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Before we do anything else this week, let me just promise that this will be a zone free from ‘do-you-know-what-it-is-yet’ jokes. You’re welcome.

This Rolf Harris business is far too complex for obvious gags. With Jimmy Saville, even though we never suspected the full extent of the horror, we all knew there was something a bit weird about him. Not so with Rolf.

While I have no fond memories of Jimmy Saville to be despoiled, with Rolf it’s a different matter. Ye gods, even my children have sung along to Jake The Peg. A nation’s attic-full of souvenirs has been set alight, and the precious memories they represent have gone up in smoke.

Everybody has greeted the news with a sort of sad little sigh, almost as if we would all sooner not have known.

That’s not an option, of course, although… ‘sooner not have known’ seems to have been the establishment’s reaction to evidence about alleged institutionalised paedophilia presented to then Home Secretary Leon Brittan by the late MP Geoffrey Dickens.

Indeed, the evidence was ‘not retained’, according to the Home Office.

This story will run and run, we trust, but in the meantime… Could ‘not retained’ now enter the lexicon of euphemisms, perhaps for use on a winter’s evening as the family gather around the hearth and I announce ‘Darling, I’ve “not retained” the fire’?

Culture cornered

This week, the Conservative Party held two events worthy of our note.

David Cameron, the lightweight’s lightweight, organised a cultural summit, declaring, in his PR team’s usual mixture of banality and cliché: “We’ve always had rich seams of thought, creativity and ingenuity to mine. So tonight, let’s resolve to keep on leading the world with our culture.”

Among those helping the towering intellect that is our Prime Minister to “punch well above our weight in culture and the arts” were Ronnie Corbett, Cilla Black, Bruce Forsyth, Oritse Williams (a former member of the boy band JLS), the pop-singer Eliza Doolittle (a sort of poor man’s Paloma Faith, were such a thing to be possible), Tess Daly (from Strictly Come Dancing), and the glorified estate-agent and Daily-Mail-made-flesh Kirstie Allsopp.

Not on the guest list to help the towering intellect that is our Prime Minister to “punch well above our weight in culture and the arts”, as far as I know, were those who voted through cuts of 36% in funding since 2010 for the Arts Council, the organisation that formerly funded so many grass-roots arts organisations that helped us “lead the world with our culture”.

A total of 58 organisations, fostering activity in the sort of fields that tell us how much more there is to our lives on this lump of rock than money and work, have lost all their funding. But Arts Council chair ‘Sir’ Peter Bazalgette, the man who brought a grateful nation Big Brother, is obviously the sort of chap who’d fit in really well at Cameron’s cultural summit alongside Ronnie Corbett and Oritse Williams out of JLS. For he insisted that an arts settlement snatching money away from people who try to enrich our communal lives would be a ‘major boost to England’s culture and creativity’.

The second event on Mr Cameron’s diary this week was the Conservative Party’s annual fund-raising gathering. This will be an extremely familiar annual event to any of you who have ever worked for or supported charities. Perhaps some of you had the same guests?

However, you may never be able to compare guest lists as the brave Conservative Party, forever criticising other parties for their transparent funding from democratic trade unions, resolutely refuses to reveal who bankrolls their moral bankruptcy.

But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that at the 2013 event, “supporters with a combined wealth in excess of £11bn paid up to £12,000 a table to dine with cabinet ministers including the prime minister, home secretary and defence secretary as well as the secretaries of state for health, transport, culture and justice.

“At last year’s party there were six billionaires, 15 people with a personal wealth above £100m, 73 financiers and 47 retail and property tycoons among the 449 guests who dined at the private event…”

The event was sponsored by investment banker Howard Shore’s Shore Capital, “a firm that invests in shale gas and underground coal gasification. Shore hosted tables featuring David and Samantha Cameron and the energy minister Michael Fallon.”

Whether it be the arts or the funding, it stinks, doesn’t it? Stinks to high heaven.

But the naked corruption is not the worst thing: the worst thing is that the country is so slow-witted, so unchallenging, so uninvolved, so uninterested, so cowed that the politicians don’t even need bother with much of a disguise for their disgusting behaviour.

Shore thing

I wonder if Shore Capital’s shale gas interests will extend to Cornwall. If so, it will be an interesting confrontation. On one side, Shore Capital and its friends in the Conservative cabinet – Shore Capital has donated nearly half a million pounds to the Tories since 2006 – and His Royal Highness Prince Charles, whose Duchy of Cornwall has been busily reasserting its mineral rights.

On the other side, Brother Fiddle.

Brother Fiddle wrote to the Duchy of Cornwall when he was one of the many recipients of a letter telling householders to make sure to tug their forelocks politely when the frackers arrive to start setting off explosions.

The Duchy replied, saying that although Brother Fiddle’s disagreement with the Duchy’s right to mineral extraction was noted, this was not a legal objection and so he could therefore fuck right off. If Prince Charles wishes to blow Fiddle Towers to smithereens, the good Brother had better be politely grateful for the attention.

It is my profoundest hope that such behaviour from the mightiest of the ‘haves’ will eventually provoke the slumbering populace of this benighted England into some form of response.

Sadly, I think Boris Johnson has the most cunning plan for dealing with fracking and mineral rights. He’s suggested fobbing householders off with a tiny bit of the income from creating earthquakes and I suspect that will do the trick nicely. Do the right thing – or collect £1.50 for letting massive explosions wreck our country and start the burning of yet more fossil fuel? Wonder what England will do…

In the meantime, I know whose side I’m on.

Also on the agenda

There have been other items on the agenda this week, though none of them as important for Mr Cameron as chatting to Ronnie Corbett and Howard Shore over some very expensive food and drink.

I’ll mention them, though.

The Alzheimer’s Society said as many as a fifth of patients are being offered no information or support from the NHS following a diagnosis of dementia. My own bitter experience of the total lack of information and emotional support for my mother following a diagnosis of a life-ending illness means this comes as no surprise.

The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services has warned that funding cuts of more than 12% since 2010 mean the care sector in England ‘can no longer absorb the pressures upon it’. The hateful lying liar Iain Duncan Smith and his colleagues will no doubt laugh heartily at this, just as they laugh when MPs try to raise the issues of changes such as food banks, or the heart-breaking damage done by the corrupt and incompetent ATOS and its assessments of whether disabled people are available for work, which have led to poverty and even suicide. Hilarious.

Remember the ‘not guilty’ verdict on the charges against News International’s Rebekah Brooks?

Well, News International has been funding Rebekah’s defence, and the defences of all former employees facing charges stemming from the phone hacking scandal. It amounts to some £60 million, according to some reports. Now News International is going to ask the Government to refund the money. Any politician, or anybody in public life with the singlest tiniest shred of decency and courage and principle would reply to Rupert Murdoch with something along the lines of “Over my dead fucking body”. Doubtless these pygmies will simply ask “To whom shall I make the cheque payable, sir?”.

Chin up!

Let’s end on some good things.

David Cameron is right to fund research into combating the growing resistance to anti-biotics. In fact, given some idiot US scientist is playing about with invincible flu pandemic viruses, he ought to insist the team gets to work really quickly.

In a list of the 50 best Glastonbury performances ever, as judged by the Daily Telegraph, we travel back in time beyond the present incarnation of the festival as a sort of dumbed-down BBC3-friendly Notting Hill day out in the quaint countryside and don’t mind us if we despoil the fields with tons of our middle-class litter, to 1984 and the desert grit of Green on Red – happy memories! Other personal highlights on the list include the vicious, viscerally thrilling attack of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 2009.

But number one? The single greatest performance of all time at Glastonbury, according to the Telegraph’s team? Step forward the Godlike One. Leonard Cohen, on the 2008 tour that I remember with awe and gratitude.

And finally

Finally, thanks to those of you who’ve asked where the blog has been these past two weeks, when I’ve been inexcusably late. You have no idea how much I appreciate the question!