Rod Liddle
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Charlie is also a psychopath, which is one of the reasons he is seated before a court in The Hague regarding war crimes, mass murder, etc. This surreal melodrama has been playing on your TV sets every morning, just before Jeremy Kyle comes on. And in attendance yet again were the slebs, well-meaning slebs whose only concern was charidee, whose only wish was to like, help people and now — OMG — they’re suddenly being questioned about stuff, lol. Slebs like Naomi Campbell, who has found it all a terrible inconvenience, appearing before this court with her strictly limited IQ and epic sense of entitlement and arrogance.
She is accused of having flirted with big Charlie at some glittering bash more than a decade ago and reportedly boasted that he would bung her a few diamonds, or ‘blood diamonds’ as the PC argot has it, referring to diamonds mined in a war zone or by a warlord, as opposed to diamonds mined in peacetime by those liberally inclined Investors in People, De Beers and so on. And so he did, via two henchmen late at night.
Campbell has tried, so far as her room temperature IQ will allow, to dissemble; she didn’t know that the present was from Taylor, she didn’t know that they were diamonds, she hadn’t flirted with the man, she hadn’t sat next to him at dinner the night before, she’d never heard of Liberia or blood diamonds and she definitely didn’t shag him. But testimony which contradicts some of these points was provided by the fragrant American actress Mia Farrow. Now come on, who among you was really surprised to find that Mia Farrow was a dimbo too? She seemed so knowing and aloof in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose and hell, she was married, for a while, maybe until she opened her mouth, to André Previn. But she stood there at the trial looking vacant and hopeless and bemused. Why were she and Naomi having dinner with Charles Taylor? And the willowy supermodel Christy Turlington. What’s going on here?
Well, the bash wasn’t for Charles Taylor, it was for Nelson Mandela. There was a party for old Nels and all these celebs were invited. Farrow, Campbell, Turlington. Why? What need had he of them?
The truth is that these deadly slebs, none of whom knows anything about anything nor, if we’re honest, wishes to know anything about anything, crept in under the wire on account of charidee. This is how it works. This is how the world has become queered by slebs — how, with their stupidity, their vapid pronouncements on third world debt and global warming and economic inequalities, they are helping to determine how we live, what we do about things, and are actually, bizarrely, making an impact.
It is why the hilarious and, frankly, talentless Wyclef Jean is posed to become president of an entire country, even if it is only Haiti. These are two sides of the same coin, or perhaps even the same side of the same coin; slebs are indulged by politicians, are invited to meet with them, to divest themselves of their ill-considered opinions (opinions almost always forged in the sticky cradle of sentiment), to accompany them on fact-finding missions across the world — as the fabulously self-aggrandising Bono once did under the Bush administration.
Slebs are invited to head up quangos and charitable institutions, slebs are courted, slebs are given their head, so to speak. Slebs are given a voice by the national media, even though the journalists know they are speaking tommy rot.
And then, at the end of it, the end of a natural progression, slebs become heads of state, like good old Wyclef Jean. You might argue that there is nothing new in this, given Ronald Reagan’s presidency of the USA. But Reagan was a useless B-movie actor and had not been glimpsed by the cinema-going public for at least 20 years before he was elected. And it was not slebdom which propelled him to the presidency, although he was undoubtedly helped by a certain actorly facility, we should concur. But there is a case to be made that Reagan’s success was in spite of his slebdom, rather than because of it.
In the middle of December 1970, the US president Richard Nixon received a letter from the country’s most iconic superstar, Elvis Presley, who asked if he might become a ‘Federal Agent at Large’, dedicated to combating drug abuse and youthful anti-American activity among all those unwashed long-haired hippies in the universities, all those people causing lots of trouble. Nixon, eviscerated by young voters on account of both the Vietnam War and the distinct whiff of authoritarianism emanating from his administration, could not resist, and invited Elvis, secretly, to the White House.
The key here is the word ‘secretly’. Because there it ended, with this backwoods redneck borderline educationally subnormal singer, now well into his bloated Las Vegas drug-addicted pomp, handing over the gift of a facsimile Colt 45 pistol to the bemused president and Tricky Dicky nervously and sensibly wishing him well. Nixon did ask Presley if he had ever shagged Marilyn Monroe and the singer sadly demurred; you needed even more than Presley had to shag Monroe, as Arthur Miller might have testified.
And that was it. No position in the administration for Elvis, no Federal Agent at Large idiocy. Today, though, Presley would be the US Drugs Czar and the next president in waiting, relentlessly indulged by the press and public, with his own think-tank and trips abroad to meet the leaders of lesser nations.
I suppose they started being taken seriously in 1985, the slebs, with the farrago of Live Aid. A few years before this, the Conservative party had held a repulsive rally in which, for the first time, the very rich slebs of the day were pre-eminent, trotting out onto the stage and pledging themselves to Maggie. The hugely forgettable saccharine crooner Vince Hill, Lulu, the snooker player Steve Davies, that strange bloke called Errol from Hot Chocolate. But one suspects that even then this put more people off voting Tory than persuaded them to do so.
Live Aid was different; this was not witless slebs supporting politicians unconditionally, but witless slebs telling politicians, all politicians, that they had got things wrong, that they with their direct connection to the public knew much, much better. A few brave souls said so at the time, and now we know for a fact that Live Aid was more harmful to Ethiopia than helpful, and that the money raised was diverted into the wrong pockets — as it always is. And yet for the past 25 years both Bob Geldof and Bono have continued to be courted by politicians both here and in the USA, despite the fact that their simple prescription — more fokkin money to Africa now, and let’s write off all that debt — has been seen to be fatally flawed.
One supposes that it is the simplicities of the sleb argument which seem, if you’re thick as a block of tungsten, compelling; give ’em more money, that should do it. But since then the charities and supra-national institutions have leapt on board. If the fairly sentient Bob Geldof can do it, can galvanise the public, why not that minxy Geri Halliwell from the Spice Girls, who is totally unsentient but has sold a lot more records than Bob? Make her a UN ambassador, then. And after Geri, why not Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell and Mia Farrow? They don’t know very much about anything, but hell, who cares? They will capture the interest of the public and make the politicians sweat.
But they will also take the diamonds from a mass murderer or try to become the president of Haiti, because they know no better. They think they are entitled to everything. They think they can do anything, and they think they are right.
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