Pirates and Emperors

The prime minister of Mauritius, Navinchandra Ramgoolam, has had a bit of a chat with Daveybloke about the Chagos Islands, which were stolen from their inhabitants by the British government in the mid-sixties and later used, with the blessing of the Lower (formerly Upper) Miliband, to facilitate kidnapping and torture at the convenience of the United States. Ramgoolam described his meeting with Daveybloke as "very cordial", as no doubt it was. Before he took up the prime ministerial thingy, Daveybloke's family found him a job in marketing, and presumably it was during this brief blip of nearly honest labour that Daveybloke learned to restrain his inner purple-faced school bully behind that cordial façade which has fallen away with such inconvenient regularity during recent months. Ramgoolam said that Daveybloke's demonstration of his talents with the coloured folk "augurs well for the future", which indicates either diplomatic politeness or a potentially traumatic lack of background knowledge concerning all those promises about cutting the deficit but not the NHS, protecting frontline services and so forth. Ramgoolam also expressed the hope that Mauritius would be an equal partner with Britain and the US in the negotiations over the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, which will doubtless be good for a snigger or two in the Bullingdon Club (for example, compare and contrast: British values; American values; Mauritian values). Neither Downing Street nor the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns had anything to say about the talks, although a proclamation of delight was made because Daveybloke signed an agreement whereby Mauritius will prosecute and imprison those pirates whom the Royal Navy chooses to capture rather than serve.