Operation Misery: Month 8, Week 1, Day 4.

In the past 24 hours Rihanna has not performed any concerts which I find a shame because when Rihanna is on stage we at least know where she is and what she is doing for around two hours. It does though give me the opportunity to look back at how Rihanna's trip to Australia and New Zealand have gone politically.

As I've already explained at great length the political purpose of Rihanna visiting Australia and New Zealand was to allow the UK to test out these members of the UK Commonwealth Realm's loyalty to the mother country by seeing whether they'd be prepared to participate in a low level harassment campaign against Rihanna in order to soften her up for the trip to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The visit to Australia was particularly important because it coincided with a General Election and the formation of a new government. Despite initial indications that they didn't want to be associated with the harassment campaign and very publicly briefing against the US for its campaign the UK was actually very active in the campaign. The main contribution was sending to British boyband "One Direction" on a tour of Australia and New Zealand at the same time as Rihanna. This had the effect of doubling all the normal tour pressures such as crowds of fans and paparazzi outside hotels and venues. Also One Direction fans have a reputation for being particularly hysterical and disruptive. In fact I seem to remember reading a story about One Direction fans breaking into the bands hotel rooms and stealing items of their clothing which although shows the fans devotion can be quite annoying.

To their credit the Australians don't seem to have participated in the UK's campaign in any way shape or form. There was a little bit of an issue with Rihanna's stay in Sydney coinciding with celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Australian navy. However to fair to the Australians this isn't something they could really cancel at short notice so it was really up to Rihanna's CIA handlers/Live Nation (the management) to make sure that Rihanna wasn't caught up in the situation.

Traditionally being much more loyal members of the Commonwealth Realm New Zealand did sadly participate in the campaign against Rihanna. The main feature of this was a general lack of security at Rihanna's Auckland hotel. The main problem was the paparazzi in particular a photographer by the name of Simon Runting who took up position in a building directly opposite Rihanna's hotel room. This vantage point allowed him to look directly into Rihanna's bedroom and take photographs of her as she changed, showered, slept and did whatever else Rihanna got up to in her room. This obviously represents a gross invasion of Rihanna's privacy that seemed intended to cause Rihanna a great deal of stress and paranoia.

In fact it was such an invasion of privacy the New Zealanders also seemed to be using it as a way to muscle in on the debate about new anti-paparazzi laws in California, US that make taking photographs of a child on private property with a long camera lens a criminal offence of trespass regardless of where the person taking the photographs is. As Rihanna was only in Auckland for the best part of four days there obviously wasn't the time to seek a civil, legal remedy to this problem. However I find it hard to believe that the hotel management, the owner of the building in which Runting had set up or Rihanna's own security detail could not have, erm, negotiated with him to stop.

I have to say though that Rihanna has to an extent brought this increased attention from the paparazzi on herself by maintaining an information blackout about her movements and well mood at a time when these issues are of some political importance at the global level. That's because if a foreign intelligence agency wanted to find out what Rihanna is up to on tour the obvious way to do it would be to get a friendly editor of a celebrity gossip magazine to make it known that they would be prepared to pay a premium for any and all footage of Rihanna. After all digging up information of stars like Rihanna is what celebrity gossip magazines do anyway making it the perfect cover. On something of a side note Rihanna complained about Runting's behaviour on Instagram which has been wrongly interpreted as Rihanna comparing the paparazzi to the Nazis creating a bit of a backlash. What Rihanna actually said was that she hates [the paparazzi] worse then the Nazi (singular). This is actually a little pet name that Rihanna and her fan base use to describe me so I actually took it as a compliment.

The second security problem with Rihanna's Auckland hotel is that it is very large featuring bars and restaurants that are open to the public. This meant that more or less anyone could wandering in off the street and disrupt Rihanna's stay. One example of this is self-confessed Shannon Roberts who apparently walked into the bar of Rihanna's hotel on Sunday evening and then took to Twitter to demand that Rihanna came down to say hello while encouraging her Twitter followers to the same. Although Rihanna didn't come down stairs the 15 year old was rewarded when Rihanna dispatched her security detail to find Ms Roberts and give her free tickets to the Monday concert which included backstage passes and an invitation to the after party where she got to meet Rihanna. Provided that Ms Roberts was polite and in no way stabby this wasn't really a problem.

The only issue is that I have been known to turn up at Rihanna's hotel requesting an audience although I always ended up getting snubbed. Therefore Ms Roberts doing the same would have got Rihanna and a few other people thinking about why Rihanna and I haven't met up in person yet. The answer to that is pretty obviously that the management have got the twin guns of this Inland Revenue Service (IRS) audit and Rihanna's right to remain/work in the US to Rihanna's head to discourage her from meeting up with me. Being reminded of that is also likely to increase the stress on Rihanna.


This has taken me longer then expected to write up so I'll be back to look forward to the South African phase of the tour after dinner by which time Rihanna should just about be arriving in South Africa.

16:40 on 9/10/13 (UK date).

Edited at around 19:00 on 9/10/13 (UK date) to add;

Now Rihanna has performed her final concert in New Zealand she travels on to South Africa for concerts in Johannesburg on Sunday (13/10/13) and Cape Town on Wednesday (16/10/13). As with the visit to Australia and New Zealand these South African concerts are one of the main political pillars that this third leg of the tour has been built around. As I've already explained by agreeing to the concerts South Africa was hoping to gain an advantage over its African neighbours by getting the inside scoop on Rihanna as she was being used to exert pressure on the nations making up the peacekeeping force in Mali. Since that plan was drawn up though it has run into two small problems.

The first of these is that over the summer very little has actually happened in Mali with almost no violence and a trouble free election. By an amazing coincidence though just Rihanna was finishing up in New Zealand Islamist violence appears to have restarted in Mali. On Monday (7/10/13) the town of Gao came under light shelling/mortar fire then on Tuesday (8/10/13) to bridges close to the border with Niger were blown up. Unlike the recent car bombing in Timbuktu these attacks seem like the work of a much more sophisticated Al Qaeda linked terrorist cell. Although that cell seems to have limited capability the responsibility for hunting them down and eliminating them should fall to much more capable French special forces that are in Mali rather then the Malian army or the peacekeeping force. I am simply recommending that because this type of operation requires specialist skills that neither the Malian army nor the peacekeeping force possess however a happy side-effect of the French doing the job is that this latest violence is unlikely to have any impact whatsoever on Rihanna's trip to South Africa.

The second problem the South Africans have is that Rihanna is now travelling with a very slimmed down tour party. Rihanna's friend Leandra never joined the tour in the first place and Melissa Forde has now left the tour. While I'm not sure if Rihanna's cousin Noella Allstrom or Rihanna's brother Rory are still travelling with her the core tour party now really only consists of Rihanna and her personal assistant Jennifer Rosales meaning that there is precious little gossip to be found.

With South Africa's greed being very obvious in the way they arranged the concerts both the UK and the US have prepared things to exert pressure on South Africa during Rihanna's visit in order to make sure they have full knowledge of any advantage South Africa has gained. The UK has been the most aggressive of the two dispatching Prince Edward the Duke of Wessex and his wife the Duchess of Wessex to South Africa for the duration of the trip. This puts the UK in minute by minute communication with the South African government throughout Rihanna's trip.

For their part the US have publicly announced that the actor Tom Hanks is suffering with type-2 diabetes. In 1993 Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his groundbreaking portrayal of a gay man suffering with AIDS in the film "Philadelphia." Whilst in developing nations such as South Africa HIV/AIDS is a huge problem and often a certain death sentence in developed countries such as the US it is viewed as a chronic health condition that can be managed much like type-2 diabetes. So through the timing of the announcement by Tom Hanks the US was hoping to put the issue of HIV/AIDS and to a lesser extent homosexuality on the agenda. This means that we can look forward to lots of lurid rumours of Rihanna sleeping around in country where roughly 1 in 5 people are HIV+.

Obviously with so much international effort going into Rihanna's trip to South Africa there was much excited rumour last night about when Rihanna would leave New Zealand and arrive in South Africa. With the most to gain the majority of this effort came from the UK firstly with a story from Humberside airport in which the pilot of a small aircraft died mid-flight meaning that the untrained passenger had to land the plane relying on radioed instructions from a pilot on the ground. This could be interpreted in any number of ways as a coded reference to Rihanna's travel but none of them made much sense because the intention was to cause confusion. The UK followed this up by releasing video footage of a presumably very drunk man who was tasered and arrested by police after stripping naked at Manchester airport back on September 26th (26/10/13). Again this could be interpreted in any number of ways as coded references to Rihanna's travel. Just to confuse matters further it could also be interpreted as a coded reference to me because rather famously I, on a particularly drunken evening, did find myself wandering around in the street completely naked.

The biggest single effort though appear to come from Rihanna herself with the gossip site TMZ.com reporting that trucks were removing everything from Rihanna's home in Los Angeles. This prompts the obvious rumour that "Rihanna's moving" but also seemed intended to promote discussion about whether Rihanna's falling out with Melissa Forde was so severe that Forde was being forced to move out and whether the threat Chris Brown presents to Rihanna had forced her to permanently quit Los Angeles for New York.

Although this seems like a very solid rumour I cannot fully confirm it. However if it is true I think Rihanna should look very hard at the person who advised her to move out both because the timing is unfortunate and as the victim Rihanna should not be the one forced to move to keep away from Brown. If I was Rihanna I also wouldn't be in a rush to put the USD12million property on the market because she can easily afford to buy somewhere else to live while she comes to a decision. That fact does of course help to underline why Rihanna is really too exceptional to be much use as a way to debate public policy on domestic violence.

For her part Rihanna took the trouble to take to Twitter/Instagram to let us know that she actually left New Zealand at around 05:00(GMT) some 6 hours after all these rumours of her departure began. That means that by my calculations Rihanna should be arriving in Johannesburg in the next hour or so. I for one am looking forward to hearing for her but that's because I generally just like hearing from Rihanna.