Not Cliff Richard!

Cliff Richard!  Yes, that Cliff Richard!  The crackpot conspiracy sites have been whispering his name as the next alleged celebrity sex offender to be unmasked for weeks, nay, months, now.  The funny thing is that now his apartment has actually been raided by police over 'historical sex abuse allegations', their reaction has been strangely muted.  As Mr Spock once sagely noted on Star Trek: "To have is not the same as to want".  That definitely seems to be the case here: after all their anticipation of how world-shattering the exposure of another pillar of the British entertainment establishment (with all his links to other conspiracy favourites like Billy Graham and Tony Blair) would be, the actuality of the police operation turned out to be pretty mundane.  In spite of the efforts of South Yorkshire police (bizarrely raiding a property in Berkshire) to turn the whole thing into a media circus by allegedly tipping off the press, the whole thing has stubbornly refused to turn into a major sensation.

Perhaps we're still all numbed by the Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris cases that we've resigned ourselves to the fact that investigations into allegations of sexual impropriety on the part of anyone who was on TV in the seventies is the new normal.  Perhaps I read the wrong newspapers, but the feeding frenzy over which celebrity would be next to be exposed seems to have eased off of late. Maybe the media feel that we've all overdosed on this sort of salacious sleaze in the wake of the Rolf Harris' conviction.  Moreover, the 'twatterati', who frequently seem to drive these things, have plenty of other stuff to get outraged over at the moment: Gaza, Iraq, the shooting of a young black man in Ferguson to name but a few of the bandwagons they are currently jumping on as vehicles for their ostentatious displays of 'right on' outrage and hand-wringing.  (I know, I'm being far too cynical - they're all genuinely compassionate about whatever the issue of the day is).  The whole child abuse business is now so last week for them.  Although I have no doubt that if another celebrity is charged they'll all be back on their soap boxes tweeting their outrage to the world.