It's All Gone A Bit Michael Gove

'Twas Brexit, and the slimy Goves
Did fib and wibble in the wreck;
All flimsy were the Boris coves,
Yet brazen was their neck.

"Beware the Haystack, husband mine!
The jaws that fib, the tongue that forks!"
So ordered creepy Mistress Vine
Before the torrid talks.

In greasy grip he took his sword -
Not by the hilt, but by the blade;
For warnings that he'd end up gored
Were by mere experts made.

And as in some distress he hopped
And tried to re-attach his thumb,
The Haystack came, and grinned and flopped,
And burbled at its chum.

"One two! One two! When I am crowned,
I'll take the fillies, you the flak!"
He plucked the sword from off the ground
And stabbed it in the back.

"And hast thou stopped the Haystack here?
A Grub Street boy who likes to win!
Come goose-step with Lord Rothermere
And bask in Murdoch's grin!"

'Twas Brexit, and the slimy Goves
Were asked about the mess.
All piggy pinks and mottled mauves:
"No clue, we must confess."

Dodger Clewlis

Not Above Causing Trouble

The Farage Falange paymaster Arron Banks is thinking of starting up a new and doubtless even more reputable gang of boot-boys with which to defend British democracy. Amid some sneers at the emotional autism of mere facts, and some erudite eructations in favour of taking the Goebbels approach to campaigning, Banks dropped a couple of lead-lined hints to his servant Nigel that it might be about time to take the road to professional Fox News punditry or Honorary Grand High Bumptiousness of his local Klan: "He may have had enough. And by the way, going out at the top is a good way in politics." Presumably the strutting Caudillo's victory speeches, with their sniggers at the work of adult diplomats and at the merely factual assassination of Jo Cox, constitute Banks' idea of making it. Meanwhile, Banks promised anyone else who might disagree with him the attentions of "the army", by which he meant a million supporters who may or may not care about the mere fact of having been lied to.

But This Time We Really Really Mean It

With a smarmy opportunism worthy of Britain's dead-baby-waving Head Boy, the erstwhile Deputy Conservatives are seeking to posture as the party of righteous indignation over a campaign fought on lies. The Liberal Democrats know a thing or two about mendacity; and while their example in office may not have been the original inspiration for the Farage Falange, it certainly helped to rub in the lesson that pledging and delivering are two very different and mutually independent processes. The leader of the Lib Dems' shattered, sagging rump has declared that the party can provide a "safe space" for voters who want an inclusive, moderate and economically competent party which spent five years conniving with the Bullingdon Club at the pillaging of the state on behalf of the squillionaire class. How safe that snug vacuity will become should the Lib Dems ever get to play electoral kingmaker is, like everything else these days, anyone's guess.

A Changed Situation

For far too long, I used to say,
Too tolerant we've grown:
Those cunning darkies who obey
Our laws, we leave alone.

This wasn't quite the thing, I thought:
Our love must be more tough.
We must Prevent, Arrest, Deport,
And all that other stuff.

I blathered, less than two months past,
Of scary Muslims who
Might nurse some fiendish plans to blast
A London bus or two.

It brought me votes, it brought me praise,
And I enjoyed eftsoons
Approving belches, barks and brays
From my back-bench baboons.

But, now it's fashionably late,
I find it plain to see:
We must condemn this awful hate,
For it's no use to me.

Davey FitzAnthony

Justice and Fair Play

In turbulent times such as these, it's reassuring to find that some of us still have our pride. Her Majesty's Government, which has already paid out two million to one family who were renditionised to Libya with the enthusiastic connivance of British Intelligence, has not abandoned the old bulldog spirit in trying to deprive others of their day in court. The vindictive foreigners are a married couple who were kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured in a joint operation conducted by MI6 and its very special chums, the CIA and Colonel Gaddafi's goons. They are seeking £3 in compensation plus, outrageously enough, an apology, which would of course imperil Britain's security, put our brave boys at unnecessary risk, and all the usual. Accordingly, the Government has spared no expense to protect the taxpayer from any suspicion of parsimony towards the spooks: ten months ago the bill was six hundred thousand, and the eventual cost could be over ten million; which certainly shows just how much value Her Majesty's Government places on preserving British values as embodied by Colonel Gaddafi.

Taking Back Control

Well, here's a thing: having fought and won their jolly little campaign to cut the Continent adrift, the robustly straight-talking Englishmen have taken less than twenty-four hours to go virtually full Clegg.

First, having spent the last few months promising to throw an extra three hundred and fifty million a week at the NHS, the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange has decided he'd really rather not; which is probably just as well, since the figure was made up anyway.

Then, having fought the campaign largely by squealing that the bloody wogs are coming over here and taking our jobs, the prominent Fox News blah-blah Dan Hannan has loftily informed his dupes that they had better not get all excited about zero immigration just yet; possibly because free movement is not going to stop - at least, not unless the new régime thinks the British economy can do without the European market.

Then, having argued for separating from Europe in double-quick time because Britishness rah rah, the London Haystack has proclaimed that the mainland is part of Europe and no less European than ever and really loves Europe and there's really no hurry about any of it.

In other words, to those among the fifty-two per cent who voted to leave on any of those three grounds: fooled you again, proles. Enjoy your democracy.

Independence Day

What can I say? The pessimists, the experts and the wogs stand chastened and defeated; and, aside from Sinn Fein and Nicola Sturgeon urging the breakup of the kingdom; and the twenty-seven remaining EU nations informing us that a prompt exit will enable them to keep their books in order; and the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange being frightfully witty about decent people having won with no shots being fired; and Spain making condescending noises about Gibraltar; and the pound looking a bit less sterling than it has done for quite some time - well, it all looks jolly rah-rah so far.

Bring On the Willy Pete

It seems fitting, on this day of national-historical renewal, to note that the present government of Iraq seems to have internalised Western values to a degree for which even the Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair can hardly have dared to hope. Falluja, the site of some of the crusade's most edifying scenes, is once again hosting the clash of civilisations, with the Iraqi government declaring victory over the Fighting Islamic Sons of Tony even though only a third of the city has been cleansed of the insurgent filth. Further glories and new, happy lives are undoubtedly to come. Meanwhile, the UN has warned that a swarm of up to 2.3 million human locusts may be poised to descend upon Middle England; though perhaps not precisely in those exact words.

Making the Positive Case

A former Farage Falange councillor in Bristol has been defending British values from those who seek to undermine the nation that spawned Oswald Mosley, Enoch Powell and the Falange's own strutting Caudillo. A Muslim resident and family centre worker sent a group email to local councillors in which he had the temerity to quote the Koran's definition of Ramadan as "the month of prayer and guidance, discipline and tolerance, repentance and charity": all ghastly foreign traditions bound up with terrorism and female genital mutilation; and the former councillor, apparently driven to breaking point by losing his seat in last month's local elections, had no hesitation in pointing out the general inferiority of such values by comparison with those of the Farage Falange. For the benefit of any wogs who might have failed to get the message, he told the Bristol Post that "whatever race, creed or colour you are, if you want to be accepted into our country, obey the law, accept our culture, enjoy our freedom, and if you can't or won't, you have the freedom to leave." It is as yet unclear which laws have been violated and which liberties and cultural norms have been trampled by communicating about a tradition shared by a couple of million British people; but if the Farage Falange's referendum campaign has taught us anything, it is that facts are for wimps.

Police as Business

The Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club has paid unctuous tribute to the "brave and innovative operations" carried out by the Special Demonstration Squad: not, as might be supposed, the Kettlers in Kevlar, but a sneaks-and-spooks unit initially set up in 1968 to spy on leftists. Undercover officers concealed evidence in court cases (operational discretion), spied on the relatives of Stephen Lawrence (race relations) and utilised long-term sexual relationships as part of their cover (family values). They also engaged in identity theft, hiding behind dead children; and, as it now emerges, lied about the value of the information they gathered in order to fleece the taxpayer. It all sounds rather like the entrepreneurial activities of those reliable people at Serco and G4S, with just a naughty hint of Britain's Head Boy and his human shield, Little Ivan™; and so proud is the club manager, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howitzer, now an inquiry has recounted all these brave and innovative doings, that he has been sitting on the report since last year. Doubtless he was waiting for a week during which he couldn't be accused of burying the bad news.

Adult Reasoning

Junior threats to our way of life have received a boost from the hotbed of radical-left subversionism that is the high court. The minions of Mad Tessie May have been ordered to stop throwing children in jail on the grounds that somebody happens to think they look eighteen or older: a policy which the Ministry for Wog-Induced Panic has found perfectly humane and rational hitherto. Local authorities have to conduct a full age assessment before deciding whether or not to boot an asylum seeker into jail; but the minions of Mad Tessie May, in order to counter any risk of taking some of the blame which more justly attaches to politically-correct council profligates, are subject to no such restrictions. Fortunately, the taxpayer has been granted the privilege of spending more money defending the Ministry's doings, should the minions of Mad Tessie May so choose.

Bone Tomahawk

S Craig Zahler 2015

In a year of Westerns which take themselves either not seriously enough (The Hateful Eight) or too seriously by far (The Revenant), it's been refreshing to encounter a couple which respect the genre sufficiently to essay it on its own terms and without postmodernist flippancy. Kristian Levring's The Salvation provided some fine flourishes to the virtuous-avenger subgenre, and Bone Tomahawk gives an equally watchable make-over to that of the posse in pursuit, mingling old-fashioned virtues of character and dialogue with thoroughly up-to-date violence and horror.

Before the pursuit begins, the film spends a considerable portion of its running time building up the characters: cool-headed sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell), garrulous elder deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), dandy shootist John Brooder (Matthew Fox), impetuous foreman Arthur O'Dwyer (Patrick Wilson), who has broken his leg falling off a roof; and eventual kidnapee and main object of their pursuit, O'Dwyer's spirited wife Samantha (Lili Simmons), who substitutes for the local doctor on the frequent occasions when he's too drunk to dig one of Hunt's bullets out of a felon's leg. By contrast with Eva Green's snake-eyed mute in The Salvation, it's a pity that Samantha, whose character in these early sequences is developed as carefully as the men's, does not in the end have all that much to do.

The dialogue throughout is first-rate, peppered with polysyllabic archaisms after the fashion of the Coens' True Grit ("shut up" becomes "close that aperture") and delivered with aplomb by all concerned. As a zinger-laden vehicle for character, the script is comparable to Howard Hawks at his most amusing, or to the first and far superior half of The Hateful Eight; and, unlike Tarantino, Zahler has the good sense to keep Russell's character around for the whole duration.

When his town is invaded by anthropophagous troglodytes who murder a stable-hand and make off with Samantha, a young deputy and half a dozen horses, Hunt rides out in pursuit, accompanied by Brooder, Chicory and the crippled but obdurate O'Dwyer. The film takes care to establish that its savages are not mainstream Native Americans; in a typically witty touch, it does so via an expert who is himself an Indian, and who remarks with deadpan disdain upon whitey's refusal to distinguish between cannibal cave-persons and normal decent tribes. (In fact, thanks to the chalky dust with which they cover themselves, the troglodytes turn out somewhat whiter than the whites.)

During the arduous and unpredictable chase, the film effortlessly mingles its comic dialogue with bursts of bloody violence. The climax comes with a supremely gruesome sequence at the cannibals' cave, where Samantha gets to deliver one of the film's best lines, succinctly diagnosing the real difficulty with frontier life. Although the men she's criticising arguably give her words the lie, a delightfully nasty prologue has already shown us how the trouble started; and as that fine, upstanding American, the Man with No Name, observed in another dusty situation, God is not on our side because He hates idiots also.

Peace is Their Profession

Germany's foreign minister appears to have misunderstood the purpose of NATO, which is now engaged in a large-scale provocation in the Baltic states. Lots of toys are being played with, including jets, warships, tanks and armoured vehicles, and Britain and the US are standing shoulder to shoulder as ever; so there is almost no chance at all of anything going catastrophically wrong. Nevertheless, Franz-Walter Steinmeier is worried that NATO military exercises - "a symbolic tank parade on the alliance's eastern border" as he rather hurtfully put it - could worsen security rather than improving it, which would obviously be a Very Bad Thing for all those chirpy wog-bombers with their ever-open beaks. Vladimir Putin, for his part, has urged co-operation and search for compromise: an approach which was discredited as long ago as 1990, when Germany re-unified and immediately joined NATO in democratic defiance of the fiend Gorbachev's plea that it remain neutral.

All Decent Britons

All decent Britons abhor and deplore the assassination of Jo Cox. All decent Britons regard it as an attack on decency, democracy and British values. All decent British politicians are completely against it. All decent British prime ministers are doing their utmost to claim Cox's values as their own. All decent British journalists condemn the atmosphere of hatred and contempt for politicians which has been fostered by social media. All decent British pundits are appalled at the hatred, recrimination and mendacity which has emerged from the referendum campaign, and wish that we could all disagree a bit more respectfully with those who call us shirkers, scroungers and terrorist sympathisers. All decent British right-wing tabloids are concerned about the melanin-challenged suspect's mental health, since he does not appear to have shouted Allahu akhbar, in defiance of the precedent set by the devastating sanity of ISIS and al-Qaeda. All decent British publishers of the likes of Katie Hopkins are deeply concerned about the indecent rhetoric being used by the other side. All decent Britons look forward to the day when Cox's murder attains the status of latest excuse for censorship, government snoopery, or bringing back hanging, and everything is normal again and we can all get back to being decent and British as we always were before.

What It's All About

It isn't about saving the NHS. It isn't about rebalancing the economy. It isn't about national security. It isn't about more jobs at better wages. It isn't about a British bill of rights. It isn't about national sovereignty, or about keeping the Queen Gawblesser on the stamps, or about saving the pound; and it isn't about fish. It's about keeping the wogs out, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange, and to his sponsor, the NHS privatisation fan Arron Banks, for their final, absolute and unequivocal confirmation of that highly edifying fact.

Reef Madness

Scientists investigating the state of coral reefs have discovered that some are doing better than expected despite the best efforts of entrepreneurs and wealth creators; while others are doing worse than expected despite being located in relatively remote and undisturbed places. The surveyors' conclusion is that reefs are better able to stand the pressures of modern living where nearby populations have a high stake in maintaining the stability of the environment, and when the locals have a large say in how their environments are managed. Fish stocks are worst where there is an industrial rate of netting and where freezers can be conveniently used for storage. Saving the reefs and their dependent organisms, including various human expendables, is therefore a simple matter of going against the dominant religion's most fundamental decrees, which specify that the financial interests of large corporations are paramount in all circumstances and that the planet's resources are owned by those who can profit by them and not by those who depend on them. It looks, therefore, as if we will just have to do without the reefs.

Rare Bits

Assumed consent for organ donation has been in operation in Wales for the past six months, and has resulted in the predictable moral disaster, with lives being saved by the dozen, including several which might have been lost under an opt-in-only scheme. Assumed consent is a calamity for family values, because relatives might be prevented from overruling the wishes of the deceased; especially when organs for transplant are in short supply. The Church in Wales is concerned that the rules could alienate relatives of potential donors, and may be too confusing for its simple-minded flock to understand. The Church is also worried that the system may set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; not to mention healing the sick, an activity with which the Saviour famously never sullied himself.

Why Can't They Just Breathe Less?

Mere experts are once again attempting to sully the clear blue waters of British pluck and gumption with the idea that our fine, clean-limbed children cannot cope with a bit of traffic. A study done on a few foreigners in a country where they can't even spell Anderson has found a link between air pollution and mental illness in children. The cause of mental illness in British children, of course, is that junior resources in families with shirker-level incomes are faking stress in order to get out of learning Gove's British Grammar for Toddlers in time for their eleven-months-plus exams, while meddling Euro-wogs have forbidden parents to utilise the age-old remedy of enhanced gluteal incentives against antisocial behaviour. Fortunately, our island nation is blessed with heroic, no-nonsense populists like the London Haystack, who apparently suppressed a report into the effects of air pollution so as to avoid causing unnecessary worry to hard-working families and distracting them from genuine priorities like migrant-bashing and Bozza-boosting.

Leave NATO Now

Fury at shooting horror

The United Kingdom Indpendence Party has called for Americans to be barred from entering the UK and for Britain to leave NATO "before all our perverts get shot".

The announcement was made in response to the latest and greatest modern blessing to be conferred by the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.

"We fully recognise the difference between Americans and Muslims, but for the sake of our country we must be realistic and treat every outsider as a potential homicidal maniac," a spokesbeing for the party said.

"We already know that Turkey, a nation of 76 million rapists, could be let into Britain on a nod and a wink from the unelected Strasbourg bunker in Brussels. Just think what might happen if America were to gain control of our independent nuclear deterrent by similar means."

Members of UKIP have previously made comments interpreted as homophobic, but the party denied that it condones attacks on gay people.

"The UK Independence Party condemns all acts of violence whether perpetrated by immigrants or Islamic terrorists," the spokesbeing said.

"We believe that gay people should be prevented from marrying and kept away from children, with chemical castration reserved for the most annoying cases, but that is as far as any civilised 1950s British person should go."

Solar Fires

Westminster's war on the evil subversives of subsidised solar appears to be within measurable distance of its end. Deeply concerned by rising bills among hard-working families, so that the robust interventionism of Amber Rudd is a much-sniggered byword among the energy cartel, the greenest government ever has been kicking the solar industry for years and has now succeeded in booting more than half of its workers out of a job. The cost of solar energy has declined, which means that the Government would get more for the same subsidy than it used to; but that would probably not leave much money for such fine and manly Conservative Party pursuits as sacking and fracking. Besides, it would be frightfully irresponsible to put British homes and businesses under the sway of some bloated, toxically radioactive, non-privatised, non-Murdoch sun.

At Rest

Apparently moved by the recent burial of Richard III's remains in Leicester, campaigners are calling for those of Joseph Carey Merrick, the Elephant Man, to receive similar treatment. A descendant of one of his managers, and the founder of a memorial society, have both been on the BBC proclaiming that Merrick was a devout Christian who would have been deeply concerned with the location of his corrupt body once the spirit had departed. His remains at the moment are available by appointment for medical education and research; which seems appropriate enough given that it was a doctor, rather than the Church or managers of freak shows, who eventually befriended him and gave him proper care. The University of London has stated that Merrick "expected" this use of his remains. As a gentle soul, a devout Christian and the victim of one of his fun-loving God's more elaborate pranks, he was in an excellent position to understand that the flesh is not what counts.

New Lagoons and Blue Baboons

Among the first actions of the greenest government ever, along with token filly Caroline Spelman's attempt to sell off the country's forests, was the cutting of flood defences; following which Spelman was kicked out of the Department for Greenwashing and replaced with the climate change denier Owen Paterson. Hundreds of schemes were abolished; major flooding duly followed; Britain's Head Boy toddled about in wellies and had a bit of a burble about money being no object except when it was. An inquiry by the Environmental Audit Committee has forced publication of a report which concluded that failing to spend money on flood defences meant that flood defences became less effective, and concluded that the Government would need to maintain flood defences if it wanted to avoid flooding. The logic of this position had eluded the author of the Osbornomic miracle, and no doubt continues to be a little obscure among the intellectual élite of the Not Awfully Bright Party; but since much of the flooding affected non-expendable voters, the Bullingdons have decided that something should be done besides blaming the Labour party, and have started by restoring some of the funding they cut and calling it an increase. They have also appointed Oliver Letwin, the noted clown-without-portfolio, to come up with a twenty-five-year plan for "managing our rivers across whole catchments". It is as yet unclear how this is to be translated for the benefit of native English speakers; but likely possibilities include the more effective outsourcing of future blame to local authorities, refugees and badgers.

Hot Water

Will the lesser breeds never fight fair? The Royal Navy, having acquired half a dozen destroyers at a thousand million pounds each, has discovered that water in the Middle East tends to be a bit warmer than in the North Atlantic, and that the ships' engines are a bit too British to cope. One ship, HMS Daring, has seized up twice through getting into the wrong sort of water and has been forced to put in for repairs, doubtless to echoes of barbaric merriment from the mad mullahs, the pesky pirates and various unofficial but highly entrepreneurial immigration services. The Ministry for Wog-Bombing shrugged it all off as "teething problems"; but that was when the Ministry was being run by Adam Werritty via his little man in Westminster, the vole-brained Liam Fox. These days the Ministry is in the safer, saner hands of the blustering buffoon Michael Fallon, whose main achievements in office are proclaiming the Lower Milibeing a pawn of Putin and Sadiq Khan a scary-Muslim security risk. Prudently enough, rather than letting Fallon blather on about blasting the fuzzy-wuzzies out of City Hall, the Ministry extruded a spokesbeing to cover the whole issue in a nice, thick coating of complacent commercial ooze. Contrary to the defeatist ramblings of mere experts, the destroyers are entirely fit for purpose and are busy putting the great back in Britain from the Falklands to Fallujah; and their cost, after all, is only taxpayers' money.

We All Need Protection

Since investigations are proceeding into allegations of electoral fraud, a Conservative MP has taken it upon himself to warn the Electoral Commission not to risk appearing biased. The BBC appears biased in the eyes of the Conservative Party, and we all know what happened to that. A Channel Four investigation made the original allegations about Conservative election spending, and the Secretary of State for Squatting on Leveson is deliberating appropriate penalties even now. The police have not named the owners of any fat, sweaty necks which may happen to be bulging over whatever collars they are feeling in this case, lest their replacement with those charming people at G4S should be abruptly accelerated. And anyway, lots of other people were doing the same, just like with parliamentary expenses; and if the Electoral Commission has never heard of a gentlemen's agreement, that would really be rather a shame. The Electoral Commission is, on the whole, rather a nice little commission, and it would be a pity if someone were to, all inadvertently-like, just happen to come along and privatise it.

D-Day

The forces of freedom and democracy have launched the biggest response since the Cold War to Russia's assertiveness and actions. A massive war game has started in Poland, involving German tanks rolling eastward, which will certainly awaken some stirring memories; particularly given the potential for nasty accidents and the fact that Britain's leader has recently claimed to be the sort of responsible world statesman who will happily risk World War Three if it appeases a few noisy party baboons.

The choice of date may also be construed, should the Russians choose to do so, as a reminder of who really won the Great Patriotic War. Given Russia's recent aggressiveness, which is not a response to anything, least of all the reckless adventurism and demented rhetoric of the past fifteen years, this seems as good a time as any to send a firm yet tactful message that, so far as the Good Guys are concerned, the twenty million died in vain. The Russians, having no rational self-interest and no legitimate security concerns, regularly hold military exercises on their own account; but that, of course, is because they're meanies.

Nobody Stands With Dave

Britain's Head Boy has evidently decided that his campaign to remain in Downing Street could do with a bit of a boost; and he seems to believe that bringing on the previous empty-headed mediocrity to make a fool of himself over Europe will somehow help matters. The post-Thatcher interregnum's routine career of blathering ineptitude was blighted by enemies on the back benches and saved only by the fact that the Labour party was led by Neil Kinnock. Even the premiership of Gordon Brown was less depressing; mainly, it must be admitted, because Brown's flailing and gurning went on for less than half the time.

Anyway, it is apparent that twenty years in the grey havens have neither undimmed the dullness not sloughed away the sleaze; while the intellectual vacuum sucks as much as ever. The interregnum, who began the neoliberal sabotage of the NHS with his ridiculous internal market, affected worry about what might happen to the NHS. The interregnum, whose régime set a standard for squalor and corruption that New Labour could only build on, was very considerably discombobulated at the fundamental dishonesty of the Not Awfully Nice Party's less refined souls. It certainly shows characteristic adroitness by Britain's Head Boy that he should order his enemies denounced as irrepressibly drab and awful by the Conservative Party's very own Herbert Anchovy.

Fishy Britishness

In his capacity as representative of the common working man, the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange has put himself forward as mascot to a protest flotilla of anti-EU fishing boats. The organisers argue that leaving the EU is a no-brainer for fishermen, because Britain is unable to represent itself in negotiations because half a dozen other nations are involved, and negotiations where other people are involved are, of course, a waste of time. If Britain left the EU, apparently there would be lots more people on our side, quite apart from the fact that our former partners among the Euro-wogs would naturally be giving their all to oblige us. The strutting Caudillo himself has been a member of the European parliament's fisheries committee, during which time he defended the interests of the little fisher folk in all of one out of forty-two meetings; which doubtless explains why he was too busy to take part in any votes on reforming fisheries policy.

Considerable Ecstasies

Oh, yes! Oh George, it's lonely at the top,
Whether of clapped-out Empire or World Cop.
No matter what we bomb or privatise,
We fail to shine in lesser bastards' eyes
Because so few appreciate, today,
The virtues of our whiny shade of grey:
My modest manners and abilities,
Your own success in training chimpanzees.

Edwina and my party chums can cause
Considerable skidmarks in my drawers;
And yet my beer is warm, my bat is straight!
Our schoolgirl missives mean it is our fate
Considerable ecstasies to know!
Oh, George! Oh, quite considerably so!

Jack Shit

Abated Pledges

Astonishingly enough, it appears that the greenest government ever is preparing to consign yet another pledge to the memory hole, where it can join the one about ending the deficit by 2015 and the perennial favourite about the NHS being safe in those sweaty little hands. All agog at the run-up to the recent Paris blah-blah on climate change, the token filly for green crap proclaimed that the Government would "set out proposals to close coal by 2025". Amber Rudd, the token filly in question, has form when it comes to making pledges with a whiff of Clegg about them: it was she who promised that frackers would not be allowed to operate under sites of special scientific interest, whereupon the greenest government ever decided to allow frackers to operate under sites of special scientific interest.

In this case, the proposals have been delayed by the coal industry, which has been squealing that it is in far too much of a crisis to do anything at all just now and, no doubt, threatening to turn all the lights off just in time for the next elections. Andrea Leadsom, a Rudd underfilly and therefore about as token as it's possible to be without actually being Sajid Javid, has "encouraged" the coal companies to give Rudd a bit of help in deciding what she meant by the pledge. Meanwhile, a four-year competition to develop carbon capture and storage technology has been scrapped six months before the prize was due, and plans have been drawn up to crate a massive open-cast coal mine somewhere in the Northern Powerhouse. A spokesbeing for Rudd's department was rapidly extruded to proclaim that the Government is "absolutely committed to phasing out power production from unabated coal by 2025 and it is nonsense to suggest otherwise", so presumably the planned mine will be producing the abated stuff only, once the coal industry has inserted its preferred meaning of the term into Amber Rudd.

Arrangement in Purple and Orange

Whatever the results of the EU referendum, it seems the country can look forward to a nice quiet morning after. On 24 June, the Trumpster will be dropping in on one of his Scottish fiefdoms for the official re-launch of a hotel which will soon be graced with the Donald J Trump ballroom, "the most luxurious meeting facility anywhere in Europe". It is as yet unclear whether the Trumpster, or the rabid Liberal Democrat tribble which sits on his head and does the heavy thinking for him, has realised the implications of a vote to leave, which could reduce the Donald J Trump ballroom to merely the most luxurious meeting facility anywhere near a Scottish golf course. In any case, the day is likely to be a busy one for Britain's Head Boy, who called the Trumpster's anti-Muslim comments "stupid, divisive and wrong" while very intelligently, inclusively and correctly supporting an openly anti-Muslim mayoral campaign and libelling an imam who supported his own party. Accordingly, it appears that, however much both may desire it, no definite arrangements have been made whereby Britain's Head Boy can meet the likely Republican presidential nominee and tell him what a fine, upstanding, hard-working little Englishman Sadiq Khan really is.