The Next Four Dangerous Years

 The danger is not that politicians sponsored by Elon Musk will prevail over those sponsored by Bill Gates and the Getty Family, or vice versa. Because Musk and Gates are not opponents: they are rivals! Both are bent on equivalent inexplicable and irrational objectives and both are completely capable of discarding evidence which fails to fit their narrative. This tendency often goes with great wealth or power and so consistent is the correlation between wealth, power and a determination to ignore, or frig, the evidence that one can only assume that cause and effect in these cases works both ways and leads to a runaway effect every time a man acquires an excess of power or wealth.

The danger is that the world will be conned into thinking it has to pick sides in the battle of the Oligarchs, because they will make the rest of the human race fight to the death on their behalf and not care a jot.

The opportunity is for us, the human race, to realise that we do not have to let either Musk nor Gates get his way, or lend our wealth or power to any Oligarch or despot whatsoever. They have nothing which they did not take from us in one way or another. Gates and Musk in particular are adept devising ways of exacting money for doing little or nothing. (The Hyperloop cost the government of the UAE and Richard Branson much, but it did nothing.) Because no-one ever lives long enough or works hard enough to earn untold billions in their own lifetime, it is actually a defining property of Oligarchs that they devise a means of getting money for little or nothing.

The things they actually do with the money they get from us, are always all about them and their hobby horses or hobbies.

And if one Oligarch or another were to one day have complete and total power, would that be a world in which we could bear to live, even assuming that the Oligarch wanted us to live?

Perhaps the emerging evidence about the regime of "racist" rape and terror exercised by the billionaire Mohamed al Fayed and his brother over his staff gives us a pretty good clue that every day in such a world would be like a private top floor suite in the Harrods department store on a really bad day.

The strange thing is, the assumption of many reporting on the fact that black staff were ordered to leave the shop floor every time al-Fayed visited it, leaving only young, blonde and female staff, is that the black women cleared from his path were victims! This is not the case: the black women were not, as far as has been reported so far, the ones who were raped and then intimidated into silence by the former and serving police officers in his pay.

 

And that brings Medawar to what might or might not be a different matter:

Now that John Cannan, the convicted abductor, rapist and murder of Shirley Banks and the only suspect the Metropolitan Police will accept for the abduction and murder of Suzy Lamplugh has died in prison without even being interviewed under caution in connection with Suzy Lamplugh, there is no known legal reason why the following information from the public domain cannot be restated, and unknown "legal" reasons are unacceptable, as when a Soviet court refused to tell Irina Ratushkinskaya what law it was that she was supposed to have broken, leading Kenneth Baker MP, now Lord Baker, to campaign for her freedom. (As did Medawar in a much smaller way.)

John Cannan may have been a lone murder and rapist, (as with Steve Wright, the "lone" bit has never been proved and in Cannan's case it has never really been tested.) But he was not a lone criminal: he had a defined role within organised crime circles and that role was to provide bigger and more important criminals with vehicles for a particular occasion and purpose that couldn't be traced back to them, first and foremost, with the vehicle not being traceable back to Cannan as a somewhat lower priority. If push came to shove, the buck was supposed to stop with him. He was what a structural engineer might term a "crack-stopper." Part of being a crack-stopper would have been disposing of the vehicle afterward, again in a way designed to be, if it couldn't be untraceable, somewhat less traceable to his client than to him.

The reason why the CPS under more than one DPP never allowed the police to interview Cannan under caution about Suzy Lamplugh, was that the police only presented the CPS with one reasonably-solid piece of relevant physical evidence, and that was DNA evidence which proved that both he and Suzy had been in a particular car with a history of unclear ownership, which police had found in a car-dealer's showroom. The CPS found this insufficient (they did not find it to be invalid) because proving that two people had each been in a vehicle with a chequered past at some point, does not prove that they were both in the vehicle at the same time, however simple and obvious it might seem at first glance that this "must be" the explanation.

Given Cannan's low-level role in organised crime; providing the big fish with their wheels, an equally simple and perhaps equally valid explanation might be that Cannan provided another criminal with a car that was then used to transport Suzy, or that he disposed of such a car afterwards. 

There was then an impasse, for decades, largely because the police seemed to go round in circles attempting to make the CPS accept that their bit of evidence proved what they wanted it to prove, rather than accepting that it proved what the CPS (experts in proof) said it proved and moving forwards from there.

There are two possibilities raised by this which the police seem determined not to even consider:

The first is that all Cannan did was handle a car which someone else used to abduct Suzy. This is possible, and there's nothing that really disproves it, but given Cannan's history it would be a bit of a coincidence. Medawar sees why the police don't like this idea, but he can also see why the CPS couldn't ignore it, because it contains the seeds of a successful defence, albeit one that would amount to a plea of guilty to a charge of assisting an offender.

The second is to consider that if it were normal for Cannan to provide other criminals with a car that couldn't be traced back to them, might he not have been contracted to provide someone with such a car, with a young woman meeting a particular specification, already in it?

Medawar does not go so far as to claim that such a client would have been Mr al Fayed, but the indications are that he was taking advantage of a captive audience for his sexual needs on a regular and organised basis with his employees at Harrods. If there was one billionaire in London corrupted by his own wealth and power into behaving thus, it is not unreasonable to conclude that there might have been and might still be, others. 

Al Fayed is a useful case study, rather than necessarily a suspect, because some of his victims claim to have been transported (on a pretext) to Paris or New York and raped, in a manner remarkably similar to what the veteran News Anchor, Sandy Gall, privately claimed had happened to Suzy. And there are two other prominent corporate figures in the news at the moment, alleged to have done very much the same thing to young men. (Again, Paris tends to feature, along with New York, probably because these are tempting destinations for an adventurous young person.) Had any of these young men or women died during such a misadventure, they would seem to have disappeared without trace from their last known location and the body might have been disposed of a very long way away from where the constant drizzle of "criminal intelligence tips" to police would suggest. Just like Suzy. 

The police have had tip after tip from the criminal community pointing the finger at John Cannan and sites in the West Midlands and South West, where they have looked and found no evidence of any body at all. Medawar would humbly suggest looking East and South East, for a change.