If -

If you can note the chaps round whom to hover
And whom it is more circumspect to fear;
Whose arse to lick, whose face to trample over
In service of your brilliant career;
If you are sure who's serf and who is master
And that the useful one believes you're true;
If you can live through Triumph and Disaster,
Ensuring only one descends on you;

If you can draw aristocratic whinnies
That paralyse your chinless chums with mirth
By cracking jokes about some piccaninnies
Of lowly, Anglophobic Kenyan birth;
If you can make his place known to the native
And pen a Daily Toryguff epistle,
Fib folderol, tell ablative from dative
Or tell some beastly wogs to go and whistle;

If you can dream while others do the detail
And always sell yourself, no matter what,
Remembering that everything's for retail:
Your word, your friends, your honour, the job-lot;
If you can be all tactless and tendentious
And then complain that Nazis beat you up,
My son, you'll be a populist - contentious,
Ambitious, posh and silly, and a Pup.

Flipping Crudyard

Some Jews are Israel's Misfortune

British academia has been redeemed from the scourge of antisemitism thanks to the intervention of a plucky little ambassador from the Middle East's much-oppressed nuclear-armed apartheid Righteous State. In a calculated insult to the true meaning of the Holocaust, a Jewish Holocaust survivor was due to give a talk at Manchester University, comparing Israeli ethnic cleansing to Nazi security measures. A disaster of Corbynite proportions was averted only when the plucky little ambassador and his civil affairs attaché visited the university's superbly-titled Head of Student Experience and made him a clarification he couldn't refuse. Appropriate action was taken, and the absurd comparison of vicious racist oppression with virtuous racist oppression was duly removed; though undoubtedly further vigilance will be required to prevent other Jewish Holocaust survivors falling prey to the scourge of autobiographical misinterpretation.

Moral Agents

In the wake of an article about spies in the Economist, the head of MI6 has felt obliged to point out to the readers of that august journal that fiction is not true. Other revelations are that professional snoopers are less likely to be gun-toting alcoholic sex addicts than coldly manipulative, emotionally stunted bureaucrats, and that the "quiet integrity" of the latter is prized much more highly than the "brash antics" of the latter. Equally surprising, no doubt, will be the assertion that national intelligence agencies reflect the values of the countries they serve; or in Oldspeak, the governments which pay them. The Stasi, who did their own torturing, demonstrated what East Germany was all about; British intelligence, who prefer to sit around watching while the CIA does the dirty work, shows a good deal about modern Britain, although the head of MI6 is justifiably indignant at the idea of a moral equivalence.

Squealing Primates

Since Tumbledown Tessie has spent her entire prime-ministerial martyrdom being pulled between the Brexit baboons and the Euro-appeasers, she will no doubt find comfort in the fact that two of her life's great moral guides are warbling from exactly the same hymn-book. The Trumpster administration and the Church of England have both been moved to consider that burning ethical dilemma of our times, the question of what consenting adults do with their rude bits; and both are mired in owlish cogitation as to what sanctions should best be imposed upon those who fail to accord due attention to the ravings of various Iron Age hate preachers. The dead-eyed warden will no doubt be glad of this heavenly guidance for the future: although rational planning is economically heretical, politically North Korean and not at all how a lily or a sparrow would behave, she can hardly be unaware that it is always prudent to plan the next witch-hunt while the present one is still going on, and that if present trends continue Britain may soon run out of wogs.

The New Napoleon

With the party's annual rah-and-blah lurking just around the corner, it is only natural that the Conservatives should have better things to do than listen to the speeches of ghastly Euro-wogs; particularly when they have the bad manners to be French and slightly to the left of Marine Le Pen. Nevertheless, Emmanuel Macron decided to take the risk that David Davis would be too busy inflating himself, and delivered a speech in which he mentioned the possibility of Britain rejoining the EU, once the latter has been so far simplified that even David Davis can understand it. In Macron's view, as befits a centrist, this would mostly involve a more uncompromised focus on killing and profiteering: Macron wants an EU army underpinned by an "efficient market" and a "common strategic culture". Given that Her Majesty's Government cannot even evolve a strategic culture common to more than three members of the Cabinet, the appeal of this vision on the mainland may be a bit limited; particularly as it appears to imply that plucky little Britain might not be the only one protecting an ungrateful continent from the Russian Bear.

A Provisional Positional Proposal for the Clarification of the Revision of the Previous Clarification (Revised)

Contrary to the propaganda put about by various traitors, enemies of the people and citizens of nowhere, it is quite untrue that EU citizens living in the UK are being used as pawns in a political game between the Recrudescent Imperium and the ghastly Euro-wogs. In fact, those EU citizens who have somehow managed to insinuate their evil foreign selves into our island story are being used as pawns in a political game between two rival factions of the Conservative Party. One of these factions is the Farage Falange gang, who have been in the ascendancy since the referendum but have been looking ever more uncomfortable as reality repeatedly sinks its teeth into their ample buttocks. The other faction consists of the so-called pragmatists: those who are prepared to put aside their party's natural racist and witch-hunting instincts in the event of a possible danger to profits. The blithering prima donna David Davis, who once precipitated a vanity by-election about something or other, has followed the Liberal Democrat example and evolved sufficient pragmatism to side with the extremists whenever a red box is at stake.

Such is the situation behind the present confusion at the Ministry for Wog Control, which now proclaims, with a Child-Catcher grin of reassurance splattered charmingly across its face, that resident Euro-wogs will not require fingerprinting or ID cards. Nevertheless, it remains a possibility that those suspected of EU loyalties may or may not be required to trust in the tender efficiencies of a Whitehall database system, in order to prove their innocence of having arrived on the mainland after independence. New incursions will, of course, be fingerprinted, interrogated, monitored and documented to within an inch of their greasy little lives, until the blessed day dawns when they can be deported from the mouth of a cannon mounted atop the Caucasian cliffs of Dover. In spite of the grown-up magnanimity oozing from these proposals, gratitude levels among the Euro-wogs remain as yet undetermined.

Me at Poetry24:
Forgotten Heroes

Thoughts They Cannot Defend

Now that Tin-Pot Tessie and her very special schoolboys have found the magic money tree and ordered the Euro-wogs to be a bit more creative, one might think that the Recrudescent Imperium would at last be receiving its proper ration of rah-rah; but alas, not a bit of it. The treacherous Corbynite citizens of nowhere at Moody's have downgraded the nation's credit rating from the level achieved under the Osbornomic miracle; which was itself a downgrade from the top rating that, thanks to the ever-responsible connivance of Vince Cable, turned out not to matter very much anyway. However, those were the days of the Osbornomic miracle, when the economy was going from strength to strength, whereas these are the days of Brexit when, by contrast, the economy is going from strength to strength; which clearly makes all the difference. The Treasury has reprimanded Moody's for being out of date, and it is to be hoped that other credit agencies will take note and catch up with Britain's trend-setting opinions on such matters as Free Trade, Bimetallism and the Irish Question.

Holy Water

As often happens in the wake of natural or unnatural disaster, the recent meteorological doings in God's own country have brought forth appropriate theological profundities. A congressman by name of Jeb Hensarling, representing the Christian state of Texas, has proclaimed that floods are the Deity's way of informing Americans that their personal real estate is no longer a marketable proposition. Since the Deity is, miraculously enough, a Republican in the image of Jeb Hensarling, the inevitable moral corollaries clearly follow. First, recipients of federal aid tend to be millionaire beach bums having their home extensions subsidised by hard-working families in Kansas, no matter what mere facts may have to say about the matter; and second, federal insurance programmes should therefore be privatised, presumably in order to prevent those same millionaires buying them up for their own nefarious ends. Noah managed without federal aid; should not therefore the sons of Ham do likewise?

Our Brave Boys on the Fiscal Front

It may seem beyond reasonable doubt that anyone could do the Home Office's job better than the Home Office; but the matter is a little trickier than that. "We are developing an immigration system which is fair to people who are here legally, but firm with those who break the rules," said a spokesbeing for the race-baiting Clegg-pledger who is under suspicion for illegal deportations and contempt of court. When it comes to unauthorised wogs, of course, the Conservative ideal for HM Prison UK is essentially a lynch mob consisting of sixty million unpaid G4S interns; and, as we have known for at least nine years, anything that's worth doing is best done by bankers. Hence, the next stage in the war on citizens of nowhere is obvious: having recruited landlords, police personnel and primary school teachers as border guards, the Government must welcome Britain's financial soldiers into the fray. Already, in as many as ninety per cent of frozen accounts and asset seizures the new recruits are making almost no mistakes at all; and suspects who complain of unfair treatment are simply referred to the Home Office, where their ability to keep calm and carry on will receive its most rigorous test.

No Trouble At All

Northern Ireland, it's been said, has a problem for every solution; and even in the case of Brexit, the universal panacea, it appears there may be one or two small complications in the works. Although the blithering prima donna David Davis has unilaterally undeclared the Republic of Ireland, and Tin-Pot Tessie and the DUP have abrogated the Good Friday agreements to make room for their magic money tree, there remains the small matter of dealing with an estimated hundred million or so border crossings per year once the Recrudescent Imperium has formalised its independence from the ghastly Euro-wogs and taken back control. It appears also that many in the province have divided loyalties, and persist in having relations across the border despite the undisputed advantages of Britishness. Doubtless the blithering prima donna has in mind some simple yet effective libertarian measure, such as tagging everyone in the Free State and deterring unauthorised migration with missile-launching drones and Trident. Then again, the research has after all been carried out by mere experts, some of whom are further biased by not being British themselves; so perhaps Her Majesty's Government will simply stick to its usual policy of hoping it all turns out rah-rah in the end, and blaming the ghastly Euro-wogs when it doesn't.

For Gallantry in the Face of Joysticks and Moral Qualms

Standard policy when it's all kicking off in the Cabinet is to dispatch the likes of Gove or Fallon to sneak a few headlines by saying something fatuous. Doubtless because the jabbering homunculus has gone all rah-rah for the Imperial Haystack once again, the post of honour this time has fallen to the blathering blimp at the Ministry for Wog-Bombing, who wants to grant the mental health of button-pushers parity of esteem with the physical risks taken by soldiers. Although American drone strikes in Iraq and Syria have killed at least four hundred and eighty-four civilians, the RAF heroically admits to bagging none but the guilty; nevertheless, the work can take a certain toll on the moral fibre, and the blustering blimp thinks a gong or two for the bravest would be just the thing. It is unclear how courage is to be measured in the absence of physical danger; but presumably the medals would be bestowed, in accordance with modern Conservative principles, upon anyone gallant enough to pay for them. It is certainly jolly decent of the blustering blimp to mouth such concern for the mental health of those who protect his government against the political perils of sending troops abroad and the tedious drudgery of negotiating with uppity foreigners; especially given his government's insouciant unconcern with the mental health of those lacking the entrepreneurial pluck and gumption to be killers for hire. Whether the idea will go any further than a quick snigger at the Party's post-Cenotaph belch-along remains to be seen.

Works Without Faith

Other than the Bullingdons playing at grown-ups or the Blairites faking a conscience, there can be few things less convincing than an outburst of humanitarian indignation from the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK. Nevertheless, it appears that Tin-Pot Tessie is suddenly much exercised by the stain of modern slavery, and her sermon on the matter has prompted a ludicrous paean from the Independent, where her sincerity is taken for granted thanks apparently to her long record of compassion for the vulnerable and her frequent homilies about unpaid work being the best route out of poverty. Like the Reverend Tony at his most unctuously disingenuous, Tin-Pot Tessie credits her mean little god as a prime motivator of her tireless quest for social justice: from her arming of the head-chopping House of Saud and her favouring of the G4S choirboys, right up to her zealous continuation of the Bullingdon Club's crusade for race-baiting, poor-bashing and cripple-kicking. As might be expected given that her government apparently sees the Grenfell Tower disaster as little more than an pretext for hustling a few more prospective deportees onto the database, the dead-eyed warden once more orders the public to look around for reasons to denounce their neighbours: a regrettable necessity given that someone or other has rather carelessly cut the police to bits; and, speaking no doubt as a non-Muslim, she urges particular vigilance towards people who "always cover their faces."

Tony's Healing Touch

Thanks to the imposition of enlightened Western values by the Reverend Blair and his chimpanzee chum, the emergent democracy of Iraq has been dealing with its terrorist problem with a degree of moral assertiveness of which even the British Home Office can only dream. At least eighty-eight people were hanged last year, and at least one sixteen-year-old is at risk of being strung up unless a way can be found to deport her back to her native Germany. Although this is obviously less civilised than the American way of dropping suspects into black holes like Guantánamo, let alone the British way of trial by tabloid followed by reformation at the hands of those well-meaning G4S people, it certainly cannot be said that nothing was achieved by the Reverend Blair's great crusade for civilisation.

Retreat from Kabul

Another enemy of the people has crawled from the wormy woodwork of British justice to interfere with the cleansing of Britain's streets and the relieving of the national constipation. As is well known, because the likes of the Farage Falange have said it so often, the UK is full up and cannot afford to support asylum seekers who come over here to take advantage of the free hospitality offered by those charming G4S people. Britain especially cannot afford asylum seekers who have the temerity to act as carers for British "citizens", thereby contributing to the present glut of social care workers and putting professionals out of a job. Accordingly, the race-baiting Clegg-pledger at the Ministry for Wog Control has been shaking the magic money tree to battle metropolitan élitists for her right under natural justice to deport an Afghan asylum seeker. The criminal had ludicrously claimed that his life would be in danger from the Taliban, who have been such fluffy bunnies recently that the Government wants to send more troops to fight them. But of course, as everyone knows, the Taliban are dangerous only to real people; where asylum seekers are concerned they magically metamorphose into the sort of decent, moderate Muslims who showed such pluck and gumption against the USSR's proto-Corbynite invasion. Nevertheless, no sooner had the asylum seeker been deposited back home than the Clegg-pledging race-baiter was ordered to uproot him from his natural habitat and return him to the heaving, straining bowels of the Recrudescent Imperium. The extent of likely damage to the white working class has yet to be properly assessed.

Much to Learn

In the wake of North Korea's latest provocation, which comprised lobbing a ballistic missile over Hokkaido and annoying some fish, the Heathen Chinee have responded with typical sinister subtlety. Although North Korea has accused the US and the South of plotting to invade, and regularly threatens to rain fire and fury upon the World Cop and its Asian allies presumably up to and including Jehovah, the Heathen Chinee are suggesting, of all things, that Washington might consider toning down the rhetoric. Given that America and its allies have only invaded North Korea once, and killed off a purely expendable fifth of the population for the benefit of some expatriate thugs and pro-Japanese quislings, this is of course outrageous. A spokeswoman for the Heathen Chinee Department for Foreign Devils has even implied that the ones who should take responsibility for sorting things out are those who messed them up in the first place; which clearly runs counter to any conceivable notion of civilised values, common decency and unperverted banking.

The Deserving Few

Celestial day of high and mighty glory
Within our patriotic island story:
The kicking of some nasty Nazi bums
By WInston Churchill and his Air Force chums,
When Britain stood alone against the foe
(Just Lend and Lease to keep her on the go),
In conflict with a dire oppressor hurled
While ruling over merely half the world.

Recall, this day, that happy time when we
From foreign-born intruders fought us free,
Letting no European empire vex
Our land with Germans, Frenchies, Poles or Czechs;
And condescend commemorative due.
Praise and remember the deserving Few.

Victor Flyte

Strung Along

In the unopposed appointment of its ninth member, the Commons Science and Technology Committee has made an encouraging concession to the demands of diversity: although Graham Stringer is the eighth male and the eighth white person out of the nine, he is impressively qualified to balance out any small bias the committee may have in favour of actual science. Not only does the erudite Stringer believe that dyslexia doesn't exist; he is also a climate change denier and a member of Nigel Lawson's disinformation club, the Globular Whining Plutocrats Foundation. In the spirit of the BBC balancing mainstream neoliberals with ranters from the Farage Falange, or the Government setting the terms of inquiries into its own mendacity and negligence, Stringer's appointment will indubitably ensure that all acceptable points of view are taken into proper account.

A Nice Fat Scoop

The ever-glistening editor of the London Evening Osborne has continued his long career of public service by personally undertaking field research into Press ethics. The sometime restaurant-smasher, poor-basher and cripple-kicker was discovered unobtrusively basking in the fragrance exuded by such party colleagues and journalistic eminences as the Imperial Haystack, the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove and the Murdoch drone in charge of NHS demolition. Engineers from Thames Water are now doing their best to extricate the former chancellor from the consequences of his economic miracle, which numbered among its many blessings a near-total lack of interest in shoring up the country's infrastructure. Although the editor of the London Evening Osborne, being a congealed 130-tonne block of wet-wipes, nappies, fat and oil, fit in quite naturally with his new surroundings, the Museum of London has expressed an interest in putting "perhaps a chin or two" on display as a warning to future generations, provided that the sample can be pickled sufficiently well to disguise its objectionable odour while preserving its uniquely sebaceous texture. The lead curator of the museum expressed the hope that today's problems might be solved and forgotten in as little as fifty years, although even the most extreme predictions of rising sea levels have not been so optimistic as to claim that they will wash away the editor of the London Evening Osborne.

Nice Pax Britannica, Shame if it Got Broken

Plucky little Britain has once more defied the uppity Euro-wogs by ignoring all the silly, obscurantist talk about paying our dues and citizens' rights, and focusing with rectal-tunnel vision on the Government's eminently sensible threat to withdraw the mainland from collective security arrangements and leave the continent at the mercy of the Russian Bear. Since all the Euro-wogs seem to want to talk about is mere money and the rights of mere migrants, the blithering prima donna David Davis and his chums have pointed out the eminently relevant fact that Britain has lots and lots of weapons, and that Britain and France are the only European countries important enough to be emulated by North Korea; except of course that, as was most recently made clear by the film Dunkirk, France doesn't really count. The Imperial Haystack and the blathering blimp at the Ministry for Wog-Bombing both joined in the chorus of undiminished unwaveringness and unwavering undiminishability; but it remains as yet unclear whether the Euro-wogs will be manly enough to take the hint.

The Usual Remedy

Although tuberculosis has a role
In keeping down the breeding British prole,
It does evince some little social harm
When loosed upon the British dairy farm.
A health emergency, no less! and hence
Too serious a thing for evidence.
Instead, we'll kill and cure by our tradition
Of good old-fashioned Huntin', Shootin', Fishin' -
Join up, all you chaps brave and British-bred:
Bag that non-profit-making quadruped!

Tweedie Lackchin

Freedom Trumps Climate

Always an astute psychological commentator, the ferret Quiller noted on several occasions that carrying a gun is dangerous mainly for the carrier because the resulting sense of power tends to reduce said carrier's inclination to think. Hurricane Irma has provided the NRA Nation with a superb opportunity for a clinical demonstration of this axiom, and the Sunshine State has come through superbly. Like many modern symptoms, it started as a joke by someone still young enough to believe that most of his fellow Americans know what irony is, who set up a fake event to "show Irma that we shoot first". Perhaps because he omitted the appropriate emoji, twenty-five thousand people signed up to join in and show the illegally migrating meteorological phenomenon the precise moral meaning of the Second Amendment; and at least one county sheriff has been moved to inform citizens that shooting small bits of metal at a Category 5 tropical cyclone "won't turn it around". The constitutional consequences of this creeping, communistic attempt at gun control have yet to become clear, but will no doubt be devastating.

Just a Bit of Wind

Is there no decency or pity in the world? Have trendy lefties like Lord Naseby no sense of basic humanity? Has Tin-Pot Tessie not called a Cobra meeting and made rah-rah noises about the military? Do people not realise that Priti Patel's Department for International Development is a profit-making enterprise, not a charity for exploitation by shirkers who can't even bestir themselves to get out of the way of their own hurricanes and into their holiday homes or wine cellars? Lord Naseby went so far as to refer to Caribbean natives as British citizens, implying some sort of moral equivalence with tourists in their climate-stabilising airliners. Britain is even now sullied by migrants with the merely legal right to call themselves British citizens, but has Lord Naseby thought what disasters might ensue if the Government were to treat them as though they were members of the human race? Other critics of the Government have even spoken the blasphemous words forward planning, as if ministers from the parliamentary wing of the Farage Falange were somehow to blame for not anticipating consequences which were widely and reliably predicted and against which numerous lesser breeds somehow managed to guard themselves. Surely this persecution must end. Is it not enough that the Government should be put to the trouble of making up facts on which to base its policies, without also having to adjust its delicate senses to the cumbersome vulgarities of the merely real?

Totalitarian Sport

Among traditional methods of keeping the rabble in line, one of the more profitable is the truck system, whereby workers are paid not in money which might be mis-spent on trivial or vicious lower-class pastimes, but in tokens which can only be redeemed at shops owned by the employer. A school near Sunderland has implemented a variant of this system, refusing to let pupils through the gates unless they are dressed in uniform bought from a particular local firm, in which it is as yet unclear how many of the school's governors, owners or shareholders have some coincidental financial interest. Parents said that their children were lined up in the rain while the head teacher checked the shade of their trousers against a colour swatch; the head teacher defended the action by pointing out the dangers of a slippery slope into who knows what bestial state of sartorial chaos. It is to be hoped that the school remembers to order all pupils' laundry done in the same place and with precisely calibrated degrees of frequency, temperature and branding, in case unequal fading over the course of term should bring on academic apocalypse.

Her Proper Place

Now that the Conservative Party has gone full Farage Falange, it seems unlikely that there will be much room for women in public life beyond their natural duties of cleaning behind fridges and squeezing out small Rees-Moggs. Accordingly, the Government has rejected all six of the proposals by the Commons women and equalities committee, on the grounds that more equal representation would be too much trouble. The chair of the committee was Maria Miller, last seen in office as the expenses claimant for which the Bullingdon Club reached whenever it heard the word culture; the token filly's new status as a trendy-lefty feminazi says much about our progress away from the bad old days of metropolitan élites. The Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands is, of course, a world leader on women's representation as in everything else, with no more than thirty-nine other countries ahead of it; most of which are probably foreign and therefore don't count. Besides, we haven't got rid of all that red tape just so we can tangle ourselves up in fallopian tubes.

He Was One of the Good Guys All Along

Once more, the crying shame of the late coalition has been exposed: namely, that sensible, principled Liberal Democrats like the former Minister for Mates' Rates were never permitted to hold ministerial office. While haplessly ensconced in the non-Cabinet role of business secretary, the present leader-by-default of the Deputy Conservatives allegedly witnessed Tin-Pot Tessie suppressing up to nine different studies which found that immigration does not have a negative impact on jobs or wages. Instead, underemployment and wage suppression were shown to result from other factors, such as the economic policies concocted by the Conservatives and their little orange helpers; but of course the former Minister for Mates' Rates was entirely shut out of all policy decisions, given his purely decorative and ceremonial function as business secretary. It is certainly to be regretted that, for all the nobility of Nick Clegg and the gravitas of Danny Alexander, the coalition was so lacking in those far-seeing, statesmanlike qualities for which Vince Cable was knighted by the Bullingdon Club.

God Wants You for a Gluteal Positioning System

It appears that the great American marriage of Jesus with Mammon may be theosophically closer to the church mice of the Anglican Communion than either would care to admit. The $Reverend Joel Osteen, a millionaire Texas saviour-salesman, was criticised for closing the doors of his sixteen-thousand-soul mug market over the weekend Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston: an act of charity which was, morally speaking, not a million miles from the authorities at St Paul's Cathedral calling in the City of London goon squad to hose the poor off their doorstep some years ago. Now that the emergency is over and normal cash-flow has been resumed, the $Reverend Osteen has been lecturing his disciples on the proper reaction. In the first place, obviously, one must refrain from being miserable at one's lot, "because that’s just going to bring you down". There's nothing like feeling low to bring a person down: an inspired spiritual profundification that no Anglican cleric could dispute. The $Reverend also denounced those who wonder why things happen; it is just possible that the Church of England, which likes a bit of hand-wringing now and then, might differ with him on that point. "You've just got to turn it over and say 'God, you're still on the throne'," the $Reverend concluded mystically. Presumably few Anglicans would disagree about where God sits, but it's a rather subtle question whether He requires an arse to inform Him.

Pleading Insanity

During the initial effulgence of the Osbornomic miracle, with the happy connivance of the Liberal Democrats and of a Home Secretary whose name escapes me for the moment, the Conservatives cleared away simply oodles of red tape and sacked simply oodles of unnecessary proles. Among these expendables were a good many police officers and back-room staff, yet there still remain a few delicate snowflakes who seem to think that being worked into a nervous breakdown is somehow bad for morale. Mental illness, always good for a snigger among the gleeful cripple-kickers of the Bullingdon Club, has become a matter of concern for the Police Superintendents Association of England and Wales. Such lily-livered liberalism is hardly what England and Wales have a right to expect from what the late Head Boy once memorably characterised as A Force And Not A Service; and Nick Hurd, the Minister for Meritocratically Being the Son of a Former Minister, will be blithering into the breach to set the matter straight. His response is expected to be nothing less than the standard blah-and-rah about how much money the Government has been spending on this very issue, and how everyone just needs to buck up, pull themselves together, count their blessings and get on with hunting down the enemies of the people. It will certainly be a great comfort to the police superintendents of England and Wales to know that the Government has much the same degree of respect for them as it has for prison officers, NHS staff and teachers.

The Supremely-Tonsured Saviour of the English-Speaking Peoples

Some benefactor of the human species has evidently gone to work with a mallet, a crowbar and a good quality drill-bit, and has managed to force into the Johnson cranium an inkling that World War III, or even a bit of genocidal rah-rah around the Korean peninsula, might not be altogether a good thing for the career of Boris Johnson. Contrary to the usual doctrine at Westminster, whereby war is not just the easiest option but the only option that is morally sound and physically tolerable, Tin-Pot Tessie's joke Foreign Secretary has proclaimed that "there is no easy military solution" to North Korea's latest precautionary measures against the fire and fury of the Trumpster. Nevertheless, "all options are on the table", so presumably the Imperial Haystack allows that the Trumpster can still push the button after his state visit, provided the Queen says it's all right.

Aside from trivial considerations such as the lives of a few squillion palpebronasalic ænigmata, and even significant considerations such as the personal convenience of the Imperial Haystack, there are one or two valid reasons for not blowing everything up quite yet. Britain's own nuclear deterrent, assuming the boffins have worked out how to point it in the right direction, will of course be required for punching above our weight with the Euro-wogs should Brussels remain intransigent about doing what it's told. Troops will be needed to keep order on the streets when the shortages begin and the Treasury runs out of cash to pay those nice G4S people. Perhaps most importantly of all, when parliamentary sovereignty has been restored through the Great Enabling Bill which will free ministers from the un-British red tape of parliamentary scrutiny, it is not inconceivable that an aspiring heir to the Conservative Party might wish to keep Kim Jong-Un and his chums around as a guide to strong and stable government in a time of national self-reliance.

What Can Their Problem Be?

Despite the Christian charity of the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK, who posed for photographs with only a few security personnel to protect her from the angry cockroaches; despite the dead-eyed warden's altruistic obsession with lowering immigration even when the economy suffers from it; despite years of improving rhetoric about hostile environments for job-stealing health tourists; despite Whitehall's obsessive press-ganging of landlords, teachers, police and charity workers as snitches for the Home Office; despite that monumental orgasm of British tolerance and fair play which was the Go Home Vans affair; and even despite the continued involvement of those charming G4S people as boot-boys in the wog warehouses - despite all this, the survivors of the Grenfell Tower disaster are showing a strange reluctance to avail themselves of the Government's offer not to kick them out for a while if they'll just hop onto a database or several. Doubtless this boorish attitude is the result of some non-British cultural flaw; or perhaps, as so often happens, an overdose of welfare-induced luxury has eroded their moral perspective. It is certainly a bit of a conundrum.

Profit With Pleasure

It appears that the financial acumen of the race-baiting Clegg-pledger at the Home Office is not confined to her little number in the Bahamas. The Ministry of Hostile Environments is not only charging £5.48 for entering into email correspondence with visa-seeking cockroaches; it is also imposing fees up to eight times the cost of processing immigration applications, and in a rare access of efficiency is concealing information from applicants so that they will spend yet more money to apply again. This delightful little dodge was announced six years ago under the coalition, as a means of compensating for budgetary cuts imposed under the coalition, all complacently nodded through by the Liberal Democrats; but the Clegg-pledging race-baiter has presided over an efficientisation of as much as twenty-three per cent in some cases. A spokesbeing for the Ministry exulted that the arrangement was only right, as anything must be if there's money in it; and proclaimed that those who have the temerity to try coming here and paying taxes should be made to pay for their heinous hindrance to the Recrudescent Imperium's global competitiveness.