"No" Votes At The Ready - Tony Blair Is Coming!

Despite a love of cinema I don't take an awful lot of interest in the lives of spoilt, pampered celebrities.

I can't usually be bothered reading about divas and their entourages. One of the most irritating must be the endlessly annoying Mariah Carey. Who can forget her deep insights into famine in Africa: "Of course I'd love to be that thin, but without the flies and death and stuff..." Way to go, Mariah!

They just irritate me, for the most part.

I am, however, interested in the ongoing Rihanna-Chris Brown saga. Of course to call it by such a grandiose term is to elevate it from the sordid little tale of human misery and woman-beating that it is and I immediately withdraw that word.

Despite the awful photo of the beautiful singer's pulped and beaten face, it would still have passed my radar but for a story that I covered in Ireland a year or so ago.

It was on a refuge for battered spouses and really opened my eyes. I had been aware of course of the reality of so-called "men" who beat "their" women but it was only on seeing the statistics and, worse, seeing the images and hearing the stories that the full horror of it hit home for me. I was astonished and shouldn't have been at how it was not confined to a certain demographic but instead went right across the social divide, involving professional and non-professional at every imaginable level.

Indeed, if one could be said to be worse than another it probably was, for example, the wife of a doctor who felt - God knows why - that she had to hide it because of their social station. Ridiculous, but that is what she felt.

At the other end of the scale - yet perhaps not really - there were the women who just couldn't see a way out financially, especially when children were involved. Really, whether it was the inner-city or the suburbs, it boiled down to one thing: they were being beaten and abused and felt unable to do anything about it. I certainly felt helpless in talking to them, so can only imagine what they saw when they looked into the future.

So when I read of the supposed re-union between Rihanna and her abuser boyfriend I felt a red mist of anger descend as I recalled talking to these Irish women who - rightly or wrongly - saw no way out and felt utterly trapped.

By the time you read this hip-hop singer Brown will have appeared in a Los Angeles court but if this stupid woman has taken him back then very little can be done to him. What gets me about her is that she is a million miles away from the battered inner city wife. And don't give me that crap that they are all suffering equally. They're not. Rihanna is an independently wealthy woman who can simply turn her back on this ugly incident and her even mentally uglier boyfriend. There's simply no excuse for her going back to him. She doesn't need to. And while I would agree that no one should compel her to be a role model I do think that when you have a fan base of teenage girls then maybe it's a duty to give them an example; and you don't do that by taking back a pig who likes to push women around.

In true black comedy style most of the headlines say that she is back with her "lover". There's an oxymoron if ever there was one. Lover? And do that to a woman? Shouldn't those headlines have read "back with her craven, cowardly little swine"? Brown is loose on $30,000 bail, but has been wooing his lady back by sending "gifts, including an iPod Touch." Ah, bless him. I think I'm going to throw up.

How perfect that they kissed and made up, swearing undying love at the home of P. Diddy, Cuddly Dudley or what ever rapper Sean Combs is calling himself this week. This diva is of course one of the leading lights in the Cult of Phony Masculinity and Pseudo-Macho Bullshit Artistry. So no surprise there then.

Rihanna, you received a great deal of sympathy after that savage beating from Brown but if you really have made a conscious decision to take this louse back then when it happens again - and you know of course that it WILL happen again - you just may find that public sympathy, ever a fickle thing, has been used up.

And talking about divas...

It's great fun while here in Britain to watch how Tony Blair is being perceived as opposed to the adulation he is being greeted with in the States. He only appears to take time out from his remarkable schedule these days in order to make the briefest of flying visits home. And the peasants are revolting!

It seems that the put-upon staff at his London home are wearying of his kingly manner, not to mention his habit of changing out of his dirty clothes and just letting them lie where they fall, waiting for some rapidly growing less- than-obliging flunky to pick them up. Indeed, it seems from disgruntled sources that he doesn't even deign to pull the bath plug anymore.

You know, I don't think it would matter how much loot I was earning: there are basic manners involved here and waiting for someone to skivvy after you, picking up your smalls is just too awful to contemplate.

By heavens, though, you certainly have taken to the boy in America! He is coining it in on the lecture circuit where he can command £170,000 for one and a half hours' gabbing. And of course, as befits his new status of peace envoy in the Middle East and advisor on democratic government in Rwanda and Sierra Leone he will now only deign to fly by private Gulfstream IV jet.

Since he's made £15 MILLION in the short time since he left Downing Street he can certainly afford to throw his weight around; but he's so rarely at one of his two mansions now that even his ghastly, money-grubbing wife, Cherie, is getting cheesed off. Oh dear. Trouble in Paradise.

Only in an insane world could Blair amass such a fortune instead of being on trial for war crimes (yes, I know-in my opinion). Then again who said the world was sane? He did a great job on the Peace Process, though. I'll give the preening popinjay that.

The adulation in America has had another adverse effect on him. Loving the attention as he does, he is sucking up like nobody's business to the Religious crowd. He is even part-time lecturer in faith and globalization at Yale University in America. That's it: I can definitely feel one of my sicky heads coming on.

He has some previous in major sucking-up after his years at the beck and call of ex- President Bush, so it's not something that he's unfamiliar with.

All right, I hear you say. Big deal. What's this got to do with Ireland? Well, you know, he may just turn out to have a lot of impact here. With the help of little Napoleon Sarkozy he is far and away the leading contender for the first ever job of full-time President of the European Union.

You can imagine how that is going to go down in Ireland. The thought of Tony Blair lording it over us, making our decisions for us and "advising" us on how to think ranks up there with our attitude to Napoleon S. In fact, if Tony is made EU President in time he may just help win we "No" campaigners our enforced second vote on the Lisbon Treaty.

Bring it on!

You know, we tend to think that we're the centre of the universe when we're in Ireland but it only takes a small jump across the Irish Sea to remind us that our nearest neighbors are pretty indifferent to what goes on there.

Even with the internet I feel weirdly out of the loop as regards what is going on with the Irish banks. Of course there isn't much happening in the way of justice anyway. The Golden Circle who profited from the outrages ( hell, let's call it what it is: the shabby, tarnished, grasping, greedy circle) still hasn't been named by the government, although four names have been thrown into the public domain. Guess what? They all have connections with the corrupt government of Fianna Fail. No wonder Cowen, Lenihan, Harney and co. are dragging their heals.

Tell the truth, though. Are you really surprised?

Last week they acted as if they had done something bold and decisive by sending the Fraud Squad into the Anglo Irish Bank headquarters. What they didn't belabor the point on was that plenty of warning was given in advance. By whom? Take a wild guess, why don't you? Vested interests, skullduggery and wheels within wheels. Some things never change in this corrupt little republic and yes! We have no bananas! We have no bananas today!

Rumour has it that there was a huge upsurge in the sale of paper shredders last week in the area close to a certain bank

I draw no conclusions, of course. I merely offer it as an observation.

I'll be back in my own bat- cave next week and hope to see you then. Same bat-time! Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net