I have a basic policy which I have found to be sound over many years.
When I see and hear governments and their cheerleaders in the media using professional gobshites like Clarkson and Morgan to whip up outrage and hatred against people who have little to no influence on people's lives, whether it's the Duchess of Sussex or Nicola Sturgeon, I make a point of looking towards, and behind, those who really do impact our lives because there's surely something that needs distracting from. And sure enough there's plenty going on in government that should rightly be the subject of all that induced righteous anger. Rupert Murdoch is a republican who doesn't care for the RF and what damage he does to them as individual human beings, and he cares little for Scotland (or the North of England for that matter); the Sun pays little heed to them because they contribute little to his coffers – what he loves are the working-class Tories of relatively prosperous Swindon and Basildon.
Anyway, I know that the Sun employs a bevy of very expensive lawyers who will have chosen the precise wording of Clarkson's rabble-rousing to ensure that they have a getout clause in case of libel actions. All the same, it was completely below the belt to juxtapose Nicola Sturgeon with Rose West without actually suggesting that she was a serial killer. Nicola can afford to write that one off with a withering comment of course, knowing that she remains very popular in Scotland even if there are only 5.7. isn't any longer able to speak her mind. The very idea of even hinting that she played host to Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan out of sheer spite for her step-daughter-in-law. I think she's the best of the lot of them at the moment, and she's put up with much more than her share of media shit-stirring in her time, far to much for her to be bothered with doing the stirring herself. I see her as quiet, a solid and grounded support to her husband, bright, thoughtful (like her husband), curious and bookish (like her late mother-in-law who, I understand, beyond a predilection for the Racing Post and the working-class sagas of Catherine Cookson, was perhaps surprisingly a keen reader of the great christian apologists who could dispute Thomas Aquinas with the Archbish and win) and genuinely interested in people. I can't imagine her in a million years having any time for the likes of Clarkson and Morgan.
