Our Glorious Heritage

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, has taken the opportunity for a bit of rah-rah to please the back-benchers by shrugging off a query by one of his orangey pets about returning the Elgin Marbles. The marbles were chipped off the Parthenon in Athens by an eighteenth-century syphilitic and shipped off to Britain under a permit of dubious legality; the pretext was that this would preserve them from damage in the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman menace, much as Daveybloke and his chums might bomb the occasional city to prevent civilian casualties. It is certainly understandable that this robbery of the underdog by the empire for which we should stop apologising might appeal to the Conservative Party, even if the material gains amount to nothing more than a few bits of foreign sculpture. For the benefit of any tabloids in the vicinity, Daveybloke took the opportunity to plunge into the vernacular, stating that he had no intention of allowing Britain to "lose its marbles", at least until somebody offers a reasonable price.