Sackcloth and Ashes

Thursday 19th July

We appear to be in a strange mood, an unsettling time of recrimination and ritual humiliation, where both public and private institutions and individuals are hauled up in front of committees and inquiries and forced to not only apologise but to be publicly insulted and humiliated.  Whether this is meant to be some sort of cleaning out of the Augean stables or is more akin to the show trials of Stalinist Russia only History will tell.  And possibly the worst aspect of the whole shebang is that none of it satisfies; no amount of public blood-letting and heaping on the victims heads of sackcloth and ashes makes us feel vindicated.  All it does is whet our appetite for more, much as Madame Guillotine did in revolutionary France.  Maybe we will not be happy until all of the mighty are fallen.  Not many of us have any sympathy with the Murdochs or top bankers who are now quaking in their expensive hand-made boots as one after another is exposed, and even John Terry will have made few friends with his ludicrous defence that he was merely questioning what Anton thought he, Terry, had said.  Strange febrile times where the most innocuous of friendly e-mails are dredged up as evidence of wrongdoing, and even Tweeting is dangerous.  Whatever happened to free speech?  I hate to think what would happen if ever I were hauled up before some committee and my e-mails were exhumed.  No amount of sackcloth and ashes would possibly be enough to satisfy the public’s mood for repentance. Let us hope it never comes to that.