Have you heard the Christmas fairy tale about the prince and the spy?
An odious royal, who happens to be the King’s brother, gets in league with the world’s most incompetent secret agent, and together they create an almighty media storm that dominates the headlines of supposedly credible newspapers for days on end.
But it’s silly season, when there’s no other sensible news around, and the only people taking any of it remotely seriously is a bunch of rentagob politicians, desperately trying to revive flagging public profiles, to keep themselves relevant.
In the end the news cycle moves on, because a man with a face like a giant peach is about to become president of the United States, and no-one lives happily ever after.
The peculiar case of Yang Tengbo, the suspected Chinese spy, and his supposed relationship with the Duke of York, is a cautionary tale of our time, that illustrates keenly the frenetic, looking glass nature of what has become of our national conversation.
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It demonstrates what happens when two or more honed narratives collide, in a world that has lost sight of the difference between causal and correlational effects.
When facts can no longer exist independently of one another, but only in a sinister, conspiratorial relationship, we end up with a story like this dominating the news agenda, fuelling our collective prejudices and common fears.
Let’s stop for a moment to investigate the individual elements of the story, and to consider how they relate to one another, if at all, in any meaningful way.
Yang Tengbo is a 50 year-old Chinese national who, in 2002, moved........