The Future of Customer Service is Puce

I am sure we are all happy to learn that Britain's late Head Boy has found a way to keep the wolf from his shed door, despite having been cruelly snubbed in his earlier efforts to toddle into the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns. Besides his memoir thingy, Daveybloke has kept himself occupied with sinecures at organisations specialising in state fragility, citizen service and Alzheimer's, presumably in the hope of avoiding all three. His skills are so much in demand with these organisations that he has also found time to take on the responsibility for "curating and overseeing the strategic guidance" for the advisory board of an American firm specialising in the application of artificial intelligence to call centres. Doubtless all the British firms are inconveniently aware of the Conservative Party's less than fortunate relationship with difference engines and the like; or else they are hiring cautiously thanks to Daveybloke's little Brexit mishap. Certainly the role of glorified call centre manager seems a bit better fitted to Daveybloke's capabilities than trying to run a country.

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Has-Been

Say what you like about posturing Thatcherite leftovers, but they are rarely behind the times; or anyhow not quite so far behind as their posturing neo-feudal successors. Lord Heseltine, whose purging from the Conservative Party was apparently a rather less apocalyptic blow to British democracy than the expulsion of his Liberal Democrat brother-in-arms Alastair Campbell, has warned the Conservatives not to follow the poisonous politics of the Farage Falange; and he has delivered his warning only slightly less than a decade after Pigsticker Dave appointed Tin-Pot Tessie to the Home Office. In fact, Heseltine himself was something of a precursor both to the strutting Caudillo and to his blond-bombshell wannabe, the Imperial Haystack Boris Johnson. While serving the sainted Thatcher alongside such famous paragons of one-nation paternalism as Peter Lilley, Nicholas Ridley and Norman Tebbit, Heseltine cultivated a flamboyant image: at a time when certain elements of the BBC still had some regard for their dignity, he used to flounce out of studios live on air whenever his fellow interviewees were not right-wing enough.

Almost as inspiringly, New Labour's very own John Major apparently has plans to accuse the Farage Falange of "attempting to hijack British patriotism and representing a toxic, divisive, intolerant 'them-versus-us' nationalism more in tune with Le Pen and Putin than the values of the British people." It would certainly never do if the acolytes mature debate and British jobs for British workers were to be led astray by a them-versus-us nationalism redolent of greasy foreigners. In the event of a second vote on EU membership, the contribution from elder statesmen of this calibre should be almost as effective as the presence of Nick Clegg, the Reverend Blair and the soon-to-be-late Head Boy last time around.

Simple Solutions

Given the sublime simplicity involved in freeing our glorious Union from the Euro-wog yoke, it should come as no surprise that Her Majesty's Government has splurged the cash value of several qualified teachers, their foreign-born NHS spouses and a substantial slice of fireproof wall-cladding on paying private companies to tell ministers what they wish to hear. Thanks to the Osbornomic reforms of the last Liberal Democrat-influenced administration, the civil service consists almost entirely of trainees, traitors and redundancies, and planning and infrastructure have been four-letter words for even longer; so it was only natural that the Conservatives should turn to their corporate chumlies to ensure that the plebs don't die off in large enough numbers to inconvenience anyone. Nevertheless, the National Audit Office has rather tactlessly pointed out that, as usual, the superior efficiency of the slimmed-down Government departments does not extend to providing the taxpayer with timely and transparent accounts of precisely how the ripoff was perpetrated.

Blue Waters, Red Tape

Anyone who is a citizen of anywhere must naturally be grateful for the decades of fiscal prudence which have driven so many benefits cheats to starvation and suicide; but it does appear that one or two minor matters have been neglected during the Treasury's everlasting rush to virtue. The empty suit that is the present incumbent has made some noises about cracking down on tax-dodgers, and the results are much as one might expect: of the ten most enterprising tax havens in the world, four are British overseas territories, and Albion herself is thirteenth on the list. Even the ghastly windmill-greasing clog-wogs who are our nearest rivals in the business cannot manage a quarter of the volume. Fortunately, tax-dodging is nowhere near as thrilling as whatever fragrant gases may be emerging on any given day from various orifices in the strutting Caudillo of the New Real Provisional Farage Falange; doubtless because tax-dodging affects only big government and its ability to do a lot of things Her Majesty's rather small Government doesn't much care about.

European Enigma

Although we've made prole-pulses quicken
With promise of chlorine-washed chicken,
Despite all our fracking
And solar non-backing
The Green Party gave us a kicking!

Oh what can have happened? Dear me!
Our logo includes a big tree!
We get on so well
With BP and Shell!
Oh, dash it all - how can this be?

Although Michael Gove's full of beans
And farting out ripe, fragrant paeans
To Michael Gove's skill
And Michael Gove's will -
We've gone and lost out to the Greens!

Tweedie Gammon

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Gingivitis cxlvii-clxix

Long before this, however, the Father of Teeth wandered the earth telling people his good news. He encountered a man who had made himself rich, but still found himself discontented as he quivered and twitched in his gold-plated bath-chair. The Father of Teeth told the rich man that he had neglected his soul, and this was the cause of all his unhappiness.

When the bodyguards threw him out by the servants' gate, the Father of Teeth encountered a leprous mendicant who felt uncomfortable with the mendicancy of his leprousness; the Father of Teeth told the leprous mendicant that stimulating the generosity of others is a noble and spiritual calling, and the leprous mendicant pelted the Father of Teeth with the seven dead rats which had been left in his begging-bowl so far that morning.

He was rescued by a woman who had lost her husband and nine children to a recent plague; the Father of Teeth told her that there were many others worse off than herself and that she should view her bereavements as a test of faith, whereupon she directed him down an alley where bandits were waiting. Despite the Father of Teeth having faith in their willingness to listen, they were not in a redeemable mood and the Father of Teeth had to bite his way out.

Driven from the city, the Father of Teeth encountered a hermit and told him he had neglected his fellow men. At this the hermit expostulated vehemently; as it turned out he had been the rich man, who had given away all his property and was now poor, so the Father of Teeth informed him that his charity would be wasted in a week and forgotten in a fortnight.

The hermit laughed, for he had thrown off all delusions save the delusion that a fleshly product of the material world could rise above the world and the flesh; and the Father of Teeth initiated the hermit into one of his own favourite Mysteries, informing him that the Creator's greatest joke on His victims was to give them the idea that they might somehow save themselves from their Creator's sense of humour.

And God Remembered Noah

Meanwhile, in the Christian state of Kentucky, God appears to have slightly neglected the fiscal well-being of His faithful. A fundamentalist theme park, set up partly at the expense of the American taxpayer in order to celebrate what its founder believes to be a historical genocide, suffered property damage two years ago when the Lord absent-mindedly sent a little too much rain. We may safely assume that the punishment of sin was not what He had in mind, since the purveyors of the fifty-dollar Ark Encounter experience force all their employees to sign statements denying evolution, denouncing homosexuality and declaring regular attendance at communal grovels. Accordingly, the owners are now pursuing a lawsuit against their insurers for refusal to pay the full cost of repairing God's work and providing against the possibility of further chastisement.

A Burnt-Out Cable

As the country allows itself a brief period of Schadenfreude over the impending final demise of Tumbledown Tessie, and begins the long slow business of resigning itself to whatever the nationwide rotten borough that is the Conservative Party membership may next choose to inflict, some may find it strange that the former Deputy Conservatives have chosen this day of all days to announce the forthcoming resignation of the dead-eyed warden's sometime Cabinet colleague, the Bullingdon Club's Minister for Mates' Rates. In fact, of course, such reticence is understandable enough. Aside from the residual need to follow their former masters in all things, the former Deputy Conservatives are undoubtedly aware that political resignations tend to stimulate an unhealthy urge to examine legacies. The liberal statesman who sat happily back during the bonfire of regulations that probably helped bring about the Grenfell Tower disaster; the statesmanlike democrat who accepted a knighthood for services rendered to the Bullingdon Club; the democratic liberal who toddled complacently through the lobbies time and again in favour of poor-bashing, migrant-baiting, NHS-flogging, wog-bombing and smirking, sniggering racism - this suppurating Picture of Dorian Orange is hardly the sort of façade the former Deputy Conservatives will wish to present just as their latest Unique Selling Point - Remain until the next rose-garden - seems at last to be fooling some of the people some of the time. Indeed, with a legacy of this magnitude, which did so much to elevate the Farage Falange and others equally fragrant to their present degree of public prominence, the only surprising thing is that Pigsticker Dave's little yellow fags felt sufficiently emboldened to make any announcement at all.

Without A Single Bullet Being Fired

With British democracy once again under threat from foreign elections, the strutting Caudillo of the New Real Provisional Farage Falange has shown what he is made of, cowering courageously in his sugar-proof battle-bus while leaving the police to face an onslaught of hooded men armed with cold drinks. Presumably the Caudillo was still a bit shell-shocked from his recent messy encounter with a milkshake flavoured with banana, a notoriously foreign fruit; nevertheless, as a preparation for Victory in Europe Redux his performance fell somewhat short of donning the old khaki and taking to the streets with his Lee-Enfield.

UN Vote: Majority Isolated

Not content with allowing rapporteurs to make libellous allegations about the Conservative Party's idleness police, the general assembly of the United Nations has very carelessly voted against Britain's occupation of the Chagos Islands, and has thereby placed itself tragically out of step with the mainstream of the international community. A hundred and sixteen countries voted in favour of the Senegalese motion, while Britain was supported only by the Maldives and by the Conservative Party's fellow race-baiters in Australia, Israel, Hungary and the United States. Fifty-six countries abstained, which naturally indicates that they were uneasy about backing the motion; who, after all, could ever be uneasy about backing Britain? In any case, those who pass for diplomats in the present Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns had already resigned themselves to defeat. The problem with the Chagos Islands is a problem of decolonisation; and despite the rest of us having long since drawn lines, moved forward and accomplished missions, decolonisation remains, in the delicate phrasing of Britain's leading liberal newspaper, a totemic issue for the uncivilised tribes.

Moderately Unacceptable

Contrary to squealing, purple-visaged, pram-crashing appearances, there are still a few moderate Conservatives lurking among the ruins of Tumbledown Tessie's party. Lord Heseltine is so moderate that he served with Norman Tebbit and Peter Lilley under the great one-nation prime minister who demolished the country's manufacturing base, denounced striking workers as the "enemy within" and passed Clause 28. Lord Heseltine is so moderate that the party has temporarily withdrawn the whip, although it remains to be seen whether it will be restored as quickly as if Lord Heseltine had said something racist.

Similarly moderate is a group of MPs which has recently launched a minifesto giving the rah-rah to "human rights, social responsibility and the fight against injustice;" the sincerity of the group's aspirations may perhaps be gauged by the membership of Amber Rudd, who has done so much for the Windrush generation and who has been known to advocate naming and shaming companies for employing too many foreigners. One of Rudd's fellow moderates, who is so moderate that she is still serving in Tumbledown Tessie's rabidly moderate government, has publicly disapproved of Boris Johnson's candidacy for coronation once the dead-eyed warden finally takes the hint. The former Imperial Haystack is an unacceptable candidate, according to Margot James, because he said "fuck business" when asked about corporate worries over the Recrudescent Imperium's approaching independence from the Euro-wogs. The lying, the racism, the demeaning of the office of Foreign Secretary, the eight years as mayor of London when he responded to illegal levels of air pollution by sitting back and fiddling with his taxpayer-funded vanity projects: all these are forgotten, forgiven or (as no doubt with the racism) positively praiseworthy to the moderate Conservative mind; but using bad language about the business community is simply not on.

Careless Talk Costs Lives

We have learned to expect all manner of shabby tricks from the ghastly Euro-wogs, so it will come as no surprise that the beastly Boche have utilised the maunderings of an elderly woman in the furtherance of their fiendish federalism. It seems that the unfortunate lady made some out-of-context remarks which were overheard by a foreigner with a funny name, and were subsequently transmitted by him to the very depths of the Euro-wog conspiracy. Evidently the nuances of documentary declassification are lost upon the forces of the Hun, with their limited enthusiasm for Whitehall's conception of transparency and democratic oversight. The victim, whose migrant-descended family are believed to be living on taxpayer-funded benefits in various large houses, has made an effort to keep out of politics except when discussing the niceties of her own tax bill, and the falsity of the slander may be judged by the fact that it contradicts the impartial and patriotic testimony of both the scumbag press and the British Broadcasting Conservatives.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Caries xxxi-xl

Later, finding himself once more among the dentists, the Father of Teeth was rushed into the sacrificial chair and angled with breakneck zeal towards the hot and holy light. An acolyte in a white coat came forth, holding in his right hand the instruments of purification and in his left a libation of royal purple in a plastic beaker. The maw of the Father of Teeth glittered black and mahogany in the searchlight's sacred beam, while he clawed unerringly for the acolyte's crotch and guided him, very nearly painlessly, to replace the Father of Teeth on the altar of virtue.

"Will it hurt?" the acolyte inquired according to the ritual; but there was awe in his grin as the Father of Teeth loomed over him and bared his luminous magenta gums.
"Don't worry," answered the Father of Teeth, flexing his face towards a hideous approximation of the traditional smile of reassurance; "we're just going to scrape off the plaque."

Expertly he flicked a switch, and penetrating whines of eagerness were heard from the exquisitely sharpened instruments. "Open wide," said the Father of Teeth, and the acolyte complied in a delirium of mystical receptivity.

And when the festival of moral and oral hygiene was ended and the receptionist dared to peep around the surgery door, the light from the acolyte's hovering grin was truly blinding; so much so, indeed, that neither then nor ever afterwards could the dumbstruck receptionist or the screaming police be sure that anything but the grin had remained of him.

Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Fascists

In older and greater days, such as those to which the New Real Provisional Farage Falange urges our immediate return, the measure of a man was his conduct in the face of physical peril. Unlike the panicky lesser breeds, a worthy wearer of the white epidermis of Albion was supposed to show pluck and stand fast, come Hell, high water or a hail of soft drinks. Unfortunately, it seems the stout-full yeomanry of today's freedom fighters are not quite up to this exalted standard: after some trouble with snowflakes provoked by racism, rape jokes, bullying and other robust manifestations of the British sense of humour, the tough-talking libertarians have gone squealing to the police for protection. In advance of a rah-rah in Edinburgh, a McDonald's restaurant has acceded to a police request not to sell milkshakes or ice-cream in case they are put to nefarious use by terrorists. It's a touching gesture of solidarity between corporate clowns pushing tasteless crap, of course; but it remains to be seen whether Edinburgh's throwable resources have thereby been completely exhausted. Older readers may recall, with appropriate emotions, how Farage's spiritual predecessor, the tangerine migrant-baiter and serial party founder Robert Kilroy-Silk, was dunked in liquefied cowshit by a morally bankrupt opponent: a course of action which certainly should not be condoned or recommended by any responsible traitor.

Teach Them to Fly Underwater

Ravens have hatched at the Tower of London for the first time in thirty years; and on St George's Day to boot. Omens and portents can be slippery little buggers, as those great Englishmen Oedipus and Macbeth could both testify to their cost; and this happy event is no exception. To begin with, the parents are named Huginn and Muninn, after two unnaturally well-travelled servants of a foreign god whose migrant worshippers were noted for their unpleasant ways with hard-working British families. Then, while tradition undoubtedly predicts ill fortune for Tower and Kingdom alike should the ravens leave, it is by no means clear that the arrival of more ravens is anything to crow about. The last time it happened, after all, was on the eve of John Major's accession to Downing Street, whence followed a period of stagnation, corruption, xenophobia and petty nastiness which was comparable to the Kingdom's present glories in much the same way as the 1990 attack on Iraq was comparable to the 2003 adventure: the later version was bigger, stupider, more murderous and wore a grin of fatuous triumph rather than a frown of sanctimonious constipation, but the basic outlines remained recognisably fraternal. Today the Tower is famous as a place where people waited to have their heads chopped off at the whim of hereditary monarchs, and as the site of a double infanticide supposedly carried out on the orders of a Machiavellian hunchback; the Kingdom is divided on such fairly basic questions as the century it is living in and which bit of continental shelf it is sitting on; so the nation's citizens of nowhere and other traitors might arguably be justified in pondering whether the Tower and the Kingdom are really worth the ravens' efforts in propping up.

Dauntless Dimness

The Recrudescent Imperium's new Secretary of State for Wog-Bombing has lost little time in positioning herself as a worthy successor to the likes of Gavin Williamson, Liam Fox and Butcher Hoon. Having proposed to avoid prosecutions of British troops for crimes against lesser breeds, unless in "exceptional circumstances" where such a prosecution would benefit the Conservative Party, Penny Mordaunt decided there was no reason why Britain's brave boys should be caught in any nasty Northern Irish backstops. The response from the breakaway Republic of Ireland was predictably unsporting, and Mordaunt's own ministry had initially made clear that uppity colonials are not exactly the same as terrorists; but this in itself provoked squeals of indignation from the likes of Marc de François and other men of action on the Conservative back benches, who ejaculated oracular admonitions against placing British subjects under the rule of law. It remains as yet unclear whether Mordaunt has sufficient Williamsonian vision to respond by introducing a Kill a Mick and Win a Skoda clause.

Another Punishment Beating

So effective and thoroughgoing have been the compliant Sajid Javid's improvements at the Ministry for Wog Control, and so sincere and unrelenting the dead-eyed warden's concern for helping the victims of modern slavery, that the beastly Euro-wogs have been allowed to swindle some of Britain's most deportable people out of £600,000, with almost another three million at risk. The Government had intended to use the money for breakfast clubs among the less affluent learning emporia, but changed its mind in favour of a show of disapproval for modern slavery, presumably because someone told Tumbledown Tessie that foreigners are to blame. However, this saintly initiative has been martyred by the beastly Euro-wogs with their fiendishly cunning strategy of expecting Her Majesty's Government to do its paperwork properly and submit the forms on time. As a result, Britain is the only EU member state which has failed to use the programme to aid its citizens, while mighty Slovenia and those robotically efficient Italians go sniggering all the way to the bank. A spokesbeing from the Ministry for Wog Control was expectably forthright in blaming the beastly Euro-wogs for their temerity in enforcing rules to which Her Majesty's Government is a signatory, but it remains as yet unclear whether the balance of the money is to be shaved off the "divorce payment" or simply extracted from what remains of the weekly bonanza after the NHS has been set up for life.

Well Worth Airing

Mere scientists have once again been indulging their fetish for facts, with the usual miserable results: a research team has announced that, contrary to the optimistic hopes of all sensible non-scaremongers, plastic pollution is very likely no more beneficial to marine bacteria than it is to larger organisms. Plastic waste releases chemicals which interfere with the growth of the commonest photosynthetic bacteria, which among other little conveniences produces ten per cent of the atmosphere's oxygen. Though hardly front-page news, the researchers' conclusions are important in their way because plastic pollution, aside from the comparatively trivial matter of its global magnitude and growing environmental impact, also causes financial damage which might not be adequately offset by a modest increase in the market price of breathable air. Accordingly, it is possible that even the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, who serves Global Britain in place of a minister for the environment, may be driven to contemplate strong measures to protect British fish, commencing perhaps with a law incentivising shirkers to earn their food bank privileges by inhaling less deeply.

Choose Your Battles

Pluck, gumption and British fair play are once more making themselves felt at the compliant Sajid Javid's Ministry for Wog Control, which has now sufficiently recovered from decades of multicultural mismanagement to start defending the realm against the comatose. An Indian woman whose symptoms of Crohn's disease were doubtless improved no end by her correspondence with the Ministry's minions fell into a vegetative state after a major operation, and thus the legions of Javid were emboldened to order her out of the country. Her fiancé appealed on her behalf, providing medical evidence that travel, even if undertaken with the supervision of the Home Office's very own hired thugs, might put her life at risk; the Ministry's minions advised that this did not entitle her to remain, and that in any case she could receive "palliative care" once she was back where she belonged. The migrant in question has a history of campaigning to support immigrants and those with chronic illnesses, which may help to explain the Ministry's thoroughly British prudence in kicking her while she's down.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Carnassials clxxxiii-ccxvii

On the contrary, by this time the Father of Teeth was far along the soft black road, which glistened and bubbled for miles both ahead and behind. During the day the sun blazed above, and the enamel of its rays scraped the skin of the Father of Teeth to a shade of brown not unlike his own best-decayed dental stumps. He thirsted and perspired most horribly, and was attempting to blunt the pangs of appetite by chewing small lumps of lukewarm tarmac, when at last a small settlement came shimmering into view.

It turned out, on closer acquaintance, to be more a gathering than a settlement, for it consisted only of a dozen figures squatting listlessly beneath less than a dozen hideously flowered parasols. They were all dressed alike in blinding white, which covered them from head to foot, including their mouths and noses; their hands and feet were sealed in hefty gloves and boots, and their eyes were shaded by dark glasses in which the Father of Teeth could see only the gnawing reflection of his own curiosity.

A sound like the munching of autumn leaves brought his attention to a new figure, which had raised itself from torpor and was cautiously approaching. Instead of white, this personage was clad in silver foil, which rustled importantly as he walked; and as the figure drew close the Father of Teeth observed that the frames of his dark glasses were emblazoned with a brand name of previously worldwide prestige.

"How comes it, impious stranger," demanded this apparition, "that rather than worshipping in the true fashion you expose to the sun god's life-giving rays your indecent eyes and epidermis?"
"I take it, then," said the Father of Teeth, "that the true fashion of worship means lounging around in that get-up of yours, in order to avoid being blessed too directly?"
"Our idleness at this time is commanded by the sun god, for if we move about too much he strikes us down in a manner most uncomfortable," replied the silvery personage; "our clothing is dictated merely by the rules of decency, which forbid the mysteries of skin cancer to all but a few, who are chosen by the god himself when in the wisdom of his mercy he causes their suits to wear out."
"And this silver suit of yours," said the Father of Teeth; "it ranks you among the few, I suppose?"
"Alas, no," was the reply; "the silver suit is a mark of heavy and onerous burden of responsibility, for those who wear it have renounced the spiritual privileges of dermatological carcinoma in order to assume the duties of earthly leadership. Yet we too are chosen for our task, as the sun god ensures that we are born only to females of a certain chosen family; and we must bear our worldly burden for longer than those of less dutiful ancestry, because the silver suit never wears out."
"Indeed," said the Father of Teeth, who had taken a stray fold between his mandibles in order to try the metal's potential as dental filling. "In that case you can look forward to being the first of your line to attain spiritual release, as this tinfoil has just split open quite close to where I tested it."

This observation so perturbed the silver suit's occupant that he there and then removed every vestment and vestige of his sacred calling, and sat cross-legged on the tarmac to await the sun god's guidance. In three hours he began to sizzle, and the Father of Teeth, who had no objection to a roast now and then, turned him over carefully and pronged him with a fork.

Look, Deportees, Upon His Uncomplaining Martyrdom

I am sure we are all deeply shocked and appalled to find that the compliant Sajid Javid, of all people, is disliked because of his colour; especially when there are so many worthier reasons to dislike him. The forthright non-compensator of the Windrush persecuted and valiant remover of citizenship from terrorist-groomed child-brides claims to have been abused both by those his party slanders and those to whom it panders: the former for not being brown enough and the latter for being too brown. Of course the compliant Sajid Javid, like all acceptable coloureds, is moderately brown, as he has proved by his courageous continuation of his predecessors' hostile environment under barely divergent rhetoric. Token wog or not, it is certainly disturbingly un-British for the holder of one of the realm's great offices of state to reap what his party has sown.

Deservedly Saved

Britain's employment figures are set to receive another boost, with up to seventy more jobs being saved in the Mediterranean. A number of threats to British livelihoods had embarked from Libya, where the entrepreneurial situation remains about as favourable as can be expected after Britain and its greatest ally democratised the country some years ago: a moral improvement unaccountably unmentioned by Britain's leading liberal newspaper. The boat sank forty miles off the Tunisian coast; and despite the inconsiderate interference of various fisher-folk too primitive to know better, the economy of Global Britain was duly rescued from at least fifty causes of legitimate and understandable concern.

Me at Poetry24:
Our Ship

God's Old Boys

If one thing is needful in these turbulent times, it is a greater degree of understanding between men of different faiths; so it's reassuring to see the Church of Rome and the Church of England agreeing their priorities and acting in Christian harmony. The Pope has decreed that sexual abuse and cover-ups within the Catholic Church must be reported to authorities within the Catholic Church, as this will help matters no end; meanwhile, some luminaries of the Anglican Church have been found complicit in the protection of Bishop Peter Ball. Both the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Blathering-in-the-Dotage, and the future head of the Church, Mrs Battenberg's Prince in Perpetual Waiting, oozed compassion for Ball as a club member in good standing; the bishop was eventually imprisoned for abusing vulnerable young people, though not before the first of his victims to report him had been driven to suicide. According to the Bishop of Bath, Wells and Safeguarding, the Church has condescended to ruminate further upon these mysteries, as this will help matters no end.

The Right Sort of Foreigner

Achievements long in the making are often the hardest to let go; and having spent the past decade kicking people out of their houses, it's only natural that the Government should be in no particular hurry to dismantle that particular triumph. In a happy sign of continuity during these turbulent times, the Tumbledown Tessie administration has followed the natural inclinations both of its dead-eyed warden and of her former Cabinet colleagues among the Liberal Democrats by downsizing its promises and making its usual courageous decision to protect wealth creators against the ravages of redistributive taxation. In a tentative try at combining her wogs-out obsession with an appearance of caring about the human litter defacing Britain's real estate, the dead-eyed warden last year pledged to impose a charge on foreign property speculators and use the money for reducing homelessness; however, the empty suit at the Treasury has decided on a much smaller charge than anticipated, cutting the likely benefits by two-thirds. Fortunately, of course, the problem is far from urgent: the Tumbledown Tessie administration has set itself a rather relaxed target of eight years in which to eliminate homelessness, presumably in the hope that a few bracing winters will help simplify the matter into a question of disposal rather than warehousing.

Lest We Remember Incorrectly

In a superb act of Britishness, the most openly racist government since the Second World War has decided to build a rah-rah centre for What Britain Did in the Holocaust. With characteristic sureness of touch, the Tumbledown Tessie administration has chosen a site which will destroy green space and trees, thereby providing a potent symbol for the relative importance to the British intellect of the Anthropocene extinction event and the matter of who won the war. As if the approval of the wog-bombing Reverend Blair were not enough, the hypocrisy of the venture will be delightfully rubbed in with a posthumous award to Joan Stiebel, who brought a thousand non-bogus Jewish orphans to an Albion which presumably was not quite so full up as it seems to be these days.

What They Can Do With Technology Nowadays

Given the radical improvements in the National Health Service which have been so gloriously achieved by the Conservatives and their little orange enablers, it is only natural that the Minister for Profitable Healthcare should be calling for malingerers to be monitored with technology. As with the Irish border, technology means that Conservative ministers need not worry about such trivia as the welfare of the realm's less significant inhabitants; and now that a Blairite think-tank has put out a worry-piece about poor and disabled people lacking digital and internet skills, the Minister has discovered that technology is a wonderful thing. It was technology, after all, that enabled those fine upstanding people at G4S to make a healthy profit monitoring the activities of dead criminals; and certainly no-one can deny that the greater use of technology in health is a more than adequate substitute for proper budgeting, reasonable working hours and immigrant medical staff. Still, even technology is not always perfect, as with the Government's slowly developing mastery of the concepts of carbon-copy and copy-and-paste; so the Minister has also proclaimed that there should be more "social prescribing", where the doctors whose workload his government has increased connect patients to the community services his government has spent the last decade cutting to pieces. If problems arise, there's always technology.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Incisors cxlix-clxxii

Long beforehand, however, the Father of Teeth was wandering the sewers when he encountered the three or four hundred survivors from humanity's most recent festival of rights defended and lessons learned. They screeched for his aid, for the tunnels were blocked by a vast greyish-white agglomeration of plastic and chemically-treated pulp, which prevented their hunting rats in any direction except north, south or east. As a result, they had nothing to eat except a particularly uncooperative species of mutant albino algae and were slowly starving to death.

The Father of Teeth hinted that the rat population might possibly have attained nutritious levels in one or more of the directions where hunting was taboo; but the people covered their eyes and savagely masticated their neighbours at even the subtlest allusion to the forbidden points of the compass. So the Father of Teeth went to work on the greyish-white agglomeration, which obstructed the sewer for a distance of several miles and tasted even more repulsive than the mutant albino algae. Months of steady chewing were required before the Father of Teeth could carve out a tunnel wide enough to crawl through; and by the time he had done so, of course, the highly-evolved descendants of the rats were crawling through in the other direction. At this point the Father of Teeth thought it prudent to absent himself towards one of the forbidden points of the compass; for which he was rewarded with the execrations of the human race and various malodorous tokens of ingratitude.

Some few millennia elapsed before the Father of Teeth passed that way again, to find that the descendants of the rats' descendants had degenerated so far as to bear a passing resemblance to human beings. They chased him away for having wrongly-shaped incisors, and for many years afterward issued apocalyptic warnings to their children against speaking to dirty old men.

Dependably Brilliant

Surprisingly, despite the glittering record of privatised utilities, privatised railways, privatised prisons and privatised health services, the privatised probation service has become less efficient and more expensive. Incredibly, the primary purpose of the probation service was originally to help prevent re-offending, but the millenarian patriotism of the present Government leaves no room for such lowly and uninspired functionalities. Remarkably, offenders under the new system tend to re-offend more often, and the number recalled to prison has gone up by nearly half, despite all offenders being subject to statutory supervision once they leave the punishment warehouse. Amazingly, despite a decade of cuts in such fripperies as drug rehabilitation, mental health services, housing and social security, offenders leaving the punishment warehouse tend to be confronted with difficulties in gaining necessary access to drug rehabilitation, mental health services, housing and social security. Astoundingly, the taxpayer will have the pleasure of repaying private companies for these improvements to the tune of five hundred million pounds. Astonishingly, the minister who shovelled the privatisation through in the first place was none other than the brilliant Chris Graybeing, whose tenure at the Department for Profitable Incarceration was also notable for his attempt to deprive prisoners of the opportunity to read books. Predictably, no-one is surprised.

Rah for the Rads

Most of the media seem to have neglected the first public engagement of the former Minister for Wog-Starving, now promoted to minister for corporate killing by more direct methods. The event in question was a superbly Gavin Williamson service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey to celebrate Britain's share in the United States' capacity for bestowing nuclear holocaust. Bruce Kent protested articulately in the Independent, and Steve Bell irradiated satirically in the Guardian, but neither paper seems to have run the story. The ceremony was mentioned at the BBC and the Tax-Haven Barclaygraph only because one of Mrs Battenberg's benefits-claiming boys was shouted at by some Russian fifth-columnists, even though he had only toddled along because a genocidal U-boat is to be named after a character in The King's Speech. Although the Gospels are clear enough that neither Christ nor His Father has anything against genocide in a good cause, a number of Anglican clerics apparently registered disapproval of the service.

Breakable Parole

Since the Government does not wish to waste police time on anything so trivial as national security, and since Cressida Dick of all people knows which side her dum-dums are buttered, there appears little chance of the posturing schoolboy Gavin Williamson being prosecuted. This is doubly unfortunate as little Gavin's sacking has precipitated another Cabinet reshuffle with the usual degree of new brooms, fresh insights and sparkling bristles. Penny Mordaunt, despite having inadvertently misled the taxpayer over Britain's influence in the EU, moves to the Ministry for Wog-Bombing from the Department for Wog Starvation, which of course constitutes less a change of position than a change of emphasis; while something called Rory has rather handily been shunted into Mordaunt's vacancy from the Ministry for Profitable Incarceration. The move helps Rory squirm out of an indiscreet pledge to resign if the human warehousing business failed to efficientise on his watch, and the Prison Officers' Association is taking a characteristically uncharitable view of the matter. Rory listened more than Michael Gove and understood more than Chris Graybeing; but even if there is no real prospect of Gavin Williamson being sent for a little "secure training" by those educative G4S people, there are worries that his successor may lack the ability or inclination to maintain these enviable standards.

This Little Piggie Had None

One of the best ways to forget our own misfortunes is to contemplate the lot of those less fortunate than ourselves; so those of us facing such minor inconveniences as poverty, homelessness or arbitrary deportation may find their lives slightly improved by considering the travails of Britain's late Head Boy. It seems he has been hoping someone will make his mark for him in the arena of international affairs, presumably in compensation for the howls of vulgar derision with which the lesser breeds greeted his efforts to toddle into the Foreign Office. Having apparently heard something to the effect that co-operation with the Heathen Chinee might be rather a jolly wheeze, the puce one has been agonising over the title for his memoirs and waiting strenuously for the beastly foreigners to come kowtowing to his shed's servants' entrance. Nevertheless, matters have so far failed to progress, except in the optimistic grunting and squealing of a spokesbeing for the great statesman's office. Possibly the Heathen Chinee are aware of the generally regrettable relationship between the late Head Boy's promises and his actions, from his burbling of sweet nothings about the NHS while waving his disabled child's corpse in the air, to his jowl-wobbling determination to see the Brexit process through no matter what, to the trail of regional stability whose centre is liberated Libya. Whatever the reasons behind this latest inscrutable subtlety of the Heathen Chinee, the Year of the Pig has thus far left Britain's late Head Boy looking quite the sorry little porker.