Agree With Thine Adversary Quickly

With his usual brilliant timing, the Glorious Successor has answered a questionnaire from a magazine by saying that Benedict's League of Divine Paedophiles is to be congratulated "in particular" among the country's various religions for helping "the least of these" - a reference to the Saviour's party political pep talk in which he promises life eternal to those who feed, clothe and visit people who manifest the same peculiar apocalyptic proclivities as the Saviour did himself. Emulating the humility of the Saviour and of the Saviour's chum Tony, the Glorious Successor also compared himself to the "good Samaritan", who did not pass by on the other side but who instead took money from the poor and used it to construct a PFI hospital in which medical aid for the victims of mugging was withdrawn on the grounds that the funds were needed for repaying Samaria's national debt and the customers should have been more careful anyway. The Glorious Successor rejected the idea that "religion should somehow be tolerated but not encouraged in public life" on the grounds that such an attitude would entail a community "stripped of values" - a particularly unfortunate case to make for the Christian churches, which were born in misogyny and anti-Semitism and spent the twentieth century leaping into bed with Hitler, Mussolini and various younger choirboys. The Glorious Successor also said that his policy on "family finances" derives from his own positive experience of marriage rather than anything from which the rest of the country might possibly benefit.

Daveybloke, answering the same questionnaire, made his usual enigmatic pronouncement about "our broken society" (Daveybloke, like certain other spiritual healers, frequently appears to confuse Britain with Somalia or Zimbabwe), and burbled that bribing people who hate one another to bring up their children together "has a key part to play" in mending it.