I see Prince Charles has been out in Saudi Arabia making a reel of himself performing the ardha - men with jewelled swords stumping and clumping to elaborate drumbeats while a nasal poet whines a verse. The Guardian stretched its account to feature-length story by listing some of Charles’ previous gyrations.

Jiving at an agricultural show in New –Zealand! Swaying his hips to samba in Rio! Waggling his elbows during a twaichmah in Sri Lanka...

What really caught my eye, though, was a quote from actress Emma Thompson after some shindig or other to the effect that dancing with Charles was “better than sex”.

I thought this a very strange remark until I realised that what she meant was sex with him.

Bob Dylan made an arse of himself at the Superbowl last month with his silly advert for some American car, but not to worry. P. J. Harvey had paid everybody’s dues in advance with the release of ‘Shaker Aamer’ last August Release. Now that’s funny.
I went to see 12 Years A Slave on Valentine’s Day. I hadn’t realised that February 14th was the 12th anniversary of Shaker Aamer being thrown into Guantanamo.

Shaker had been living in Jalalabad in Afghanistan and working for an Islamic charity in late 2001 when the area was overrun by fighters from the Northern Alliance who had aligned themselves with the US against the Taliban. They handed him over to the Americans, who found his story implausible, beat him senseless and put him in a cell.

Like, who’d find it credible that an Irish person in an African trouble-spot might be working for a Christian charity?

Shaker was taken to Bagram airbase north of Kabul, where other prisoners were to be baked to death sealed into steel containers in the blazing sun. He says he was beaten, whipped, starved, treated like a wild animal. After two months, he was transferred to Guantanamo - arriving on February 14th - where he has languished since.

In a message delivered via by his lawyer in January, he said: “Those are 12 years that are lost to me forever. What I have missed most has been the opportunity to do my part to fill up my four children’s reservoir of love...I want only to come home to my family so that I can try to make up to them what I have been unable to provide for all these years.”

The campaign for his release hasn’t quite become a cause celebre. But some did step forward. Julie Christie joined a seven-day solidarity hunger-strike. The comedian Frankie Boyle donated £50,000. And August last the wonderful Ms. Harvey launched an austerely poetical song: “I can’t think straight, I write, then stop/Your friend Shaker Aamer. Lost/The guards just do what they’re told/The doctors just do what they’re told/Like an old car I’m rusting away/Your friend, Shaker. Guantanamo Bay.”

I was disappointed by 12 Years A Slave. But most whom I know who saw it say they were shaken and deeply distressed. Anybody out there who’d like to put such feelings to practical use, contact Amnesty Ireland at 01 863 8300 or [email protected] to discover how to voice support for Shaker’s release.

Nobody who was in England around the time will have forgotten the wave of nausea which eddied across the land when it emerged in 2011 that the News of the World had hacked into the phone of murdered schoolchild Millie Dowler in hopes of finding juicy enough material to splatter across its front page. The revelation led directly to the appointment of the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics and resulted in the closure of the Sunday sleaze-sheet. At the time, you couldn’t have found anyone in the land to defend the behaviour of the Murdoch rag.

But now we learn at the trial of NofW editor Rebekah Brooks and her sidekicks that just four days after the Guardian broke the Millie Dowler story, on the day after the NofW closure had been announced, Tony Blair was on the blower to Brooks pimping himself to the Murdoch mob as the man to manage the handling of their Dowler problem.
Are there any depths to which this loathsome creature won’t sink to advertise his usefulness to the rotten rich? I suppose not.

Derry Chamber of Commerce has announced US General Stanley McChrystal as main speaker at its annual gathering on March 7.
McChrystal was commander of the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq from 2003 to 2008, responsible for taking out suspected terrorists without need for judicial procedure.

He then headed Task Force 6-26, specialising in the extraction of intelligence from prisoners at Camp Nama in Baghdad: its methods prompted protests to the Pentagon from CIA officers.

In May 2009, McChrystal became US commander in Afghanistan. He constantly demanded more troops and tougher tactics, dismissing Obama’s administration off-the-record as weak-kneed and unwilling to do what was necessary to win.

In 2010, he went too far in an attack on Vice President Joe Biden in an interview with Rolling Stone, leaving Obama with no option but to sack him.
Oppression, mass murder and torture doesn’t put the business community off.
I wonder what the reaction would be if I proposed Taliban leader Mullah Omar as keynote speaker at the Irish Anti War Movement agm.

Meanwhile, Margareta D’Arcy remains in Mountjoy prison for protesting against complicity in McChrystal’s war.