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.