Citizens of Nowhere

Doubtless owing entirely to the notorious antisemitism of the Corbynite Labour party, the triumph of the Farage Falange last June has led to a massive increase in the number of Sephardic Jews who consider themselves more Jewish than British. The number of British Sephardim seeking Portuguese citizenship has gone up eighty-fold since the referendum: the Iberian countries have passed legislation to make amends for the expulsion of the Jews at the end of the fifteenth century, and Portugal takes a remarkably lax attitude when it comes to creating a hostile environment for non-native speakers. England, ahead of the game as usual, expelled its own Jews in the thirteenth century, once Edward I had taken all their money; they were allowed back in under the régime of Oliver Cromwell, and by the mid-twentieth century had bred so prodigiously that the Rothermere Daily Stürmer responded to Hitler's taking back control for the white working classes by squealing that Britain was Full Up and could take no refugees. It is to be regretted that, despite centuries of learning opportunity, Britain's oldest ally has apparently failed to assimilate our national values.

Crude and Blunt

Although it was not the Imperial Haystack himself but a spokesbeing for Tin-Pot Tessie who criticised John Kerry for criticising the Righteous State, one can hardly imagine Johnson making a better bungle of it. Crispin Blunt, the chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, whose smallest right toenail probably contains more good sense than Tin-Pot Tessie's entire cabinet of gibbering ideological flatworms, has expressed concern over the briefing, which is being interpreted as a rather pathetic attempt to crawl up the Donald and get Tin-Pot Tessie a bit higher on his list of people to phone. "I have absolutely no idea what was behind No 10 briefing in the way that they did," Blunt told the BBC.

Well, perhaps some clues might be given. There are a number of reliable indicators as to whether a particular government has a coherent and sensible foreign policy. A measured and calculated refusal to engage in petty tit-for-tat squabbles is one. Another is a basic level of plausible consistency between statements and actions; another is a willingness to engage with other states in a manner befitting one's own relative power in the world. A coherent and sensible foreign policy, in other words, requires that one should not be the kind of leader whose idea of a Foreign Secretary is Boris Johnson, and who is blithely incapable of counting to twenty-seven.

To Learn from the Bad and to Cherish the Good

Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear; which is doubtless why Her Majesty's Government is holding back files which detail Britain's entirely innocent involvement in the bloody storming of the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984, which led directly to the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the subsequent anti-Sikh pogroms in which thousands died and millions were displaced. According to the official story, Britain's involvement was limited to one single rather small military adviser whose previous owner only took him out on Sundays, and whose advice was in any case not followed. An inquiry ordered by the well-known devotee of truth and former Head Boy of the Bullingdon administration found no evidence of British involvement; but this is not good enough for the Sikh Foundation, which holds the bizarre belief that Her Majesty's Government ought to share potentially embarrassing information with the plebs (and darkie plebs, at that), much as fans of female ejaculation are now required to share their porn preferences with the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK. An appeal to the Freedom of Information tribunal is to be heard in the new year; the final result will presumably depend on which the Government decides to abolish first: the freedom of information laws or the right to wear a turban.

Frogs, Wogs and Underdogs

Once again, mere experts have intervened in a blatant attempt to bully Her Majesty's Government into acting within the law, even when protecting British jobs from child asylum seekers. Representatives of thirty-six children (twenty-eight refused, eight still getting the runaround) have issued a legal challenge to the race-baiting Clegg-pledger Amber Rudd, on the grounds that her office has reneged on its commitment under the Dubs amendment, failed to relocate the most vulnerable children, failed to supply proper written decisions with its refusals, and failed to use appropriate discretion in responding to extreme cases.

One such case is that of a fourteen-year-old Afghan whose father helped NATO troops and who was variously shot, buried, starved, sexually abused and tear-gassed before being physically chastised by a baton-wielding gendarme who broke the boy's wrist. The boy has attempted asymmetrical warfare while in Calais, attempting suicide four times; nevertheless, social workers and a psychiatrist have assessed him as suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress. Experts again, what? His legal team wrote twice to the Ministry for Wog Warehousing, which naturally did not deign to respond; and, as might be expected, a Home Office social worker found no evidence that he had any particular emotional or psychological needs commensurate with the interests of the white working class and those British children who have the foresight to avoid being born to foreign mothers.

The Home Office has responded to the legal action by blaming the French and proclaiming that it cannot waste its time paying attention to cases of children who need to take legal action in order to attract the attention of the Home Office.

Let's Monetise Those Muslims

Something called Toby, which was last seen explaining why the Government cannot afford to utilise the machinery of honourable wog-bombing for the purposes of mere humanitarianism, has been extruded once again to similarly edifying purpose. This time, the Government cannot afford to bring British women home if they escape from a forced marriage; although, courtesy of those efficient people at G4S and Serco, there are few limits to the taxpayer's largesse when sponsoring repatriation in the other direction. Of course the thing called Toby understands the difficulties involved in being a victim of forced marriage, but regrettably it lacks the appropriate resources to account for such difficulties on its little spreadsheets. Instead, victims are ordered to sign a loan agreement and surrender their passports, whereupon they are issued a bill on return to the UK and the Ministry of Wogs, Frogs and Huns retains the passport until the bill is paid. Naturally, this is all in the interests of protecting the victims, who cannot always ask their parents for help; and where family values fail, and females of the brown persuasion are involved, there is self-evidently no alternative but usury.

A Certain Culture

Seven persons of the brown persuasion have been found guilty of malicious drowning by officials of the Conservative district council responsible for Camber Sands. Although the council had decided, against the recommendation of some loony lefties at the RNLI, that lifeguards were a needless expense, the seven very selfishly took it upon themselves to drown during July and August, thereby unnecessarily calling into question Britain's hard-working culture of efficiency savings. Officials noted that the beach's attraction of "predominantly non-British visitors has been an increasing issue" and complained of "incidents of non-swimming persons of a certain culture that enter the water in great numbers with deadly results." Meanwhile, the free press did its part by falsely denouncing the men as unable to swim, unable to speak English and as illegal immigrants trying to swim into British jobs. The coroner is investigating what public safety measures might be adopted; since the local House of Commons expenses claimant happens to be the race-baiting Clegg-pledger Amber Rudd, we may safely trust that any rescue industry personnel who are employed will receive appropriate incentivisation to prioritise the deserving and the indigenous.

The Festival

The gibbous moon throws eldritch light
On human lice below,
To whom the truth would give such fright,
'Twere better not to know.

Down from the sky a colour falls
To turn the farmland sere,
Where rise Euclid-defying walls -
An elder god is here!

with apologies to H P Lovecraft

Taking Back Control One More Time For Yucks

Professor Douglas Carswell, who overruled Sir Isaac Newton on the workings of the tides and who serves as sole seat-warmer for the Farage Falange in the House of Expenses Claimants, has been cordially invited to serve as the strutting meta-ex-retired Caudillo's latest dead cat. Since the Trumpster has no immediate need of an elevator attendant, and since the strutting meta-ex-retired Caudillo has already sniffed out enough extremists for one week, it has evidently been decided that the next target of his telling it like it is should be the hapless Professor. It appears that Carswell should not be in the party at all; perhaps because Mad Tessie is just about mad enough to suit him, or perhaps because he believes that tides are caused by something other than the will of the Caudillo. "He’s got his own set of views on things but maybe party politics isn’t really for him," burbled Lord Bunk of Thanet about the only member of his rabble to win a parliamentary election for the Falange. Still, apart from occasional decrees as to who should be purged, the strutting meta-ex-retired Caudillo also promised not to be a back-seat driver for the Falange now that he himself has made it to the Land of Golden Lifts. A promise is a promise, and we all know how Nigel feels about saying the thing that is not.

Efficiency Savings

More than five thousand British jobs have been saved in the Mediterranean this year, out of a swarming horde of approximately 360,000. This compares favourably with last year's bag of 3,771 confirmed jobs saved out of a swarming horde of more than a million. The decrease in the number of cockroaches attacking our white working class is thought to derive from "actions" (tough and decisive ones, no doubt) by Turkey and Greece, and the closure of a corridor between Germany and Greece which was found to serve purposes that were merely humanitarian. The fact that British jobs are being saved at such a healthily increasing rate is thought to derive from efficiency savings by smugglers and the compassion of the Deity in stirring up the sea. It is also likely that conditions in Libya are incentivising a good deal of locational flexibility; but only an extremist or a leftist, Putinite Gaddafi-licker and crypto-Assad would dare to suggest that results from the recent wog-bombing of Libya should disincentivise the West from enlightened and liberalising wog-bombing elsewhere.

An Example to Us All

Citizens of somewhere other than nowhere will be reassured, if they know what's good for them, by the latest riveting developments in the ongoing saga of Britain's most hard-working family. The Queen Gawblesser, who recently responded to the award of a £2.8-million pay rise by deciding to do less work, had been importuned by a common cold and had therefore not taken the train to Sandringham, to the consternation of millions. Nevertheless, despite the state of her health, the Queen Gawblesser has been able to host a lunch for dozens of relatives at Buckingham Palace; the steadfastness of her fortitude will doubtless serve as a salutary example to the generations of proles being waited upon in their fur-lined food banks. With the foresight and prudence which characterises the deserving striver, the Queen Gawblesser has evidently made proper arrangements for her own medical care, rather than blocking beds on the NHS; so now the Queen Gawblesser has been flown to Sandringham, and the Christmas Day platitudes have been recorded in advance, and everything's all right.

The Witch: A New England Folktale

Robert Eggers 2015

In a seventeenth-century North American colony, an English immigrant and his family are expelled from the settlement because of his refusal to adhere to the local religious doctrine. Except for a couple of sojourns in the forest, the rest of the film takes place entirely on the family's dreary attempt at a farm, where God has evidently decided to punish the man's pride by playing some of His trademark practical jokes. They start relatively small, with the failure of the corn crop and the threat of mere starvation; they end, amid abject pleas for divine mercy and terrifying displays of pious wrath, in horror and death.

Despite the drab setting - overcast exteriors and dark interiors, using only natural light - the film is beautifully shot, making fine claustrophobic use of its limited setting and small population. Mark Korven's score maintains the atmosphere nicely, sounding at one point very much like the unearthly Ligeti choruses used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As with Kubrick's The Shining and many others among the better breed of horror films, the psychological and the supernatural elements are both clearly present; what is harder to distinguish is where each leaves off and the other begins. There is no way of telling whether the blood milked from the nanny-goat springs from natural or supernatural causes, just as there is no unambiguous sign as to whether the apple vomited up by one character in extremis is simply a lump of fruit or something more Adamic. Similarly, when the twins forget their prayers or when the mother is tempted by visions, no demons appear to provide a clue to the cause; the black hare in the woods and the charmingly-named black billy-goat on the farm never sprout CGI fangs or bat-wings to help the Hollywood-minded keep up.

Nevertheless, The Witch contains plenty of genuine scares, and some of the most effective result from the hoary device of a sudden grab or impact from off-screen. This could easily look cheap (as in most films it would be), but here it is a highly effective stylistic choice, emphasising the characters' fatally narrow perspective and obsessive persistence in seeking salvation in the wrong place. An even braver artistic choice was the use of antiquated dialogue; too much has been made of its supposed impenetrability and, as in Tony Richardson's Charge of the Light Brigade, it serves both as an aid to realism and an effective distancing device.

Unimpeachably acted, the characters are, almost without exception, a sorry lot. The father is a coward and a hypocrite, whose response when confronted with his shortcomings is to throw his accuser into prison; the mother yearns for the Saviour whom she once saw in a dream, but regards the taking of her offspring unto that Saviour's bosom largely as an excuse to hate her daughter. The elder brother is a pious pubescent brought low by his gonads, and the young twins are calculating little psychopaths whose main interest seems to be getting their elder sister burned at the stake. In the end only a single doubter is able to escape the horror and, with ambiguously supernatural help, to rise above the gruesome and treacherous pieties of family and faith.

Blue Sky Thinking

Mere scientists have suggested a technological remedy for the loss of Arctic sea ice, using wind power to pump water from below the surface. Such an enterprise would be on the scale of the Manhattan Project and might well entail the artificial creation of manufacturing jobs through big-government interference in the working of market forces, which might thereby become deflected from their inexorable benignity. Also, unlike the Manhattan Project, the potential of such an enterprise for killing large numbers of people in a rapid and convenient fashion would appear to be dubious at best. It's all very well to think big, but one must take into account what is humanly possible.

Clusterfallon

On slightly better evidence than the Reverend Blair used to drag us into his Iraq crusade, Her Majesty's Government has been accused of war crimes in Yemen. Unlike Saddam's weapons of mass ethereality, the British-made cluster bombs are equipped with actual existence, and their sale and use is unequivocally against the letter of a 2010 treaty to which the UK is a signatory. Although living up to our international obligations is frightfully old hat these days, there appears to be some vague concern at the Ministry for Wog-Bombing that our customers in the head-chopping House of Saud do not quite know their place.

The empty suit at the Treasury, who at the time was an empty suit at the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns, pledged last spring that the Saudis would be asked very nicely indeed to confirm that nothing untoward was going on; and since Her Majesty's Government demands nothing better of its ministers, its police forces or those efficient people at G4S, that should clearly have been the end of the matter. The Saudis claim that the cluster bombs are relics of the good old days when the British weapons industry was less impeded by red tape; but the blustering blimp at the Ministry for Wog-Bombing has apparently seen an official report indicating that the cluster bombs in question were in fact deployed during the present paroxysm of civilisational enhancement. Doubtless the blustering blimp is as deeply concerned as one would expect; unfortunately, he has had very little time to deal with the problem owing to his busy schedule of posturing the country into war with Russia.

Update Her Majesty's Government's head-chopping chums have now admitted using cluster bombs in the present war, but only for purposes of which Her Majesty's Government can in conscience approve, viz. the defence of civilised values against Iranian-backed terrorists and the minimisation of non-acceptable civilian casualties.

Foxed Again, Little People

Remoaners, Kremlin apologists and other agents of anti-Britishness have received a good telling-off from the Minister for International Cheese and Marmalade. Asked whether he was prepared to entertain the idea of remaining in the European customs union, the vole-brained Dr Fox replied, in effect, None of your business, plebs; which presumably means that Dr Fox has not yet undergone the series of surgical operations necessary to shoe-horn the customs union into his arvicolinoid understanding. On the process of triggering Article 50, Dr Fox proclaimed gnomically that "it's not a matter of legality, it's a matter of democracy" and then went on to complain about the Remoaners: "I ask myself what don't they understand about the words democracy, referendum or binary?" There are, it seems, a number of things which the vole-brained Dr Fox does not understand about the term democracy, as well as about a few others such as non-binding, change of circumstances, free trade, parliamentary sovereignty, national interest, pack of lies and one which he really ought to recognise from his stint as Minister for Werritty: unfit for public office.

Offending Management

Those efficient G4S people, who took over the running of HM Prison Birmingham five years ago, have got everything so shipshape that riots have broken out and personnel from the hated public sector have had to be called in to help restore order. In keeping with the prevailing religious doctrine, which specifies that all forms of employment for which the Government does not wish to pay are merely a matter of sitting around, being paid and waiting to collect the platinum-plated pension (see also teachers, nurses, junior doctors and train drivers), those efficient G4S people abolished ninety-eight staff posts at their new warehouse and cut the salary for new recruits. At the moment, they are advertising to fill twenty-five full-time prison officer roles for which no previous qualifications or experience are required, much like the role of Secretary of State for Justice. The present incumbent in that exalted office, whose illustrious predecessors include such worthies as the book-banning Chris Graybeing and the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, has followed her forebears' lead in ignoring repeated warnings about a gathering crisis, on the grounds that any crisis to which further privatisation is not the answer cannot really be a crisis at all. She has also promised a thorough investigation of this particular symptom, and the full force of the law for the malefactors responsible, because Westminster religious orthodoxy also dictates that the most effective treatment for lung cancer is to stifle the coughs.

Diplomatic Weight

Her Majesty's Government, whose concern for international law and humanitarian obligations blazes forth from Yemen to Calais to the British prison system, has summoned the Russian and Iranian ambassadors for a dressing down by the Imperial Haystack. Whether he carpeted them in limericks or iambic pentameter, both lackeys of foreign imperialism were no doubt thoroughly cowed by the diplomatic acuity of the man who insulted the Saudi head-choppers days before he was due for an official visit. Among other many un-American and un-Bahraini derelictions, Assad's backers have failed to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid; which is to say help in bombing civilians or presents for profiteering corporations, depending on whether one happens to agree with the Imperial Haystack or with Priti Patel. The Haystack expressed disturbance at reports which, since they support his case regardless of fripperies like truth or falsehood, cannot possibly be mistaken. The Haystack also declined to praise Iran and Russia for allowing some people to escape Aleppo, doubtless because one or two of them may now end up trying to come over here and steal NHS beds from the white working classes.

Why Stop Now?

Fears that the Middle East's ongoing democratisation through fragmentisation might be hindered by the whims of the tangerine-elect to the White House have been firmly laid to rest by the blustering blimp at Britain's Ministry for Wog-Bombing. Michael Fallon, the man who said that a Labour government under Edward Ralphovich Miliberia would hand over the country to Putin, has been having a bit of a gush over the prospect of continuing the crusade against the Fighting Islamic Sons of Tony. The threat from the Bush-Blair legacy is a global one, present not only in Iraq and Syria but in civilised countries too; though not, of course, in Russia, whose attempts to prevent the forces of enlightenment from turning Syria into another Libya are motivated solely by a ruthless and despicable expansionism. Nevertheless, the terrorists are losing territory and recruits, and we're bombing Mosul so heavily that we must be hitting a bad man here and there, besides helping the brave little Kurds for the most virtuous and democratic reasons. The last thirteen and a half years have gone so well; we must certainly hope that the Trumpster and our other American colonial subjects are sufficiently grown-up to recognise and defer to the blustering blimp's authority and avoid doing anything foolish.

Not On the Same Page

Two meddlesome women, one with a blatantly Romanian surname, are pestering MPs with, of all things, free books. The ladies seem to have got it into their heads that certain members of the British parliament have been fostering a hostile attitude towards refugees. This is, of course, as laughable a misconception as the idea that a David Davies or an Amber Rudd might be moved to think twice, or even once, if only they had something decent to read instead of the Rothermere Stürmer. Most parliamentarians, especially those who speak forthrightly of dentally-suspect swarms, are in fact acutely sensitive to the suffering of deserving refugees, such as Lord Ashcroft and Rupert Murdoch; it is only the undeserving who attract their entirely natural and melanin-indifferent ire. Cases of genuine need are always welcome to a place in our detention centres or a complimentary ticket back to the war zone; it is only the economic refugees (in Standard English, those who object to financial as opposed to political persecution) who must be disincentivised from sponging on Jeremy Hunt's business chums in the NHS. Why, the very idea that one shouldn't refer to an undeserving refugee in terms suggesting animals or insects is nearly as ridiculous as the idea that one ought to refer to a squealing little racist in terms suggesting a squealing little racist.

Too High a Price

Few sins are less forgivable than denying a British prime minister the chance for a bit of wog-bombing, and the late Head Boy has certainly never pardoned the Milibeing for requesting a bit of forethought three years ago. Thanks largely to his own laziness and complacency over whipping up his vote, the Head Boy lost his chance at inscribing his name in the rolls of history as the brave little piggie who turned Syria into another Libya, or even another Iraq. Since the brave little piggie has better things to do these days than play the bully in the Commons, his slimy little henchman has been wagging the finger instead. If you don't wog-bomb for yourself, others will wog-bomb for you, was the refrain; the unruly Arabs stood in need of Anglo-American leadership, but now the late Head Boy's seventy thousand jihadi for fair play and British values have been scoffed by the Russian bear, and the usual happy outcome of wog-bombing by the right sort of people has been sacrificed on the altar of appeasement. The price of intervention is well-known; the price of non-intervention is that the wogs get bombed anyway, but by people whose weapons hurt more because their use means that the children of British arms dealers go hungry to bed.

Still Not as Scary as Muslims

Emissions of methane have risen dramatically over the past ten years, though only according to mere experts who cannot even find anyone reasonably safe to blame. Indeed, one reason why the mere experts are not very well-informed is that monitoring of methane emissions is far less important than monitoring Muslim children and the porn-watching habits of the proles. As a greenhouse gas, methane is up to twenty times more ignorable than carbon dioxide, and emissions may be increasing as a result of agriculture, fossil fuel mining, or the destruction of the Arctic ice cap; none of which anyone has the least intention of stopping, or even of trying to control. Among other things, methane is a significant by-product of shale fracking, to which the Government has committed itself in preference to nasty, dirty, noisy sources of energy with the purely incidental advantage of potentially keeping life livable.

His Beams Upon His Children

Church-goers in southern Nigeria have received an object-lesson from their invisible friend; quite a mild one by His standards, since only about sixty of them were killed. The Reigners Bible Church International, which was still incomplete, was crowded with worshippers for the episcopisation of the founder, one Akan Weeks, who proclaims that God will make his followers rich. Fun-loving pixie that he is, God allowed the roof to collapse. Buildings fall apart rather often in Nigeria, thanks to entrepreneurial buccaneers ignoring red tape and leaving health and safety to the Almighty, who seems to have protected His chum Akan Weeks quite adequately. The casualty figures in this case do not quite rival those of the Synagogue Church of All Nations two years ago; a fact which will no doubt spark an enlightening theological debate about whether money-grubbing is holier than gay-bashing - a question of such profundity that the Anglican Communion itself has yet to resolve it to anyone's satisfaction.

Season of Goodwill

Transfers of unaccompanied Calais cockroach larvae have been stopped, apparently on the grounds that they had started, which would never do. According to the minister for wog disposal, Robert Winterval, more than seven hundred and fifty juvenile perils to our way of life have already been interrogated and placed with family members, or else are being used by local authorities as an excuse to avoid emptying the bins. Nevertheless, one charity estimates that a swarm several hundred strong still remains in France, equipped by enemies of the people with so-called legal rights including the right of pushing the UK past its breaking point. Once they reach the age of majority and the boys have started to get a bit beardy, of course, we can always kick them out again; but it remains unclear whether such safeguards will be enough to reassure the delicate snowflakes now claiming to represent the white working class.

Grunting and Squealing

Those of a humanitarian bent, if bent is the word I want, will rejoice in the news that Britain's erstwhile Head Boy seems to be doing fairly well for himself. The little purple piggie defended his calling down of the Brexit fiasco, on the grounds that the issue of Europe was "beginning to poison British politics", and since plugging such geysers of toxicity as the Daily Mail went against his religion, there was No Alternative. Also, the issue "was certainly poisoning politics in my own party", and the interests of the country as a whole were as nothing compared to the requirements of middle management and the need to make life for the Head Boy a bit more chillaxy. That certainly turned out well; and with all that's wrong in the world the erstwhile Head Boy found ample time for a bit of a snivel about what really matters, namely the EU referendum costing him his job. On the reality-based planet, the Head Boy was not ejected from his job as Prime Minister, but trotted away from it despite having stated during the campaign that he would not. He then stated that he would stay on in Parliament to serve his constituents, but in short order trotted away from that job too, apparently because the American lecture circuit is a more fiscally exalted arena for his talents. Accordingly, the little purple piggie felt moved to disgorge a few pearls about the rise of populism and what ought to be done about it. Apparently things are all kicking off because people are unhappy, in spite of the Osbornomic miracle, the bedroom tax, and the abandonment of any residual pretence that the world is being run for the benefit of anyone but faceless corporations and the squillionaire mafia. The erstwhile Head Boy's solution is to cut taxes for low-income workers, doubtless including those who are stuck in the pig economy of the American lecture circuit.

Tight Ships, Steady Hands

The dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK has been forced to slap down the Imperial Haystack, who had a bit of a blather about Saudi Arabia and how some Bad Things are going on because politicians twist and abuse thingummies to achieve their own whatsits, quite unlike such courageous and far-sighted statesmen as (to throw out a random example) Sir Winston Leonard Spencer de Pfeffel Johnson. Since flogging weapons to fundamentalist head-choppers in support of the continuing massacre in Yemen is one of Britain's few remaining industries, Tin-Pot Tessie quickly extruded a spokesbeing to proclaim that, however fatuous they may be, the blatherings of the Imperial Haystack are not absolutely in harmony with current levels of delusion in the Downing Street bunker. Tin-Pot Tessie has had a bit of a chat to the Saudi king, emphasising the need for the Saudis to investigate Saudi conduct of the war in order to avoid the UN poking its nose in; and doubtless the two of them discovered much ideological common ground on the question of the royal prerogative. The Imperial Haystack is supposed to visit Saudi Arabia at the weekend, although it remains as yet unclear whether he will be doing so in the capacity of a fact-proof journalist or a game-show host.

Settling for Second-Best

One of the Imperial Haystack's more notable achievements during his years of bumbling and blustering at City Hall was the killing of a few thousand expendables by persistently maintaining illegal levels of air pollution; and now that the Haystack has ascended unto the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns, he has naturally taken his environmental concerns with him. What's good enough for British proles is good enough for wogs (and, as the chinless dimness that is Jacob Rees-Mogg has observed, vice versa); so the Foreign Office has responded to the most urgent issue of our time by sacking great swathes of the staff who work on it. The excuse, as eructated by a spokesbeing extruded for the purpose, is the usual one: a "whole of government approach" in which ministers make up their own facts, so that we can benefit from the low-carbon transition to shale gas and blanched radioactive pachyderms, as the Government strives to remain more or less second-best in the world, or whatever, and to deliver an economy that works for all except the kind of people Jacob Rees-Mogg doesn't much care about.

Blobs and Gobs

Scourge of people who know things about things, former Minister for More Rah-Rah in Our Schools, and non-contributing signatory of the Authorised Version, the jabbering homunculus that is Michael Gove has now weighed in, with all his blowflyweight intellectual heft, over the Turner Prize. It is unclear whether the jabbering homunculus knows any more about modern art than he does about (to take a random example) teaching; but, as with teaching, what he does know he doesn't like. The jabbering homunculus dislikes the Turner Prize for celebrating the "tragic emptiness of now", a phrase of such vacuous journalistic pomposity that one might almost think Gove a mere Murdoch drone, if one did not know better. The jabbering homunculus finds modern art too ugly and nihilistic; which is understandable enough in someone who found the Blackadder representation of the First World War insufficiently clean and cheerful. Some political colleagues of the jabbering homunculus recently tried to remove art history from the A level curriculum, on the grounds that genuinely hard-working proles will have no time for such fripperies; but it would of course be absurd, as well as unkind, to suggest that Gove has been vengefully deployed as a squeaky pink rubber attack hamster.

Floating Voters

Despite being nothing much to worry about as far as the Bullingdon Club was concerned, last winter's floods were among the most severe on record in Britain; but fortunately only according to mere experts. A review compares the flooding to that of March 1947, which had a larger impact because the country was recovering from war and had only rudimentary flood defences: a situation to which the Conservatives and their UKIP backbone are stil gamely trying to return us. One of the mere experts noted that the effects of the flooding were personal, even though they happened mostly to the idle and over-privileged inhabitants of the Northern Powerhouse. Also on the bright side, the difficulty of attributing any single specific event to climate change, or even to the Conservative Party's vandalism of flood defences, means that Government policy can proceed smoothly along its prole-fracking, badger-busting, topsoil-trashing way, while the drivelling clod Andrea Leadsom (remember her?) flails around the DEFRA stationery cupboard trying to find out where they've hidden her wellies.

Sending the Proper Message

In an advanced industrial society with sophisticated communications and an awareness of the dangers of pollution, there should of course be no objection to the use of mobile telephones on the road. All that would be required is a properly run and funded national public transport system, which would radically reduce the number of drivers while enabling travellers to apply their minds freely to matters other than controlling potentially dangerous vehicles. Since the prevailing religious orthodoxy forbids any such blasphemous measure, the Government is considering simply imprisoning dangerous drivers for longer periods. As usual, the logic is that the stiffer the penalty, the greater the deterrent, because no miscreant ever commits an offence without first taking into account the likelihood of being caught. It remains as yet unclear what the Government plans to do about the dangerous drivers who have reversed the full weight of the Department of Heath and the DWP over so many unfortunate victims.

Strictly Advisory

Although it remains unclear on what terms the British Government wishes to leave the EU, or even whether it understands the various differences between the EU, the customs union, the single market, the European Court of Human Rights and the Third Reich, a foreign judge has very undemocratically weighed in to confuse the matter further. The president of the court for the European Free Trade Association has suggested that EFTA might be a nice, soft bit of cotton-wool for the UK's delicate little sovereignty; however, the organisation at the moment consists only of Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, which hardly seems worthy company for a nation that is even now laying down the law to Nissan, defying the Italian prosecco mafia and dictating terms to Canada about marmalade and cheese. Even worse, the decisions of the EFTA court are "strictly speaking advisory"; which, judging by the fallout from the late Head Boy's silly little party management stunt in June, would automatically require Her Majesty's Government to impose without delay the most extreme and deplorable consequences with regard to practically everything.

Partial Redemption

Sentimental optimists such as myself cannot help seeing the best amid the worst. Christianity inspired some fine paintings and spectacular architecture. King John was an efficient administrator, as indeed was Stalin. Hitler was a brave soldier. The Ku Klux Klan was founded on sincere and genuine grievances among the white working class. Pol Pot enforced the virtues of hard work, selflessness and healthy country living. Margaret Thatcher was less spineless than John Major, less stupid than Daveybloke Cameron and less maladroit than Mad Tessie May. Even Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have the redeeming feature of being mortal. And the year 2016 will at least have to its credit the resounding defeat of an entitled, dim-witted, toffee-nosed race-baiter, both in the London mayoral election and in his own vanity by-election. However unremittingly awful 2016 may have been, it was not the year of Zac Goldsmith, twice, and nothing can take that away from it.

Appropriate Utilisation of Literary Resources

Perhaps the most salient difference between the present generation of Conservatives and its predecessors is that those of the present generation are, by definition and before everything else, vulgarians. After five years of gleeful kicking by the sniggering schoolboys of the Bullingdon Club, the small-minded curtain-twitchers of the Tin-pot Tessie régime have thrown a pittance at what remains of the country's libraries, accompanied by orders for the sector to mend its ways. According to the relevant flunkey, libraries are hugely popular and among our most valuable community assets, and must therefore be altered out of all recognition, rather like the National Health Service. It is absurd to expect libraries to deal in books alone; books are, after all, merely what they are set up to provide. To gain the approval of the party of Disraeli, Churchill and Jeffrey Archer, libraries must, in addition, provide access to all the other public services for which the Government is not prepared to pay, and convert themselves into job centres, health clinics and, no doubt, places of surveillance and migrant control. After all: a quiet place to read, in which units of book trade merchandise are shared rather than sold? Where's the rah-rah in that?