Mark Steyn has a bit of fun at the expense of the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew, His Royal Majesty King Charles III, and the current British government:

The royal family at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping of the Colour 2010, 30 June, 2015.
Photo by Robert Payne via Wikimedia Commons.

Last night, HM The King announced that his brother, until recently HRH The Duke of York KG KCVO, will now be formally stripped of all his titles, styles and dignities and will be reduced to trying to book fashionable London restaurants — or even Pizza Express in Woking — as plain old Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. As longtime readers may recall, I dined at Buckingham Palace, midst princes, dukes, earls, viscounts and knights, as the only mister at the table and rather enjoyed it — although, even at that lowly rank, the sense of remorseless imperial decline down the decades is palpable: from Mr Gladstone … to Mr Steyn … to Mr Mountbatten Windsor … Why not go all the way and order His former Royal Highness to wander the streets as Mr Sarah Ferguson?

Be that as it may, it was the final sentence in the Palace’s 109-word statement that caught my eye:

Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.

Had the King said that to me in person, I would have had great difficulty in restraining myself from punching him on the nose. Their Majesties have never expressed any “utmost sympathies” for the thousands upon thousands of their own young subjects in virtually every town up and down what passes for the spine of England gang-raped, sodomised, urinated on, dangled off balconies, doused in petrol, burned alive, fed into kebab mincers, etc. A decade ago, when I first met “grooming gang” victims in Rotherham, one of Sammy Woodhouse’s chums told me that “Charles and Camilla” were said to have expressed interest in meeting with survivors — although Sammy herself, ground down by official dissembling even then, expressed some cynicism as to the likelihood of any such Royal audience ever happening.

It never did. The Prince of Wales has his Earthshot campaign to save the planet, and for a while the Duke of Sussex had his HIV-Aids charity in Botswana and Lesotho. You would think one’s “utmost sympathies” for such uncontroversial apolitical causes as climate change and Aids could be easily extended to little girls taken as sex slaves — particularly when it’s visible from the sod-bollocking turrets of Windsor Castle. Just to pluck at random, less than three miles from St George’s Hall, where the King uncontroversially celebrates Ramadan iftars and where equally uncontroversially Princess Beatrice’s masked ball once hosted not only Jeffrey Epstein but also Harvey Weinstein … how does the old song go? “I Danced with a Perve who Danced with a Girl who Danced with the Prince of Wales“? Anyway, less than three miles from Windsor Castle lies Diamond Road in Slough, where a chap called Azid Ahmed was found to have engaged in “five acts of sexual activity with a child”.

Any “utmost sympathy” for that victim, sir? Or does your sympathy in such matters not extend beyond the territorial waters of Epstein Island? England is a land that, literally, rewards sex predators. If you want the Andrew Formerly Known as Prince to bugger off out of sight, why not give him a year’s salary as the British state has just done to Hadush Kebatu? Mr Kebatu is the Ethiopian who two days after arriving by dinghy sexually assaulted a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in Epping and set off the summer of “far-right” “racist” protests. He was convicted and imprisoned at HMP Chelmsford, which then managed to release him — “accidentally”. He spent two days wandering around the most surveilled city on earth and piling up enough camera footage to outpace the director’s cut of Lord of the Rings. So, for the crime of embarrassing Sir Keir Starmer, he was immediately put on a flight to Addis Ababa and given five hundred quid if he would agree not to contest his deportation.

Average annual salary in Ethiopia: 524 pounds sterling. So Hadush Kebatu is back home living large and telling friends he had a great holiday in England and this King Charles guy paid him a year’s wages for raping a fourteen-year-old.

Next time (he’ll be back by Christmas) he should make like Harvey Weinstein and hold out for a CBE.

The taqiyya mayor of London, soon to be joined by the taqiyya mayor of New York, claims that the “King apologised for taking so long to knight me“. I can well believe it. So Sir Sadiq Khan now outranks Mr Mountbatten Windsor at state banquets (my palace dinner was a little more informal, so I got to sit between Sir Angus Ogilvy and the Earl of Carnarvon). Is that because Sir Sadiq has also expressed his “utmost sympathies” for “victims and survivors”? Not at all. As the political overseer of the Metropolitan Police he has consistently lied about the existence of any Pakistani Muslim rape-gangs in London. The official position of the British state was that “grooming gangs” may all very well be operating in Newcastle, Middlesborough, Blackpool, Bolton, Manchester, Rotherham, Sheffield, Nottingham, Telford, Leicester, Birmingham, Coventry, Banbury, Aylesbury, Oxford, High Wycombe … but that it all mysteriously grinds to a halt once you hit the outskirts of the Metropolitan Line.

Alas, there are now so many dark secrets swept under the rug even Scotland Yard has noticed the bulge. So the Met has just announced they’re “reviewing” one or two … er, actually, no, nine thousand cases of “grooming”.

The striking feature of the end-phase Yookay is its total lack of “utmost sympathies”. Earlier this week, in Uxbridge (where, as it happens, the Metropolitan Line does end), an apparently pleasant fellow called Wayne Broadhurst was taking his dog for a walk when he was fatally stabbed by an Afghan who’d arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry and had, as is traditional, been given “leave to remain” — because of his potential contribution to GDP through increased machete sales.