Minnie’s Musings

There is a point when a campaign for accountability turns vindictive. When guilt by association or unthinking youthful participation in an event organised by your parents becomes punishable as a hanging offence. Where understanding and any sense of proportion are set aside in favour of blame and all encompassing righteous indignation.

I was struck this morning by a BBC piece on the future of Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice in which some bright spark wanted to hold them to account for their participation in some of the activities of their parents. This individual cried out that these two are grown adults and need to be held to account.

Yes let’s all do that, shall we. Be held to account for growing up in a household we didn’t choose, for loving the parents we were born to, for going along with a plan to entertain someone who we were introduced to as a benign family friend only to discover some insalubrious truth years later. For our parents discussing us and our private lives in vulgar and inappropriate terms.

Few of us are fans of Sarah Ferguson – who is the queen of dreadful PR advice and Mills and Boon historical romance. We all had a fine old time with her fashion choices for herself and her girls at the odd royal wedding.

Her children are the product of a a family whose whole existence is subject to public scrutiny. One of the “spare” who has persistently failed to read the room, the writing on the wall, or the anything, seemingly, at any point, which might have given him pause for thought.

If ordinary parents cause excruciating embarrassment to their children just by appearing in the same room at an event populated by their peers (school plays, parent consultations, graduation ceremonies) , Lord knows what it is like having your father plastered on every front page on both sides of the pond, behaving in a grotesque and sleazy manner with someone half your current age.

Most of us would rather believe that we are delivered by that stork from Dumbo (the one with the harmonicas) rather than admit that inflagrante pro gratis was involved in our conception. Imagine how these two feel. Your mother has already been seen having her toes sucked by a balding Texan by the pool you were splashing about in. The trauma of your father crouched over a girl lying prone on the floor, must have brought bile to the throat. ,

But no, the witch hunt must extend to third parties, caught up in this fiasco by accident. While we all wait around for a man to be called to account, handcuffs slapped on his wrists. But no, boys will be boys, as their locker room talk is waved aside and their involvement obscured with a big black marker.

And don’t start me on he who absolves himself of any responsibility for standing by watching it all, doing nothing, by using his sexuality as a shield. One can only think that the massed ranks of homosexuals who have strived to live ordinary lives, sputtered into their macchiatos on hearing this self righteous dismissal of the very idea he had known or been involved, recognising as they do thby standing by is not an innocent act. It is one of complicity.