Commanders of the British Empire

In Tony's Meritocratic Emporium, honours are not reserved solely for party donors and the trackers of potential terrorist suspects. Riley Bechtel, whose company has been awarded contracts to profit from the London Underground, the Channel Tunnel rail link and the decommissioning of the Vicar of Downing Street's beloved nuclear power stations, has been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The Queen, whose innocence of political matters is touted every time someone proposes dismantling the gravy train for her ridiculous family, approved the honour a week after Bechtel won a four-hundred-million-pound contract to profit from putting together what the Coalition of the Willing had put asunder while making the world a safer place. The pretext for Bechtel's award was "services to UK-American commercial relations", presumably because not even Tony and all his minions could find a way of inveigling him into the House of Lords.

Other beneficiaries of his reverence's largesse include a vice-admiral, a rear admiral, a lieutenant colonel and two generals, all of them involved in Operation Iraqi Liberation, all of them members of the United States armed forces, and one of them none other than General Tommy "We don't do body counts" Franks. It is not clear whether all these people are Commanders of the British Empire; what seems reasonably evident is that when some people command, the British Empire jumps. The odd thing is that, despite there being, at present, "no suggestion of any wrongdoing", neither the Foreign Office, nor the recipients, nor the Vicar himself saw fit to tell anyone about these awards, even though Bechtel's was shoved across as far back as April 2003. Have none of them any pride?