Conspiracy Theory

Daveybloke's badger-busting environment secretary, Owen Paterson, has sufficiently recovered from Parliament's recent demolition of the marriage vows to notice that British beef isn't all it should be, especially when it happens to be a Romanian immigrant. Consumers are annoyed that certain processed chunks of dead animal have turned out to be processed chunks of a different variety of dead animal; the preference may seem arbitrary, but then Steven Spielberg has never made a film about a war-cow. The horse-meat scandal, proclaimed Paterson, is a "straight fraud", quite unlike what happens when the public votes blue to go green only for the blue party and its little orange chums to put the forests up for sale and declare open season for frackers everywhere. "This is a conspiracy against the public," Paterson whinnied; indeed, given his government's obsession with getting out of the way so that profiteers may do as they please, he surely protested too much. The idea of a Conservative minister in glamorous food-bank Britain being concerned over what the proles eat is disconcerting, to say the least; could something more sinister be going on? With the approaching announcement of a royal commission to kick Leveson into the long grass, could somebody be trying, on behalf of Daveybloke and Rebekah, to destroy certain evidence of an equine persuasion?