Essays in Idleness

Am I the only person recommending that Joe Biden select Ghislaine Maxwell as his running mate?

That she’s a foreign national might present a legal obstacle (UK citizen the last I saw), but surely no one would raise such a petty objection. For after all, she’s a woman. A more significant criticism is that she seems to be a white person, but pharmaceuticals can take care of that. She has excellent connexions throughout the top elite in the Democrat Party, which should confer a kind of diversity by association; plus the street cred of being currently in prison.

Surely she has acquired a wide-ranging familiarity with foreign affairs and other policy-wonk topics from such clients as Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew. She’s in an excellent position to speak out on many hot-button issues, such as Me Too. And she has environmentalist cachet, from her recent withdrawal to remote New Hampshire, and several other past rural retreats, when she was eluding fussy legal “stings.” Too, much of her income has been derived from charitable, eco sources; some only recently defunct.

I know these various talking points could be made to sound bad, superficially, by those low-class, rightwing hick Republicans, but we have the late Jeffrey Epstein’s word for it that she never did anything wrong. Instead, she would claim the much-coveted victim status.

Connoisseurs of British politics, big business, and high society, would be able to contribute many other qualifications she has for the top job, once Mr Biden perishes. She is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, as I recently learnt from a press item. He was much more than a former Labour MP, with a distinguished (if obscure) underground war record.

Those who were present in the 1970s and ’80s, over there in Blighty — especially those who were reading the diverting periodical, Private Eye — could fill us in with numerous entertaining details. A family man, Maxwell named his principal yacht Lady Ghislaine, after this very daughter. Indeed, his very own body was found floating in the Atlantic, while it was anchored off the Canary Islands. (He’d been avoiding a meeting at the Bank of England, for defaulting on some very large loans.) But previously he’d been a captain of industry; an heroic raider of pension funds; a polymath of fraud; and by his own account, the future of journalism.

Anyway, this is all just numbers, and as we now know, math is patriarchal. The point is that, from childhood at Headington Hall in Oxfordshire (where Oscar Wilde once cut quite a figure, under a previous owner), Ghislaine Maxwell had been at home to the wealthy and progressive. (It is even suggested that she knew Donald Trump, back when he was a liberal.) She could find her way around Davos conferences.

As for the little matter of soliciting underage girls for prostitution — an antiquated charge if I ever heard one; underage girls hardly need soliciting today — it is one of those vapours, quickly dispersed by the meejah.

Time is of course of the essence, and only weeks remain until the Natted States election. Sticky red tape unspooled by federal prosecutors might tragically impair her release.

But in that case, Mr Epstein had another close associate, Nadia Marcinkova. A Slovak citizen, perhaps, but again, who cares? — with air-piloting skills, which can sometimes come in useful. But the important thing is, she’s a woman, too.

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I SEE from the news that Mr Biden has now chosen a vice-presidential candidate, much nastier than Ghislaine or Nadia, in my view. His handlers must have read the Idlepost above, and realized it was time to get cracking. I see that they printed out a script, in large type, for Mr Biden to read to Kamala Harris, over the telephone. (Who knows what honorific to place before the name of a girl like that?) So the story moves ahead. Now we can discuss whom Kamala Harris should choose for her VP.