We're Going to Need a Bigger Bunker

Well, that didn't take long, did it? A mere eighteen months after the referendum which will deprive them of their seats, and a scant year from the Article 50 exit date and subsequent tender mercies of the Department of Workfare and Privation, a brace of Conservative MEPs have decided to put in a quick bit of neck-saving networking before the catastrophe, and have defected back to the mainstream right-wing bloc in the European Parliament. The British Conservative Party used to be part of this group, but one of the earliest and silliest manoeuvres by the late Head Boy was to pull them out in order to shack up with a bunch of con-men, chancers, neo-Nazis and climate-change deniers, on the grounds that the likes of Angela Merkel were too left-wing and cosmopolitan to aid his appeasement of the Farage Falange. Now that the Head Boy has retired to spend more time at the home trough, and the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange has been promoted to Donald Trump's lift-boy, it seems this is the moment for certain Conservatives to realise suddenly that their constituents would be better served from elsewhere.

Their Tragedy Past, it's Our Farce Now

Among civilised nations it is of course axiomatic that the terrorists can never be allowed to win; and the Imperial Haystack has once more intervened with mouth and both feet to reiterate the British Empire's victory over the disreputable likes of Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera. In clobbering the Gordian knot that is the Irish Question, Alexander of Asia Minor compared the border between the Republic of Ireland and the Recrudescent Imperium to those between boroughs in London; the mayoralty of that metropolis being the Imperial Haystack's previous major political office. He left the city ridden with expensive vanity projects and breathing poisoned air, as befits a hotbed of traitors and citizens of nowhere; and doubtless would not hesitate to serve the heirs of Parnell in similarly forthright fashion. Though sufficiently restrained and thoughtful to avoid praising the salubrious effects of Cromwell's campaign, the Great Famine or the occasional Bloody Sunday, the Haystack's comments excited much indignation from the usual tedious quarters and were duly downplayed by a spokesbeing for the dead-eyed warden, which dispensed reassurance that the Recrudescent Imperium will solve all border-related questions thanks to the miracle of technology. After all, if databases and magic drones don't do the trick, we've still got jolly old Trident to enforce common sense.

That Damp Spot Where A Gove Doth Squat

There is, as everyone knows, nothing more unpatriotic, undemocratic and un-British than a government taking responsibility for what happens in its own country. The idea of constraining our democracy by imposing red tape on the future is so abhorrent to the national spirit that these days only a citizen of nowhere would dare suggest it. Doubtless this explains why, after the Environment Audit Committee called for a deposit-return scheme on plastic bottles and the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove gave it the rah-rah, Her Majesty's Government has now been constipated by a severe attack of planning. It would be uncharitable in this context to bazooka so barrelled a fish as the Brexit business; but the Department of Health can manage hand to mouth, the Department for Wog Control can deport on a whim, the Department of Workfare and Privation can place-kick paupers as it pleases, and the Foreign Office is headed by Boris Johnson. Only at the Department for the Environment does the Government tolerate planning; in this case because it wishes to hold a consultation on taxes to deter single-use plastics. The Government disapproves of taxes, and by an amusing coincidence the consultation, announced three months ago, shows no sign of being launched. In a similar spirit of dynamic non-mendacity, the Government has proclaimed that water companies are working towards creating a network of refill points, although the water companies have mentioned no such scheme; and, as an indication of how seriously the jabbering homunculus takes his present sinecure, the Government has also condescended to "work towards" eliminating plastic waste some time in the next quarter-century.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Mark 12 xxxviii - Mark 13 ii

After delivering one of His diatribes about the iniquities of the scribes, Jesus sits and watches people putting money into the offering box at the temple. He compares the offerings of the rich with the two small coins donated by a poor widow, pronouncing her gift the greater because it was all she had. He then announces that the temple itself will be destroyed.

Naturally, there is no indication in the Gospels that Jesus or His disciples did anything to protest, let alone alleviate, the widow's poverty. The Saviour's words about helping the poor are generally exhortations to get rid of worldly riches for the good of one's own soul, and His final pronouncement on the subject of poverty, at the Last Supper (Mark 14 vii), was that the poor would always be around, and that their needs were in any case less important than His rituals; the idea that the needs of the poor should take precedence is explicitly associated with the thieving betrayer (John 12 iv-vi). On seeing the widow Jesus is as usual far less concerned with poverty as such than with preaching against His enemies and gloating over their approaching destruction.

In light of this destruction, the widow's gift is seen to be futile aside from its salutary effect on the widow's soul and its pedagogic utility to Jesus. Whether He is predicting the literal destruction of the temple or the supplanting of the old Hebrew covenant with His own blood-cult, the practical benefits of the widow's giving all she had are casually shrugged off as negligible or nonexistent. Given that the widow's gift was noble not because of any worldly benefits but only by virtue of her poverty, any attempt to alleviate that poverty would clearly have detracted from the moral quality of her action. In the Saviour's view, those who devour widows' houses are wrong only because they deny the widows in question any chance of renouncing their worldly substance voluntarily.

Sacred Truth

Some patriotic people in France are annoyed because a mixed-race migrants' daughter has been chosen to play Jeanne d'Arc in a yearly festival at Orléans. For these Résistants, the most important characteristic of the original Jeanne is not that she was a Catholic martyr, a warrior for France, a challenger of gender rules or a teenage superhero, but the colour of her skin. "Next year, Joan of Arc will be in a burqa," mourned one cultural commentator, despite the fact that non-Catholics are excluded from playing the role. The enragés' commitment to realism is of course laudable; though given their likely commitment to tolerance of eccentrics as well as historical truth, it remains unclear what their reaction might be were their racial icon to be played by a Caucasian royalist transvestite who heard voices in her head.

No Way to Treat Real People

It has long been known, of course, that many members of the present Conservative Party have difficulties with social media. One can hardly expect people whose minds are still groping Land Girls on VE Day to thread their way with ease among the webbed electrical intertitles. Even among the party's clear-eyed, granite-jawed patriotic youth there are problems: a fleshy flunkey named Brandon Lewis has complained that Conservatives cannot swing a dead cat on social media thanks to vicious left-wing bullying of that moral élite who are not shirkers, nor skivers, nor plebs, nor piccaninnies, nor moaning minnies, nor enemies of the people, nor swarming hordes, nor the laziest workers in Europe, nor benefit frauds, nor health tourists, nor spies, nor traitors, nor citizens of nowhere. We can only hope that not too many among these sensitive snowflakes are driven to suicide before they have a chance to sample the loving kindness in which their own party famously specialises.

A Better Choice of Ancestor

It isn't often that archaeological science gives comfort to the pushers of patriotism; but even as the Farage Falange reels from the news that the first Britons were dark-skinned immigrants, a DNA study of more recent arrivals has given indications of a worthier heritage. Of course the Beaker people were immigrants too, and from central and eastern Europe to boot; but they seem to have compensated for their namby-pamby pottery obsession by wiping out the local population, whose commitment to large communal projects like Stonehenge indicates an unhealthy, Stalinistic centralising streak. There is as yet no indication as to whether the decline and disappearance of these inefficient persons occurred through natural causes such as their being the laziest workers in Europe, or through something more dynamic and entrepreneurial like deliberate genocide. Nevertheless, the fact that they were replaced by people with Britishness-appropriate skin and eye colour demonstrates that even mere archaeological experts can sometimes redeem the indiscretions of the past.

Me at Poetry24:
Plus ça change

Genesis, Inc.

Breeders, and a fortiori frustrated middle-class breeders, are neither the most thoughtful persons in the world nor the least self-pitying; hence this dubious celebration of the first test-tube baby's fortieth birthday. We are also approaching the fortieth birthday of the Thatcher régime and its defining genetic pattern of profiteering and privatisation; yet still some sheltered people are shocked to discover that private corporations deal in business transactions. Whatever is being bought and sold, be it gardening manure, fried chicken or the opportunity for a Guardian reader to perpetuate a favourite biopolymer, the object and legal obligation of a private company is to take as much as can be got for as little as can be got away with. Even for a frustrated middle-class breeder, it is quite an achievement not to have noticed that by now. Those who prefer to be sat down and asked, "Have you really thought about why you are doing this? What are the options? Where are you with your partner? Can you afford it? What’s going to happen if it doesn’t work?" might perhaps be better off considering adoption or fostering, where a few shreds of outmoded red tape may still remain in place, and which have the additional advantage of the chance to relieve existing troubles, rather than the certainty of birthing new ones.

Ill-Gotten Gains

One major disadvantage of a penal system where offenders are not simply hustled onto a gurney and disposed of is, of course, the danger that criminal elements will take advantage of their undeserved freedom in order to lie around in cells all day thinking of ways to screw the taxpayer. This certainly seems to be what has occurred in the case of Curtis Dawkins, a convicted and incarcerated murderer who has written a published collection of stories and whose fees and royalties the Christian state of Michigan is now claiming back so that he can pay for the privilege of paying his debt to society. Dawkins himself argues that the proceeds of his work should go towards his children's education: a grotesque and disingenuous parody of the family values espoused by the current President and his controlling orange head-tribble. Dawkins has even stated quite openly that the practice of writing eases the burden of being in prison, which rather undermines the point of the whole penitential business.

Virtuous Exports

Given the late Head Boy's announcement some years ago that Britain's mission to democratise the fuzzy-wuzzies of Afghanistan was jolly well accomplished, it should come as no surprise that civilian casualties in the pacified nation have exceeded ten thousand a year for the past four years. Our own Ministry for Wog Disposal, hardly the people to make a fuss when mere foreigners are being maimed and killed, rates Afghanistan as the second least peaceful country in the world, and notes that the United Nations mission in the country has found that the province with the highest number of civilian casualties is Kabul. Hence the Ministry for Wog Disposal is happily deporting Afghan asylum seekers, including those who swarmed into Britain as junior cockroaches and are indiscreet enough to turn eighteen, on the grounds that they can move to Kabul if they face persecution in their home province. This has the dual benefit of protecting British jobs and directing a salutary hint of British moral superiority at Iran and Pakistan, which between them have an infestation of at least two million Afghan refugees but where real and understandable non-racist concerns are only intermittently effective.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Luke 16 i-xiii

Jesus tells a parable about a wealthy man who hears rumours that his steward is losing him money. On the basis of this hearsay, the man orders the steward to turn in his accounts, as he is no longer worthy of his meat. Unable to perform manual labour, and too proud to live like a disciple of Jesus, the steward ingratiates himself with his master's debtors by illicitly altering the records of their debts. When the master hears of it, he commends the steward for his shrewdness.

Jesus notes that worldly people are more skilled at dealing with their own kind than are "the sons of light." Hence the unjust master, who sacks his steward without bothering to investigate whether the rumours are true, can at least recognise and praise his former servant's intelligence. By contrast, the light of the world despises worldly wisdom and finds worth only in the penitent. As His parables of the labourers and the prodigal son make clear, the arbitrary nature of God's favour means that virtue and hard work are largely worthless; and in order to gain the Saviour's approbation, rather than putting his talent to work the steward should have turned the other cheek, gone the extra mile, grovelled at his master's feet and begged for a harsher punishment.

Having related the parable, Jesus recommends that His disciples make friends for themselves among the wealthy, which is certainly a shrewd and worldly move if one wishes to spare oneself the trouble of taking thought for the morrow. Nevertheless, Jesus warns that, in order to be tolerable to God, such worldly friendships must be opportunistic and hypocritical: nobody can serve two masters, and the elect must therefore take care to love and despise shrewdly.

Available Now

My latest, which treats of some voyagers and what they discovered, is now available as paperback and pdf ebook. As with my short novel Taking Down, the opening scene occurred to me first, and without much else attached; and I also dithered over writing about a voyage because I didn't know anything about ships. It took a while to sink in that a voyage in a fantasy story need not necessarily take place aboard anything with gaff-rigged t'gallants athwart the mizzen and all the rest of it; and thus was born arguably the book's most innocent and tragic character.

That Fifth Column Just Keeps Getting Longer

Traitors, saboteurs and citizens of nowhere at the Royal United Services Institute have joined the choleric chorus of metropolitan moanery with an inverted pyramid of pessimism about security; and this in spite of all the trouble taken by something called Gavin at the Ministry for Wog-Bombing to point out Labour's links with the spectre of international Communism. RUSI, which was founded by the Napoleonic spy Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, seems to think that the Recrudescent Imperium's glorious path to independence is mined with risks rather than laden with opportunities, but never once makes the all-important balancing assertion that the Euro-wogs need us more than we need them. In any case, many of the so-called problems are hardly problems at all: far from being an unforeseen and undesirable consequence, the strengthening of nationalist forces through imposed poverty has been essentially the British Conservatives' manifesto for at least the past eighteen months. The undermining of the latest solution to the Irish Question is doubtless to be regretted, but it is of course a price worth paying in the service of a far greater ideal, namely allowing Tumbledown Tessie to hang on and stumble through the good fight for God, Queen and Faction. Everything else is just Euro-wog stuff that will sort itself out as soon as the lesser breeds get it into their strange foreign heads that they need us more than we need them. Besides, even the treacherous RUSIans admit that the costs of our new globular glories can be mitigated over time; in other words, as with the consequences of climate change, the worse things get the more they will be someone else's problem.

Effective Action

America's greatness has been yet further renewed with yet another school massacre. The perpetrator, who was captured alive, had a history of mental health problems and had been expelled from the school for violence. Doubtless any suggestion of risk associated with this history was effectively hidden behind his healthier traits, which included an obsession with firearms and a love of shooting animals. Hence his possession of a semi-automatic rifle was perfectly legal, in accordance with the Constitutional amendment which puts the NRA next to Godliness. Since God did so much to prevent things becoming unpleasant, the federal government has responded by offering its prayers.

The Ultimate Shirk

When it comes to doing Britain down, there are few lengths to which the metropolitan élite will not go. On the very day when the dead-eyed warden's joke Foreign Secretary was delivering himself of yet another gust of flatulent Ruritoxican rah-and-blah, a citizen of nowhere was mean-spirited and selfish enough to expire within a short distance of the House of Expenses Claimants. Despite years of incentivisation by the beggar-taunting Bullingdon Club and their little orange fags, more and more people have chosen to make themselves homeless rather than rush into the thousands of jobs being vacated by departing immigrants, and we can only hope that the bracing weather will encourage them to abandon this irresponsible choice and regain the proper spirit of British get-go. A spokesbeing for the House of Expenses Claimants responded to the latest victory for the hostile environment with a snide little hint about the individual's friends and family, doubtless in the hope that the tragedy will encourage more conscientious patronage of the disadvantaged and better management of their trust funds.

The Limits of Tolerance

Lawyers, academics and human rights activists have signed an open letter urging the Vatican to reconsider a possible deal with the Heathen Chinee, in case it harms the moral authority which has been so comprehensively restored since the late unpleasantness over sexual abuse. Relations were severed when the Communists took over in 1949, but the Heathen Chinee are closing down evangelical Protestant churches while allowing Catholic bishops to operate provided their snake-oil has the seal of government approval. Accordingly, two bishops who were operating without such approval have now been "asked" by the Vatican to relinquish their positions to less turbulent counterparts. It remains as yet unclear what major moral concessions the Vatican has won in exchange; but the pious can be reasonably certain that Xi Jinping will not insist on the replacement bishops being female.

Coming Soon

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 18 vii-ix

Jesus calls down misery on the world because of its temptations, and in the next breath proclaims that temptations are necessary, and in the breath after that calls down misery on those who perform the necessity. This is a frank and even cynical recognition of the moral quality of His Father's handiwork, whereby God's creatures are punished, even unto death, for displaying those very qualities which God has made intrinsic to their nature.

In the famous passage recommending bodily self-mutilation in the interests of moral purity, Jesus draws an important distinction between physical and spiritual punishment. It is generally assumed that these words are mere hyperbole, like the ones about giving away worldly goods and unlike the ones about rising from the dead; but in purely literal terms His reasoning is quite cogent. If the torments of hell are worse than physical pain, it is reasonable to undergo physical pain in order to avoid the fires of Gehenna. By extension, subjecting others to worldly tortures in order to spare them the demonic tortures which their loving Father has been keeping warm for them is not only reasonable but, as any good Inquisitor would confirm, a moral imperative and an authentic act of charity.

Whether or not He knew or intended it, Jesus provided explicit and straightforward licence to persons of goodwill for inflicting pain and torture. Given His words about the fate of those by whom temptation comes, it is possible that His resignation to His own physical torments at the end may have derived at least in part from a belated recognition of His own culpability.

Thus Did They Persecute the Money-Changers Before You

When preaching blatant violation of one commandment, it is usual for Christian churches to compensate by tightening up the rhetoric on another. The enthusiasm of wartime pastors for mass murder in the name of God and country was frequently balanced by thunderous condemnation of sexual incontinence on the part of the cannon fodder. With similar sophistication, the Trumpster's spiritual counsellors at the Kentucky-fried Cash Ministry (KCM) have jettisoned all that rubbish about riches in Heaven, which crude and literalist theologians have often regarded as fairly central to Christ's ministry. As a wandering preacher, Jesus certainly made His living by sponging on wealthy sinners and foolish women, and ordered His apostles to do the same; but He never went quite as far as the KCM, whose leaders proclaim that wealthiness is next to godliness and own a private jet and a multi-million-dollar home in holy Texas. The KCM has compensated by leaning heavily on the faith-healing racket, urging followers to avoid inoculations and instead stay healthy by shouting at flu germs to go away. Since the KCM is registered in the UK, the bureaucratic Pharisees at the Charity Commission have had the temerity to question whether such saintly conduct is altogether in keeping with the legitimate aims of a charitable organisation. For the spiritual peace of the KCM's congregation, we can only hope that any consequent scourging, nailing and spearing will be purely material in nature.

On Whose Flag the Sun Never Sets

Not for the first time, Japan has chosen to isolate itself from the community of nations by indulging its gross materialistic urges at the expense of the Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. Japan has made threatening noises about the consequences of Britain's liberation from the dominion of the Euro-wogs. Japan has threatened the Recrudescent Imperium with what Tin-Pot Tessie's joke Foreign Secretary would no doubt consider a Nanking-style seeing-to. Japan has, in short, forgotten who won the war. A culture so different from our own can hardly be expected to understand the values and aspirations of a proud island nation with a violent imperial past, a hermetic writing system and a grotesquely misnamed Liberal Democrat party.

Britannia Meets Her Match

If liberation from the Brusso-Strasbourgian yoke means anything at all, it means the freedom to make our own laws and give a healthy Churchillian V-sign to all that namby-pamby nonsense about human rights. Accordingly, in the spirit of Britain's present generous-spirited world leadership, an Imperial territory has become the first to repeal equal rights for non-heterosexuals, backed up with full rah-rah from the dead-eyed warden's joke Foreign Secretary. While the Imperial Haystack went into hiding behind a junior ministerial filly, a Downing Street spokesbeing proclaimed that Britain's hands were tied. Her Majesty's Government, which abhors discrimination in all its forms and is hardly at all dependent on a handful of god-bothering homophobes to stay in office, has been unable to exercise its unfettered strength as a force for good, thanks to the rampant, overmastering might of world-bestriding Bermuda.

Britain's First

Will the political correctness of mere scientists never cease? Is there no depth of white-genocidal racism that cannot be plumbed by those paltry little pettinesses known as facts? The latest findings about the earliest modern Britons, which suggest a dark re-write of the prologue to our island story, would seem to suggest not. Mere historical evidence proclaims that the first inhabitants of these islands were immigrants from the Continent; mere documentary evidence suggests that they may not all have been fluent in the tongue that Shakespeare spoke; now, mere DNA evidence from a ten-thousand-year-old skeleton suggests that the original owner may not even have borne much physical resemblance to fine-complexioned folk such as the strutting ex-Caudillo of the Farage Falange. From the tone of his skin and hair, the ignorant savage may well have had the impudence to resemble Diane Abbott instead. Naturally, the findings have given rise to much muesli-fuelled celebration among enemies of the people and citizens of nowhere, whose sandalled smugness has blinded them to the crucial feature: namely the man's blue eyes, which obviously he must have inherited from a genuinely indigenous Briton. The man's very own mother may well have been the kind of girl to whom an upstanding patriot might in good conscience give a taxpayer-funded secretarial sinecure in return for sexual favours; but instead she was ruthlessly kidnapped and violated to the primitive rhythm of the bongo drums, only for EU-sponsored scientists to laugh and joke millennia later at the signals of her shame, thanks to the terminal, treasonous obstinacy of mere facts.

All Arts Ministers Are Quite Useless

Given that Her Majesty's Government's idea of legitimate public culture begins with statues of Cecil Rhodes and ends with the latest Churchill hagiopic, we should perhaps be favourably surprised that the arts minister has so far defied market forces as to slap an export bar on a Victorian photograph album. The photographer was only a woman, and the subjects include a lachrymose Ethiopian migrant and a couple of mere scientists; but the album does also feature Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose poetic glorification of the Light Brigade fiasco has been a template for sanctified patriotic stupidity from the Crimea to Brexit. Even so, the album will probably end up being sold abroad, because state-maintained culture is a Stalinist imposition and because the British arts minister has better things to do than keep British art in the country.

We Shall Fight Them in the Streets

Hard-working British patriots will rejoice at the news that they are being protected as never before from asylum seekers and refugees. Under the capable tutelage of the race-baiting Clegg-pledger in the Home Office, Tin-Pot Tessie's hostile environment continues to pump its muscles and ply its fists, so that the number of cockroaches living in food poverty has risen by a fifth in the past year. So zealous are the minions of the Clegg-pledging race-baiter that the Ministry for Wog Control is exceeding even its own generous legal standards for swatting the swarming hordes: with traditional British defiance for bureaucratic rules and red tape, ninety per cent of homeless and destitute asylum seekers have been denied the emergency support to which the mere law of the land entitles them.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 7 xv-xx

Jesus warns against false prophets, the ravening wolves in sheep's clothing, who are doubtless to be clearly distinguished from those self-proclaimed good shepherds who bring swords to divide families and who will one day help consign most of humanity to the flames. False prophets, according to Jesus, may be recognised by the consequences of their preaching, because good fruit can come only from a healthy tree and bad fruit can come only from a diseased tree.

The ministry of Jesus begat the Christian churches, the detailing of whose failures and crimes would be invidious as well as interminable. Nor need we concern ourselves with the question of whether Jesus could have anticipated such peccadilloes as the indulgence-sellers, the Inquisition, the Albigensian genocide or the centuries of virulent Jew-hatred and misogyny. It is true that Jesus attempts to cover Himself a little later in His sermon, when He proclaims that He will disown those who prophesy in His name while failing to do His Father's famously arbitrary and contradictory will; but this is pure political anodyne, on a par with declaring that His yoke was easy and His burden light. Whether a tree is healthy or diseased has nothing to do with the tree's intentions; its fruit will be good or bad no matter what the tree may think. If misogyny is poisonous, and Paul spread the poison, and Paul was a prophet of Jesus, then the fruit of Jesus' ministry was poison.

Even before His Pauline transfiguration, during His mortal role as an apocalyptic preacher, the prophetic powers of Jesus left something to be desired. He boasted that the Kingdom of Heaven would arrive within the lifetime of some who stood listening to Him; yet two millennia later the goats still walk among us, the chaff has not been burned, and only unquestioning faith can protect the Saviour's followers from the stench of rotten fruit.

Globular Britain

As Britain's reduced place in the world becomes traumatically clear even inside the Westminster wendy-house, it becomes ever more vital to ensure that the bulk of our citizens can keep up with America. Processed foods are cheap, addictive and have no nutritional value, and can also be bad for the health; this is good for multinational corporations and sellers of dietary snake-oil, and easily good enough for the proles, yet pessimists and nay-sayers persist in claiming that the glass is too full. Mere experts and foreigners with funny names have had the nerve to criticise the stout British consumer's eating habits, which are the results of a thousand glorious years of culinary tradition, deliciously topped with a couple of light, foaming decades of deregulation and diseducation. Oddly enough, Her Majesty's Government does not appear to have extruded a spokesbeing to wag a finger at the proles for their childish and greedy habits; presumably because of the usual ministerial digestive troubles when it comes to imbibing solid facts.

A Fairly Decent Muslim

One of Her Majesty's Government's favourite Islamic fundamentalists will be visiting London this month for a bit of a rah-rah over the amusingly profitable situation in Yemen, and a bit of a blah-blah over how the carnage might best be extended into Iran. The Imperial Haystack had a blather about Britain's and Saudi Arabia's common view of the world in many ways, such as their respective governments' attitudes to democracy and social mobility. He also had a burble about the century-long relationship between the countries, although in the reality most of us share Saudi Arabia has only been in existence since 1932; the Imperial Haystack, sharing Saudi values, equated the kingdom with its founder, a British ally in the First World War. During the present era, Allah having matched him with His hour, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been merrily purging his enemies at home; which would be enough to excite the envy of a prime minister as beleaguered as our own even if she lacked Tumbledown Tessie's Christian delight in persecution for its own sake. However, the prince's purge is taking place under an anti-corruption rubric, which may well give rise to human rights concerns among some of Britain's more entrepreneurial ministers.

Best of British Cluck

Until the Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands finally achieves the glory of global outwardness, rather than merely being a member of the biggest trading bloc on the planet, red tape will continue to strangle us and food hygiene will continue to be treated as something people are entitled to expect even if they lack the gumption to own a personal chef. Regulators are interfering with the nation's chickens, as though the country that beat the Boche with help only from the USSR, the United States and an empire that covered half the globe would balk at consuming meat prepared under conditions that were less than surgical. Once we have opened ourselves to the chlorinated delights of the Trumpsterland franchise, things will be very different. Any chicken which has passed its sell-by date will get a quick dip in the nearest swimming pool before being coated in brand-new cellophane and thrust dynamically back onto the shelves; always provided that the said chicken happens not to be among the headless, featherless, gutless poultry responsible for the Department for Having Exited the European Union.