Wash Your Wetbacks For Windsor

For an initiative which has so far displayed jubilee inanity, patronising hypocrisy, forelock-tugging obsequiousness, slogans with exclamation marks, and Michael Gove and the London Haystack posturing in royal purple like varicose Boy Scouts, any further descent into idiocy should hardly be possible. Nevertheless, the Clean for the Queen campaign - a bizarre mutation of the Big Society thingy, intended to chivvy the proles into taking over for free the functions of paid (and thus largely fired) street cleaners - has found yet another way in which to be gruesomely wrong. One of the posters, inevitably fonted for World War nostalgia-porn, grovels Spick and span, Ma'am, but mis-spells the first word as a racist American slur on those who share their ethnic heritage with the sponsors of Columbus. The campaign director cited the Oxford English Dictionary in his defence, but I have certainly never seen the phrase spelt without the k until now. It seems unlikely that the omission was malicious: the Bullingdons and their chums are rarely fans of fiscal austerity when it comes to spending taxpayers' money on their own little wheezes, but possibly the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith suggested that fewer letters would be cheaper, or perhaps the layout and proofing were outsourced to migrants who would accept less than the minimum wage.