Independent Financial Advice

So fair are the forecasts and so profitable the prospects for the newly-liberated Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands that at least one representative of the Farage Falange's parliamentary wing has advised his chums in the financial sector to clear out good and fast. Elderly readers of my own generation will remember John Redwood as the doll-eyed woodentop who extolled the virtues of water privatisation by conjuring up visions of consumer-choice baths with ten or twenty taps, each run by a different company. As the very considerable Secretary of State for the Province of Wales, by appointment to the equally human John Major, Redwood's most famous achievement was failing to learn the national anthem and giving a piscine performance in which his boiled-fish eyeballs were complemented by his goldfish mouth. These days Redwood supplements his expenses claims with a six-figure salary as a "chief global strategist" for the well-padded middlemen at the Charles Stanley Group; and although like most dead-eyed woodentops he regards realistic and optimistic as synonymous for the purpose of tweeting to the proles, it appears that his fiscal self-interest has finally outshouted his political allegiances. Fortunately his political allies are unlikely to notice, as most of them are quite as brilliant as Redwood himself.