Bumbling Off

Daveybloke's badger-busting Minister for Barely Greenrinsing, Owen Paterson, seems set to take decisive action against Britain's bee problem which, like all other Bad Things, grew to epidemic proportions under the last Labour government. Although on a superficial level bees appear to be natural Conservative allies, in that they live in the country, tend towards royalism and have more than three legs, they also possess a number of less desirable characteristics which no doubt influenced Paterson's eminently rational decision. Most bees are female workers, hardly Daveybloke's most reliable constituency; and, as many Conservatives would expect of an organism whose bodily surface shows more than a hint of black, bees also carry sharp weapons and have a tendency to invade people's gardens. Like Muslims, Liverpudlians and other undesirables, bees are prone to clannishness and a hive mentality, in contrast to the healthy individualism which prevails on the Conservative back benches; and they dance not in order to obtain trophy wives, but in order to communicate coded information about possibly strategic food sources. Given all this, the fact that the European Commission wishes to protect the bees, while large chemical companies are squealing for help in continuing to poison them, must merely have provided Paterson with a handy political pretext for ridding the countryside of the apiform menace once and for all.