Black day in July

Despite his trademark fulminations and rhodomontades, it would appear that Lord Black of Crossharbour will not be hounding his world of enemies in his customary barratrous fashion anytime soon, as he had threatened to do before his trial commenced. He will undoubtedly attribute his conviction, partial though it be, to the envy and ressentiment of the unwashed peasants into whose hands he serendipitously fell. An exemplary sentence must surely follow, pour encourager les autres. We dare not imagine the private agonies of his Lady, deprived, perhaps forever, of acquiring additional kickshaws and gauds on investors' nickels and dimes.

The anvil chorus of the gnathonic media and their coprophagic gossip columnists (soi-disant "journalists" whose conservative exudates have imbrued the age with their mephitic poison, one that might yet prove fatal to us all)—may just this once be muted, there being little further to be gained from their unguinous ministrations. But I divagate.

The dénouement of this hideous tragicomedy must have come as a manifest shock to the hitherto impregnable twosome. But I can only observe, as Lord Black's risible orotundity finally promises to dissipate into the realm of the crepuscular, that what ventures forth will inevitably make its return. For what seems like an aeon—seems? nay, it is—his abominable peregrinations on the frangible stage that fame and wealth erect have perdured. And now he is brought low, though by no means humbled, I suspect.

Such lives as his are of necessity ignes fatui, playing lambently upon the mere surface of things but leaving no lasting mark. The "lives of the rich and famous" have become the lives of the gaudy and the tawdry: the Lord and his consort are but the Rick Salomon and Paris Hilton of the aristocratic world in which they tried so assiduously to carve their rebarbative niche.

Money, it is said, cannot buy everything. And, in this case, it bought no quality, authenticity or judgment, because such are endowments, not commodities. Instead, a veritable mountain of pelf, now substantially eroded and possibly in danger of disappearing altogether, permitted two of the second or the third rank of humanity to pursue their nugatory ends to an exponentially further extent than is vouchsafed to their mediocre peers. Their lifestyle was an inglorious one, marked by selfish ostentation and splendour coupled with overweening arrogance, or, in a word—vulgarity.

Alas, I cannot find it in my eleemosynary nature to weep a solitary tear for this haut bourgeois pretender and his gewgaw-bearing mate. Indeed, in the full bloom of an unconscionable, if momentary, Schadenfreude, I have caught myself hoping that he becomes some lifer's bitch. Society—and by that I do not mean the empty and pathetic glittering assemblage of costumed cotqueans and princelings whose very existence, we are assured by the barons of the media, must bring joy to the quotidian lives of the hoi polloi—is truly a better place without him. Farewell, then, at least for a time, to this odious and contemptible moral homunculus, who once declared, "I am not prepared to re-enact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of nobility." Skedaddle, Citoyen Black.