Who could deny China its moment of smugness on seeing America’s elite intelligence service outed as a modern-day version of the Spanish Inquisition?
After the report which showed that for years the CIA has knowingly breached the Geneva Convention with acts of brutal torture, Beijing had every right to tell them where to stick their lectures on human rights abuses.
Preferably by the method of “rectal infusion”.
Their joy was summed up by a cartoon in The China Daily newspaper featuring the rolled-up Senate report funnelling water over the face of a bloated man labelled “CIA”.
Now, I’m not sure how low future British heads of state figure on their radar, but had the Chinese looked further afield in Washington this week they’d have scored a double-standards double-whammy.
Speaking at the World Bank on Monday, Prince William attacked them for their role in wildlife crime, accusing them of being major players in “one of the most insidious forms of corruption in the world” which is done to satisfy man’s “craving for trinkets.”
Words that leave the future monarch wide open to accusations of hypocrisy (and I’m not merely talking about having a dad who parades more trinkets on his chest than the worst tin-pot dictator.)
Because this is someone who, in February, went with his brother to the Duke of Westminster’s 37,000-acre hunting estate in Spain to shoot wild boar and stag.
On a previous visit to his godfather’s Spanish killing fields, the princes were said to have bagged 740 partridge in a day.
His defenders argue William was speaking for endangered species, not the plentiful ones.
But is he so thick he can’t grasp that species tend to become endangered after man has killed so many few are left?
I’ll answer that for you. Yes he is thick. He also comes from a family of animal-slayers.
In 2004 his brother was photographed grinning widely, in Argentina, over the body of a one-tonne water buffalo moments after he’d killed it.
Harry loves big game hunting, just like grandfather Philip, who, despite being a former World Wildlife Fund president, has been known to shoot tigers and crocodiles in India.
And closer to home, in a couple of weeks, the whole clan will walk off their sprouts around the Sandringham estate, blowing birds out of the sky, for no other reason than they can.
If I were the China Daily cartoonist, after I’d finished with the CIA, I’d have sketched a chinless wonder pointing a smoking gun at a wild boar with blood running from its guts spelling out the words “Do as I say not as I do…”
If I were a photo-journalist on that paper I’d be asking my editor to send me to Sandringham to film the hypocrites in all their blood-lusting glory, and then ask: “Is it OK to sadistically kill wild beasts if it’s on one’s own land, or one’s rich friend’s land? And if it’s for fun?”
I know the Royals are led to believe they rule us by divine decree, but who told them they also have the right to decide which creatures get to exist and which ones don’t.
As an endangered species themselves, you think they’d be more careful.