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To: mice@crackmice.com
Subject: van Hoogstraten (fwd)
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 10:53:59 +0100
From: yyyy@spamassassin.taint.org
Anyone see the program about this guy last night?  He's a cartoon
character -- unbelievably inhuman.
- --j.
- ------- Forwarded Message
Date:    Mon, 22 Jul 2002 14:14:22 +0100
From:    "Tim Chapman" <timc@2ubh.com>
To:      zzzzteana@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [zzzzteana] van Hoogstraten verdict
>> I was a bit disappointed that van Hoogstraten only got done for
>> manslaughter , but then I read that the judge is considering giving him
>> life anyway,
A good time to savour again the classic Guardian interview from a couple of
years ago -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,365743,00.html
His tenants are 'filth'. People in council houses are 'worthless and lazy'.
Ramblers are 'nosy perverts'. Nicholas van Hoogstraten, a man who once paid
for a hand-grenade attack on a business rival, shows Emma Brockes around his
Sussex palace and explains why he's so keen to keep the riff-raff away
Friday September 8, 2000
...
On the way down from the roof, through the "workers' quarters" which Van
Hoogstraten intends to fill with staff from Zimbabwe, he returns to the
subject of peasants, expanding on the "worthless" and "lazy" majority who
make up the council estates of this country. "You are playing up to your
villainous image," I suggest. Van Hoogstraten looks momentarily embarrassed.
"I'm not villainous," he mumbles. I ask if he regards the people who work
for him in these derogatory terms, and he says no, because they work hard
and hard labour is what distinguishes the "riff-raff" from the "elite". I
ask him if being a person of quality is merely a matter of wealth. He says
no, and refers to some of his wealthy neighbours, "old-moneyed bastards"
whom he regards as being as primitive in their idleness as "those rat bags
drawing social security."
...
He was in the Bahamas when President John F Kennedy was shot, and amidst the
public mourning, remembers being pleased. "I was glad," he says. "He was
only in it for the ego trip." He claims similar feelings on hearing news of
Diana's death, while returning from France on a ferry. "She made us look
like fools," he says. "She made a mockery of the royal family."
Van Hoogstraten's relationship with authority is riddled with
contradictions. He says he hated Diana because she was thick, but when you
point out that the rest of the royal family are pretty thick too, he says
gloopily, "they are all we've got, so we have to respect them." He says he
favours dictatorship as the best form of government, but complains that some
of the officials he has dealt with in Mugabe's Zimbabwe are impossible
because "the power has gone to their heads." (Mugabe himself is the most
modest man he has ever met, he says, and he is friends with Ian Smith, who
apart from the small matter of his hysterical racism, he finds charming).
Margaret Thatcher is the only leader he has ever admired, because she made
him feel "proud to be English".
...
The 'van' is of course a late affectation - always an indication of a
genuine dickhead. See also Mohamed 'al' Fayed.
TimC
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