EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Is Sky News’s Sir Trevor Phillips in line for a windfall from reparations to the heirs of slaves forced to work on William Gladstone’s plantation?
Eminent broadcaster Sir Trevor Phillips, who takes over Sky News’s Sunday politics show this weekend, has a close interest in the visit to Guyana by the descendants of William Gladstone.
For the Phillips clan could, I hear, be in line for a windfall from moves to pay reparations to the heirs of thousands of slaves forced to work on the Gladstone plantation.
‘My own ancestors almost certainly were owned by the Gladstones,’ Sir Trevor, whose parents emigrated from then British Guiana in 1950, tells me.
The Gladstone family are seeking to atone for the actions of the Victorian prime minister’s father, John, who was one of the biggest slave owners in the West Indies.
The Demerara Rebellion of August 1823, against the brutal conditions on Gladstone’s sugar plantations, was seen as a pivotal event in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. The 200th anniversary of the revolt was marked last week.
Sir Trevor Phillips could be in line for a windfall from reparations paid to the descendants of slaves forced to work on the Gladstone plantation
‘It’s highly symbolic and important that the Gladstone family have acknowledged what happened in Demerara,’ Sir Trevor says.
However the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission rejects the fashionable Left-wing view that the British Empire was evil: ‘It’s not helpful to point the finger or talk about Britain’s culpability in the slave trade. It is true that the sugar my family produced ended up on tables in Manchester and the Gladstone family visit reminds us of our intertwined history.’
Nor is he expecting any reparations windfall to be life-changing. ‘I wouldn’t over-estimate the significance of the money. Guyana is about to become the richest small country in the world anyway because it has discovered oil reserves greater than in the North Sea.’
Some of Gladstone’s descendants travelled to the Caribbean last week to apologise for their family’s historic role in the slave trade. Six members of the family are due to offer financial reparations, saying they felt ‘absolutely sick’ at learning they had profited from enslaved Africans.
One would have thought Leftie historian Simon Schama and the World Economic Forum (WEF) would make ideal bedfellows.
Not so. The TV star has shared his incredulity at being ‘misgendered’ when WEF bosses invited him to an event next month.
Sharing an image of the invitation to ‘Mrs Schama’, he writes: ‘Very offended they didn’t call me Ms Schama.’ That’s the spirit.
Claudia Schiffer is determined to prove that she would still look good in her birthday suit.
The model marked her 53rd birthday by sharing a video online of her posing in a check-print bikini while on holiday in Greece.
‘Celebrating in Greek paradise,’ says the German, who has three children with her husband of 21 years, British film director Matthew Vaughn.
She also gave fans a glimpse of her birthday cake, adorned with only ten candles.
Schiffer has previously mused: ‘I think age should be celebrated and revered. There’s a reason we have cakes and parties on our birthdays, and I feel the same way about getting older each year.’
Claudia Schiffer marked her 53rd birthday with a video of her in a bikini on holiday in Greece
She also gave fans a glimpse of her birthday cake, with only ten candles
Could you rest easy with a pair of lions by your side?
Freya Aspinall, 19, has shared this photograph of lion cubs Zemo and Zala curled up on her bed at her father Damian’s wildlife park in Kent.
Freya, who is the daughter of actress Donna Air, says the animals are not being domesticated but will be ‘rewilded’ in Africa.
‘I have had to hand-raise them after their mother died,’ she says. ‘At night, they sleep with me as they would with their mother, as I am their primary carer.’
She adds: ‘There is no humanising or domesticating at all. If anything, they lionise me.’
Freya Aspinall, 19, cuddled up on her bad with two lion cubs, Zemo and Zala
He’s known as one of Hollywood’s greatest lotharios — but Warren Beatty was a tiresome sex pest, according to Sarah Miles, who appeared opposite him in 1961 film The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone.
‘What a nightmare,’ the star exclaims. ‘You either fancy somebody or you don’t, right? I happened not to fancy Warren Beatty.
But, wherever I went in the world, there was a phone call from Warren Beatty all the time, talking dirty down the phone. Can’t he get a life? I’d have been just another notch on his belt.’
Members of the Oxford University LGBTQ+ Society, Amiad Haran Diman, holding a banner during transgender protests in May
New students at Oxford are being told outdated laws banning homosexuality in dozens of foreign countries are the fault of the British.
The university’s Student Union has a pack for LBGTQ+ officers at Oxford’s colleges to give workshops on gay and transgender rights to freshers. And the union believes its inclusivity talks should be compulsory for new students.
The booklet reveals that 70 countries still ‘criminalise same-sex relationships… often a legacy of colonial-era laws’. And student officers are told: ‘Point out the close history of British colonisers introducing sodomy and buggery laws against LGBTQ+ people.
‘More than half of the countries in which it is illegal to be homosexual had these laws imposed while they were British colonies.
‘British colonisers saw indigenous cultures as sexually corrupt and that homosexuality formed part of this corruption.’
Source: Read Full Article