Privacy

The DT is usually pretty feeble on a Saturday - although useful for its television guide - the Guardian being too posh to bother with ITV3 - but this Saturday was particularly feeble, devoting no less than the first seven pages to the important matter of Archbishop Welby's paternity. Of these seven pages, maybe a third was given over to large pictures of the archbishop and past & present members of his family circle.

I have not read it at all carefully, but the whole business seems to have been quite gratuitously stirred up by the DT, with one of its more pompous & right wing columnists in the chair. And the news is that the archbishop's father was not the chap we all thought he was, rather someone from the declining Winston Churchill's office. This was, apparently, news to the archbishop, news which is only made possible by the advent of DNA testing.

All of which I find rather distasteful. While it is a sign of the decline of the Church of England that a second career man like Welby should make it to the top, his paternity should have been left in decent obscurity, unless he chose to make an issue of it himself. Provided he had been careful not to bang on too loud about family values, the family values of his own family would have been his own business.

Also a good example of where the truth may be unhelpful. Before DNA was invented, the DT would have had to find some other way to fill up the first half of its Saturday news supplement.

Contrariwise, I have much less sympathy for Prime Minister Cameron. It seems reasonably clear that his family has, certainly in the past, made use of tax havens, presumably for the purpose explained on the tin, the avoidance of tax. Given his present position as First Lord of the Treasury and as one who has, on occasion, banged on about the need to do something about said tax havens, he needs to be pretty clean himself. So he would have done better to have confessed all some time ago and got it all out of the way - well before all this Panama stuff hit the fan.

Furthermore, it remains a source of embarrassment to me that I live in a country with titular authority over so many of the world's tax havens. I would be much more comfortable if we could find a way to balance our national books that did not involve taking commission off so many of the world's corrupt and greedy. Not to mention all the criminals.