Days of Wormauld Pleen

The sun is up, the wind is keen;
These are the days of Wormauld Pleen.
Children's rhyme

My latest concerns a man who wakes up one day to the sound of someone pounding in terror at his front door, only to discover that his terrified guest is the company psychological therapist; and from there matters only get worse. The book is now available, as paperback and as PDF ebook, and should be bought in quantity, read with alacrity, star-rated with enthusiasm and reviewed with unseemly flattery. In addition, for anyone who may have missed it, my backlist remains as available as ever.

After All, We're Not the Foreigners

The Commons Committee for Wogs, Frogs and Huns has advised the Government not only that it should throw more money at the ghastly BBC, but that it should fund, of all things, translations from the foreign. As part of the Osbornomic miracle, the financial responsibility for BBC Monitoring was shovelled off onto the corporation, in order to save taxpayers the expense and annoyance of a Foreign Office that knew what the foreigners were getting up to. Now that the Foreign Office has been reduced to a joke department kept aloft by the blathering of the Imperial Haystack, there seems little incentive for the Government to restore funding. Fifty-two per cent of the British people (viz. the British people) have spoken; and if the world has anything worth saying from now on, it will just have to do so in the British language.

Though I Be Rude in Speech

God, as we know, has strong opinions on many subjects, while taking a liberal and tolerant attitude to others. He has no objection to taking a little wine for your stomach's sake, for instance; but if you take too much and are witnessed by your son in a compromising attitude, that son shall put forth only hewers of wood and drawers of water for the white folks. Equally sanely, God doesn't mind an occasional rape, massacre or genocide, but He does not take at all kindly to profane language. Hence, the Almighty has warned the president of the Philippines to stop his epithets, or else be killed in a plane crash. Summary executions in the name of the War on Chemical Heaven remain, however, acceptable in His sight.

Omens and Portents

Given recent annunciations by the Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair concerning his imminent personal redemption of the political centre, it can surely be no coincidence that the tomb of his second-best chum Jesus has allegedly been unearthed by conservationists in Jerusalem. The location where the Saviour's body was, "according to tradition" (or, in Standard English, quite possibly not), placed after his martyrdom to the chocolate egg industry has been uncovered by Greek archaeologists funded by a music-industry widow and the infidel prince Abdullah II of Jordan. It lies beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, custodianship of which is shared between half a dozen squabbling factions of the risen corpse's self-proclaimed followers. In order to keep the loving brothers from one another's throats, since the time of the pre-Blair crusades the keys to the church have been left in the keeping of Muslims.

Words of Honour

In the interests of taking back control and returning sovereignty to Parliament, the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK has been conducting private meetings with foreign car manufacturers, and has apparently persuaded them to invest in Britain on the strength of some assurances which neither side has deigned to disclose. Presumably Nissan have been granted honorary non-wog status along with whatever feudal rights over the white working class are deemed appropriate for the aspiring North Korea of the Atlantic. The chief executive of Nissan had expressed doubt over whether the investment would go ahead without some sort of financial compensation for any tariffs "imposed after Brexit" (in Standard English, tariffs to which the North Korea of the Atlantic may expose itself by flouncing out of the club which includes avoidance of said tariffs as a privilege of membership). Nevertheless, it appears that the chief executive of Nissan has consented to be appeased by tea at the Vicarage and Greg Clark's word of honour, and that the rest of the automotive industry will be happy to satisfy itself with the best possible deal which Mad Tessie and her minions have been announcing more or less daily for the past few months. Evidently the National Health Service's three hundred and fifty million a week remains safely ring-fenced, unless some scary Zac-baiting Muslim has made away with it.

Don't They Know Leadership When They See It?

Despite the moral and intellectual leadership of frack-happy luminaries like Amber Rudd, the country's biggest windfarm operator is considering divesting itself of its interests in oil and gas. Worse yet, Danish Oil and Natural Gas propose to invest the proceeds of the sales in renewable energy projects, rather than in something sensible like fracking Lancashire, or a blanched Sino-French pachyderm with infinitely extensible completion deadline and matching price tag. Instead, Dong Energy is seeking to consolidate the grip on Britain's wind which has gradually and insidiously come about through decades of rule by sandal-wearing metrosexuals. The company is majority-owned by the Danish government, which is also unscrupulous enough to run a welfare state in a country whose citizens, despite being Euro-wogs of 1973 vintage, look just like real people.

Your Ash is Mine

Ever since the Saviour failed to draw any precise distinction between the flesh and the spirit, the Catholic church has been doing its best to clear matters up with the faithful, who are self-evidently too stupid to work out the difference on their own. Having graciously permitted cremation since 1963, the Vatican has now decided that its congregation might require a bit of guidance on how to dispose of the results. Dead meat being more sacred than organic ashes, burial and rot are still the preferred option; and some people are taking undue advantage of the Church's liberalism by doing unauthorised things with the remains of their loved ones. Accordingly, the prefect of the Inquisition has proclaimed that practices such as scattering, keeping at home or conversion into memorial objects are all forbidden, since they lead to "pantheistic, naturalistic or nihilistic misunderstanding" and all manner of heretical naughtiness. Instead, ashes should be kept, doubtless at no more than reasonable expense, in a place that has been properly mumbled over and thus rendered holy, in virtuous contradistinction to the hideous blasphemy of Matthew 18 xx, which implies that the mumbling might sometimes be unnecessary.

Fruit Cake

Christian humility - the unassuming belief in an omnipotent, omniscient sky-daddy who created heaven and earth and all things therein, who begot a son upon mortal woman for the redemption of the sins of the world, and who also happens to share your virtuous personal distaste for what some people get up to in private - has taken another blow on the cheek (one of the upper ones, we must piously hope), but shows no sign as yet of giving up cloak as well as coat or of going two miles when asked to go one. The born-again Christian has not been delivered who can recognise his baser motives or repent his self-righteousness; hence the legal battle in question has never been merely about one objectively disordered cake, but only and always about the moral danger of promoting an anti-Biblical message that might cause bother to the Almighty. Accordingly, the case of the Northern Irish Christian Cake-wrights versus the Forces of Legalised Sodomy looks set to drag on yet further, the soldiers of God having been defeated in the Belfast court of appeal. "This ruling undermines democratic freedom, religious freedom and freedom of speech," complained the martyr, whose idea of freedom of speech incorporates breach of contract, sexual discrimination and censorship by confectionary. A further appeal will be mounted, doubtless in all due chastity, at the supreme court in London, presumably in the hope that the Government will have managed to abolish a few more human rights by the time judgement is pronounced.

Barnstorming, Buccaneering Border Control

In a reassuring sign of hitherto latent continuity and coherence, the Government is applying its Brexit policy to the problem of wog disposal. Much as the late Head Boy did even less to prepare for Brexit than he did to win the referendum, and much as the David Davis publicist David Davis has resolved to see off economic meltdown by being confident it won't happen, the Ministry for Lock 'em Up and Kick 'em Out has spent the past six months disbelieving that the Calais concentration camp is going to be demolished, thereby avoiding the expense and inconvenience of making any preparations. Now that the perfidious French have decided, on some malicious Gallic whim, to do as they've always said they would do, the race-baiting Clegg-pledger Amber Rudd and her minions are all of a tizzy. Although the Government has stipulated that only woglings with family connections in Britain can be accommodated, in most cases the necessary background checks have not been made, owing to civil service red tape which has been drawing up advisory documents on the subject for the past thirteen months. Of course, Britain always muddles through, and besides the cultural advantages of our bold, free and cantankerous Press we've still got good old child detention to fall back on.

We Have Taught Them Much

Even after half a century of independence, flashes of Imperial glory continue to fulgurate forth in Kenya, where British values are so firmly entrenched that the government is kicking out Somali refugees at the rate of four hundred a day. Democratic elections, which have almost certainly taken place in Kenya ever since the Imperial British East Africa Company rationalised the land, are again on the way; accordingly, the Kenyan government has announced an echt-British expulsion bonanza and has begun punting failed asylum seekers back where they belong. Kenya is home to the world's biggest holiday camp for asylum seekers, which holds approximately the population of Coventry; self-evidently, Kenya is even more full up than Britain, which balks at a couple of dozen not very large Syrians. Because Somalia is still a war zone, the UN and other foreign do-gooders have criticised Kenya for kicking people out too fast, even though the majority are women, children, elderly and disabled - the very categories most likely to put further strain on Somalia's doubtless already over-extended welfare system, unless they are healthy male job-stealers in disguise. Among the conditions of the repatriation package, therefore, is the stipulation that returnees give up their status as refugees in Kenya, so that if conditions in Somalia worsen they will be unable to return and will instead be internally displaced, which is clearly a more honourable calling and, thanks to the difficulties of getting aid to people in war zones and the resulting starvation, often tends to be a self-solving problem.

Not Quite Up to Speed

The dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK has excreted a characteristically Conservative diplomatic doing at a dinner in Brussels, or possibly Strasbourg. Mad Tessie proclaimed that Britain would expect to play a central role in meetings and decisions until we finally stalk out of the EU with our national nose in the air; it remains as yet unclear whether these central meetings and decisions are the same sneaky, undemocratic, anti-British meetings and decisions over which we are supposedly leaving. In any case, the lesser breeds have responded with their usual touchiness, although one might think that by now they would be used to British politicians reassuring their own back-bench baboons through the handy medium of finger-wagging speechifications ostensibly addressed to foreign dignitaries. Evidently the shock of Britain's looming entry into the international global market has caused a degree of discombobulation. Still, with the Russian Bear wading up the English Channel to wog-bomb Syria as if it owned the place, and with only the doughty pluck and gumption of the Royal Navy protecting the natives of Calais from imminent Putinisation, it appears that the Euro-wogs are in need of yet another reminder about who won the war.

Offensive Imagery

Despite its international reach and its relative seniority in online corporate terms, it appears that Facebook has yet to outgrow the ethical standards of the American adolescent male. Last month the site repeatedly censored a famous historical photograph posted by the Norwegian prime minister; this month Scandinavian values have caused further controversy with the deletion of a Swedish video on breast cancer awareness. The video features cartoon breasts aimed at showing women how to check for lumps, which the American adolescent algorithm has evidently taken in quite a different spirit. The Swedish Cancer Society has registered pardonable bemusement; but Facebook, offended beyond all possibility of negotiation, seems to have locked itself in its bedroom with its headphones on.

Bone Density

Compassionate Conservatism being the whimsical little thingummy it is, no sooner had a handful of refugee children been allowed into the country than the scumbag press began squealing that they were too old. The compassionate chorus was elevated yet further by the moron, David Davies MP (not to be confused with the cretin, David Davis MP), who demanded dental checks and X-rays on all entrants claiming to be children, just in case one of them was trying to cheat the taxpayer of a few months before being legitimately kicked out at the age of eighteen. The Ministry for Wog Warehousing, which does not scruple at breaking up families or throwing minors into prison, has decided not to adopt this extra prophylactic measure, at least until those efficient G4S people can recruit a sufficiently ethical dentition inspectorate.

Something Nasty in the Air

Among the blessings of the London Haystack's mayoral régime was a persistently illegal standard of air quality; and our lords and masters have evidently decided that, as long as the plebs choose to sit around and poison themselves with unprofitable respiration, one more airport runway here or there will make little difference. Nobody wants any new airports outside the capital, because it would take too long to drive from the Northern Powerhouse to London; which narrows down the choice to a straight fight between expanding Heathrow or expanding Gatwick. It remains to be seen whether the Haystack's new blatherdom at the Ministry for Wogs and Colonies will be enough to prevent his opposing Mad Tessie's favoured option of Heathrow; it seems unlikely, since the interests of his constituents are all that is at stake. Less comfortingly, Zac Goldsmith is making noises about resigning his seat if the Heathrow expansion goes ahead. Assuming Goldsmith isn't performing the sort of flounce favoured by those lesser race-baiters at the Farage Falange, the Conservatives face a cruel dilemma: losing their most blandly affable Muslim-bashing mediocrity, or failing to inflict yet further environmental calamity on the city that elected Sadiq Khan.

These Things Go On Every Day

Bound for Glory, an American metal band for people whose legitimate concerns are particularly assertive, has apparently cancelled a planned appearance in Scotland. The reason given was "travel concerns", although it isn't yet clear whether this means that Scotland wouldn't let the virtuosi in or that America wouldn't let them out. Michael Matheson, who is what the fiend Sturgeon does for a justice secretary, indicated yesterday that he wanted to prevent the band visiting Scotland, where the assertive proclamation of legitimate concerns has not reached quite the exalted levels seen in post-referendum England. Matheson even contacted the Clegg-pledging race-baiter Amber Rudd, presumably in the hope that anti-migrant fervour would outweigh any concerns about doing an injustice to that most obtrusively oppressed minority, the loud white male. It remains as yet unclear whether Rudd was able to respond; most likely she told Matheson to look for a British band which could manage the job equally well.

An Amazing Book

Most Britons would not choose to take the Bible with them to a desert island, even as a reminder of the idiocy they had escaped; which of course disproves all those foolish, faith-based, evidence-free claims that we are becoming a secular country. A poll commissioned by the Church and Media Network has found that only thirty-one per cent of respondents would pick the Bible for one of their Desert Island Discs books; and even some of those would relish it less for its religious significance than for its literary qualities or its copious sex and violence. The chair of the Church and Media Network found it "encouraging" that the number of Britons who "still value the Bible as an important work" now constitutes a minority, and helpfully provided a breakdown of its contents and an advertisement for its life, love, hope, triumph, despair and lots of other things that can be found in the Bible as in the average soap opera. Doubtless it was only the zeal of his enthusiasm which caused him to omit any mention of the human sacrifices and genocidal glories in the Old Testament, or the demented Jew-baiting and eschatological rantings in the New.

Marquis

Henri Xhonneux 1989

Quite apart from the director's name beginning with X, the credits include the French writer and cartoonist Roland Topor, which is generally a good sign. Topor wrote the brilliant source novel for Roman Polanski's The Tenant, played the hysterically giggling Renfield in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu, and designed the extraordinary imagery for René Laloux's La Planète Sauvage. Here, Topor is credited as co-writer along with the director, and the project is about as normal, sane and healthy as one might expect.

Marquis depicts the run-up to the French Revolution from the viewpoint of an imprisoned writer, his jailers and various others. As in the more recent Quills, a hypocritical establishment condemns the author's work while hijacking it for profit; in Marquis the piracy is carried out under the pseudonymous acronym SADE.

Apart from a couple of claymation dream sequences, the film is performed by actors in animal masks. Characters include various bovines and ovines, a sexually degenerate chicken and a rodent turnkey (complete with long tail) with an obsessive longing for the Marquis to bugger him. The Marquis himself is a soft-spoken canine whose spaniel ears suggest a balding man's ruff; his prodigiously-sized penis has a face, a voice and a will of its own, and is appropriately named Colin ("little dog"). The Marquis' anarchic member gets him into all sorts of trouble, but also provides him with company, consolation and occasional literary advice.

The Marquis is in the dog-house for blasphemy, but the authorities plan to make him the goat for the ravishment of a fallen ovine named Justine, who has been left in an interesting condition by a beast of quality. Outside the Bastille, revolutionary conspirators hatch their own plots, led by the aristocratic wanton Juliette, who has the prison governor under her hoof.

Dedicated to de Sade and the Comte de Buffon, the story proceeds at a measured pace, its unhurried visuals as far as can be imagined from campy overdrive or cartoon frenzy. Like the work of Buñuel and Švankmajer, and like Topor's own unadorned prose style, Marquis is content to let its lunatic world and demented characters speak for themselves. As another humorous Beast might have said, make of it what you will.

Marital Discord

Those who still believe that the marriage laws are as eternal and immutable as the British Isles have received a bit of a kick in the groin from a heterosexual couple who have somehow inveigled themselves into a civil partnership. The recent granting of equal marriage rights for homosexuals in the UK, of course, has undermined the institution of matrimony by showing it up as slightly less eternal and immutable than the United Kingdom or the Anglican Communion, and thus helped usher in the forthcoming Apocalypse. Fortunately for the souls of some, the second-order nature of gay marriage is still apparent, both in the grubby compromises of the Established Church and in the purely homosexual nature of civil partnerships. In the UK these are denied to normal people, whose healthy natural instincts are assumed to lead them straight to the morally superior options of real marriage or cohabitation. However, the Isle of Man, which is one of the British Isles but not part of the United Kingdom (confused aliens may see this for clarification), has muddied the waters by allowing heterosexuals the option of entering civil partnerships, thus equating them with homosexuals; which has very little to do with equality as it is manifested in our eternal and immutable Britishness.

Facts - Who Needs Them?

It is, as we know, better for the whole nation to suffer than for a single immigrant to share our sufferings without due authorisation from the Home Office; so the revelation that the Home Office is revoking drivers' licences and denying people bank accounts, with or without cause, should disturb nobody. According to the chief inspector of borders and immigration, there is no hard evidence that these endeavours to create a hostile environment for the scourge of our shores are having any more effect than did Mad Tessie's famous racist vans; so it is fortunate that hard evidence is now a concern fit only for metropolitan élites and other citizens of nowhere. Whether police, landlords or building society employees, we are all migrant-hunters now, and the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK will not allow the legitimate concerns of the white working classes to be buried under mountains of vexatious legalism. "The measures discussed in the independent chief inspector’s report should not be seen in isolation," ordered a spokesbeing for the Ministry for Lock 'em Up and Kick 'em Out, "but as part of the wider action we are taking that has made it harder than ever before for illegal migrants to live in this country." In spite of such wider actions, of course, we are still being swamped; but any contradiction between the two positions will be apparent only in the minds of the aforementioned citizens of nowhere, who are doubtless next on the list for Government-sponsored hindrances to living.

Available Now

Valancourt Books, a US publishing house which specialises in reprints of underappreciated genre works, has published a book with an introductory essay by me, together with a handful of minor contributions by one Robert Aickman. The Late Breakfasters, Aickman's only published full-length novel, which has been virtually unobtainable for many years (except for a recent, disgracefully slovenly Faber Finds edition), appears alongside half a dozen stories, some of which receive their American début in this volume. Though not exactly a ghost story, The Late Breakfasters also manages to be not exactly a Bildungsroman, a love story, a satire on modernisation or a tragicomic society novel, and displays to the full Aickman's accustomed quirkiness of plot and elegance of style. The stories - four quite early, two very late - range from a nearly (but not very nearly) conventional tale of a séance and what it called forth, to an encounter with a Faustian artist, to a perversely erotic variation on the myth of Sweeney Todd which I believe constituted my own first experience of Aickman, via Kirby McCauley's great 1980 anthology Dark Forces.

I should get hold of this, if I were you. Readers in the US and Canada can order direct from the publisher; the book is available in Britain from Amazon UK.

Northern Exposure

Norway's government has been forced by humanitarian considerations to deny that it cruelly dismissed a desperate attempt by Liam Fox to justify his sense of self-importance. According to initial reports, the vole-brained former Minister for Werritty ordered the Norwegians to start setting up a task force and prepare the European Economic Area for penetration by the Great British Trade Todger; to which the Norwegians responded with a diplomatically-phrased request for Fox to go and boil his head. In fact, the Norwegian minister for European affairs has already made negative noises about letting Britain into the European Free Trade Association, on the grounds that a "big country" might shift the balance against Norway's interests. Fortunately, if Britain continues down its present path it may soon be rather smaller than it is now: geographically thanks to intransigence among the Celts, and numerically thanks to natural attrition among the proles.

Downing Street has also intervened, claiming that Fox has merely been having friendly conversations with Norway, without any attempt to do international trade deals just because he happens to be the nominal Secretary for International Trade. This sounds reasonable enough, on the very simple grounds that no international trade deals can be made while Britain is still in the EU. This also means, of course, that the vole-brained former Minister for Werritty has no actual role to play in government aside from boasting, blathering and jabbering, and occupying space which might more usefully and pleasingly be given to a potted plant; but the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK is not generally disposed to make judgements on the grounds of pleasure, practicality or other modes of mere sanity.

Coming Soon

Just a Bit of Harmless Record-Keeping

Thank goodness, it was all a misunderstanding. Of course the Government has no plans to name and shame companies for employing too many foreign workers, and the announcement of such plans at the Conservative Party's annual rah-rah has now been overruled by the Minister for Faith Schools, who apparently outranks the Home Secretary in this matter. The Government does intend gathering information from companies, but purely in order that local skill shortages can be addressed by central government, in keeping with Mad Tessie's idea of localism. The skill of being foreign, of course, is what enables your migrant horde to ingratiate itself with the metro-liberal citizens of nowhere who have brought British industry to its present lamentable state. The information will be kept by the Government and will remain entirely confidential except on those very rare occasions when somebody misunderstands the IT or dumps official papers in a public place. It is unclear whether the Britishness of employees will be among the information gathered; but since the blustering blimp at the Ministry for Wog-Bombing has been blathering that it won't, we may safely assume that it will.

Unconstructive Dialogue

You just can't have a squeal about being prevented from talking about migrants these days without somebody threatening legal action. Avocado-scoffing metroliberal citizens of nowhere are threatening to sue the Minister for Lock 'em Up and Kick 'em Out for failing to meet her purely legal obligations to let the country be flooded by mini-wogs. The recent Immigration Act stipulates that unaccompanied juvenile threats to our way of life could be resettled in the UK provided all their paperwork was in order in France, Italy or Greece prior to 20 March; and the Government pledged that it would make arrangements as soon as possible to relocate as few as it could get away with. Even this has proved too many for the race-baiting Clegg-pledger Amber Rudd, and too few for a charity named, in gratuitous defiance of all legitimate and reasonable concern, Help Refugees. Additionally, there are worries that the Calais concentration camp is soon to be demolished without proper wog disposal arrangements having been put in place beforehand; the last time that happened, a hundred and twenty-nine unauthorised juveniles disappeared. At present the camp contains an estimated four hundred of the same; so if the same thing takes place again the problem will be almost one-third solved.

Exporting Democracy

Further subtleties of the Government's grand economic plan have emerged with the announcement that the democratic rights of British migrants living abroad are to be prioritised over those of foreign workers living in Britain. Migrants who leave Britain to be a drain on rival economies will be rewarded with a vote for life so that they can participate in British democracy for more than the currently granted fifteen years. Expats, according to the minister for constitutional chaos, Chris Skidmark, "retain strong links with the United Kingdom: they may have family here, and indeed they may plan to return here in the future." These virtues are what distinguish expats from mere immigrants, who may retain strong links with the country of their birth, may have family there and indeed may plan to return there in the future even if not forcibly removed. According to Skidmark, expats will also have "an important role to play in helping Britain to expand international trade". What are a few thousand jobs with Nissan when you can sell authentic British marmalade to life-long British voters?

A Legitimate Role for the State

Those Conservatives of a modernising bent who fear for the continuity of our political administration will be reassured by the Government's latest demonstration of respect for local democracy. The Bullingdon Club's leftover token wog, Sajid Javid, has fended off his deportation for another few months by overruling Lancashire council to allow the fracking company Cuadrilla to start drilling under the hovels of the plebs. Shale gas causes economic growth and jobs and will make us less reliant on imports, unlike nasty old solar power which apparently has to be brought in from hot countries; and Javid evidently considers the people of Lancashire to be part of the privileged few, rather than part of the everybody in whose favour the present régime claims to be tilting the economy. For some reason, all this appears to have caused a degree of annoyance among the avocado-guzzling sandal-wearers infesting the Northern Powerhouse. Also relegated to the metropolitan élite are all the other signatories to the Paris climate agreement, which Her Majesty's Government is blithely tearing up along with the Human Rights Act, the rules on child protection and all those other scraps of paper.

When Did You Last Hear It Mentioned?

Some very nasty people have apparently been preventing Amber Rudd from talking about immigration. Amber Rudd has apparently been trying for ages and ages to have a conversation about immigration, but some very nasty people have drowned her out, or interrupted, or put her off her game by asking about her wholly legal and above-board doings in the Bahamas. In spite of the Farage Falange, in spite of the Daily Mail and the rest of the scumbag press, in spite of repeated foamings by Mad Tessie, Amber Rudd's predecessor in the Ministry for Lock 'em Up and Kick 'em Out, and in spite of the squeals of horror during the referendum campaign about Johnny Turk coming over here by the tens of millions and undermining our kebabs, poor Amber Rudd has not been allowed to have conversations about immigration.

In order to defend herself and her country against all the very nasty people who refuse to let her talk about immigration, Amber Rudd used the Conservative Party's annual rah-rah to announce a proposal to "name and shame" companies which employ too many foreigners. Various representatives of British industry have joined other Trotskyite infiltrators in denouncing that proposal as a very silly one indeed, and Amber Rudd has been forced to proclaim that turning the country into a birthplace-based autarky is not something she is definitely going to do. It would certainly be very nasty indeed of me to imply that Amber Rudd might be a race-baiting, rabble-rousing, witch-hunting, Clegg-pledging, bigot-pandering profiteer. She just needs a bit more space in which to talk about immigration.

Blathering for Britain

The David Davis publicist in charge of Brexit, David Davis, has been having a bit of a blather on the fringes of the Stupid Party's annual rah-rah. In the world of David Davis, thanks to a plunging pound and Mad Tessie's apparent intention of kicking off the negotiations with a two-year deadline and no cards in her hand, it's cheers and belches all the way. The David Davis idea of the future, if idea is the euphemism I am groping for, is a sort of basic metric whereby trade with Europe will remain free and unfettered, while trade with everywhere else will become even more free and unfettered than it is already. Self-evidently, with that rather imperial sort of basic metric the lesser breeds will be only too happy to give us all the free rides we demand, and if they fail to oblige us we've always got the independent nuclear deterrent to ensure an appropriately buccaneering degree of fair play. The eminent respecter of the intelligence of David Davis was naturally eager to establish who, in these free and unfettered relationships, would be wearing the trousers and wielding the mouth: "There’s a lot of dreaming going on by our competition who don’t really know the issues we’re talking about." No doubt Guy Verhofstadt is shaking in his little wooden clogs over that.

In between diplomatic coups, the noted David Davis enthusiast also found time to dispense the benefits of his financial acumen, proclaiming that London's future as a financial centre will remain secure because so many bankers speak English these days.

Dusky Dormice

As usual, despite our fast-approaching Independence Day from dangerous fripperies like human rights and First World living standards, Britain's identity is under threat from dusky-hued invaders. A black dormouse has been discovered in Somerset, having apparently decided that the name of the Blackdown Hills gave it some right of residence. It is as yet unclear whether the creature is some hideous mutation of the native dormouse, or an invader from Germany which doesn't know who won the war. Undoubtedly Britain's dormice are not what they were; populations have been in decline because of changes in the way farms and woodlands are managed, and because the Tory shires nowadays increasingly tend to produce the wrong kind of nuts.

Learning to be Civilised

Now that the War on Terror has been brought within measurable distance of its end, we may perhaps have time and opportunity to appreciate the cultural impact of the recent crusade for Western values. Certainly the transport minister of democratic, peaceful Iraq seems to have attained an eminently Whitehall degree of sanity on the subject of airports. Puncturing the common superstition that the first human being in space was a Russian, Kazem Finjan held forth upon the subject of space exploration by the Sumerians, their voyages to other planets and their construction of the world's first airport in the fiftieth century BCE. It speaks well of our civilising influence upon the region that a member of an officially freedomised national government can display a knowledge of history to rival that of Western luminaries such as Niall Ferguson, Michael Gove and Erich von Däniken.

Entrepreneurial Insufficiency

Despite the paradisiac future recently limned by the vole-brained former Minister for Werritty, some fat and lazy car manufacturers are already complaining about the hard work that will inevitably be associated with the joyous return of unshackled entrepreneurialism. Nissan and Toyota have expressed concern about the tariffs which the fiendish Euro-wogs are likely to impose once the UK has extricated itself, thanks to the perverse Euro-wog ideological dogma which specifies that anyone who has left a club should no longer be entitled to the privileges of that club. Nissan has even gone so far as to suggest that a newly-independent Britain might use some of the NHS's weekly £350 million to compensate those companies which are insufficiently resourceful to take advantage of their new and beautiful freedom. Meanwhile, the chief executive at Škoda is demanding, of all things, "concrete decisions that one can really adjust to." Clearly he has no idea what sort of people he's dealing with.