The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Peter Greenaway 1989

Greenaway's most prescient work of social realism since The Falls (1980) came out a decade into the Thatcherite revolution. It was made with Dutch money, presumably after British producers were horrified by its implication, in the early parts of the screenplay, that a genuine English businessman might be interested in foreign food.

An energetic, straight-talking entrepreneur with a robust sense of humour takes over the restaurant of an immigrant with a semi-permeable accent and holds buccaneering court there over several days. His surname, besides its obvious pun on "speaker," is an anagram of "aspic," a meat-based jelly used as a preservative and an obvious symbol of a culture trapped and immobile amid the gammon flab.

Albert buys in quantities of gaudy cutlery without thought for its quality, force-feeds dog excrement to one rival and scolds another for reading at table. His rival for vocal supremacy is a child whose melodic enunciations verge on the foreign in their stylised unintelligibility; his sexual rival is a librarian with an interest in European history, whom Albert suspects of being Jewish. The first is silenced by means of child torture, the second by being forced to choke on a vandalised history of the French revolution.

Sheltered by the immigrant, the lovers are eventually caught through a loan to the child of his choice of books. Such a naïve and outdated belief in culture, so relaxed an attitude to education, and such conceptions of choice as determined by unprofitable curiosity, were blatantly outdated in 1989 and today seem more surreal than either the cook's magic cavern of a kitchen or the wife's poetic revenge.

A more succinct summation of the present-day British psyche than the Spica couple could scarcely be conceived. While telling the dead Michael about Albert's crimes against her, Georgina briefly notes that she once ran away and, before being repatriated with an earful of false promises and then humiliated and beaten again, found temporary refuge in Brussels.

Never Decapitate a Posh Liar

Royal weddings, and the extravagant displays of clothing that accompany them, have been a little out of fashion since the Queen Gawblesser's grandson took up with that Negress; so the Museum of London has decided to merry up the monarchy a bit by displaying the sartorial relics of one of the realm's more worthless rulers. Like his father, Charles I believed in the divine right of kings; unlike his father, who had received some harsh lessons in the political realities at a very early age, Charles was neither shrewd nor discreet, believing along with luminaries such as Richard Nixon and Boris Johnson that laws are for little people. He lived down to the precept by repeatedly breaking his word to Parliament and eventually waging war against his own people; for which he was tried and executed as a tyrant, traitor and murderer. The undergarment which he wore for the occasion is to be displayed at the museum in commemoration of the good old days when Britons made their own entertainment: when riot and cruelty to animals lost their charm, there was often a public execution. The exhibition covers the the period from the end of the twelfth century to 1868, but Britain's leading liberal newspaper has found no other executions worthy of mention; least of all those of the men who signed the warrant for Charles, who were subjected to far slower and less humane deaths than the king's upon the restoration of his vindictive heir.

Robust British Fun Undermined from Within

Unelected enemies of the people have once more shown their lack of respect for Britain's thousand-year culture by ruling against the Government over a bit of harmless cripple-kicking. The Department of Workfare and Privation was appealing against a previous decision by some other enemies of the people, which determined that the DWP's action in effectively fining severely disabled people £180 a month for moving house was somehow illegal. If only the DWP had thought to treat all similarly disabled people with the same degree of contempt, it would have been perfectly in keeping with British justice; but in these buccaneering days the idea of equal treatment for the equally undeserving has rather fallen out of favour: Iain Duncan Smith is a laughing-stock and Boris Johnson is Prime Minister. Her Majesty's Government is now considering whether to order the supreme court to overturn the judgement and thus buy itself a little more time before the inevitable privatisation.

Freedom from Information

Aside from its obvious benefits as regards leaving the country poorer, meaner and stupider, it is arguable that the full advantages of the mainland's forthcoming independence from the Euro-wog yoke have not yet been clearly set out. Her Majesty's Government has consistently refused to release its own assessments of the likely consequences, apparently on the grounds that money isn't everything and that the sunlit uplands will be so transcendentally rah-rah that public rejoicing might fatally exceed the brief period which Mr Churchill deemed fitting for the undisciplined lower classes. Nevertheless, the Government did spaff a few dozens of millions on a Get Ready campaign, and has even thought up a new slogan for the day after withdrawal; the obvious one, Protect and Survive, is presumably being saved for next year. Almost every plucky little yeoman in Britain was exposed to the Get Ready campaign, and some visited the relevant fag-end of the government's website, which informed your correspondent that no preparations were necessary and which was regrettably taciturn about the schedule and quantity of forthcoming financial improvements. Now the pedants at the National Audit Office are complaining that there is little evidence of the public being any better informed, for all the world as if there were still some sort of place in British national policy for evidence and information. A more mature understanding was demonstrated by an expenses claimant for the former Deputy Conservative Party, who praised the campaign as "an expensive propaganda stunt designed ahead of the election to help no one but Boris Johnson stay in Number 10" and thus a soul-mate to all moderates, centrists, decents and sensibles who call Westminster their spiritual homeland.

Sanitary Inaction

Although Her Majesty's Government has made clear on numerous occasions that it considers British expatriates to be little better than immigrants, there are some who still haven't got the message. The beastly French, and others who share their Stalinistic interest in public health, are officiously making arrangements to evacuate their citizens from the midst of the disease-ridden Heathen Chinee; but the new, globally-minded independent Britain has correspondingly larger worries. It is all very well to bring a new virus into the country when the hated NHS has been suitably crippled and any deaths will most likely be among the financially undeserving; but what of the cultural damage to our thousand-year kingdom from those who have lived among the Heathen Chinee and very possibly gone native?

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Carnassials cxliii-clxvii

As the epidemic continued, however, the work of transporting the dead was bestowed upon inferior citizens, whose sensibilities were insufficiently refined to be offended by close contact with bloated and soulless flesh. Those who died in poverty were placed in the community lime-pits, and their surviving relatives were charged a special dissolution tax to ease the clergy's grief over the loss of revenue on mausoleum space.

The exequies of those who died wealthy were rather more elaborate, with specially scrubbed mourners marching behind the coffin and exuding the mingled odours of sanctity and carbolic soap. Behind them walked the relatives in order of precedence, all clad in funereal puce and urging the Creator of the universe to admit the deceased into paradise while continuing to withhold that privilege from the bereaved. Behind the bereaved, at an appropriately spiritual distance, walked a member of the clergy, his face hidden behind the ritual mask from which, thanks to the rites of purification, the odour of carbolic wafted even more strongly than from the specially scrubbed.

In this instance the mausoleum was a tastefully bladed cupcake of bashed basalt, with battlements frogged and filigreed in reverent magenta. Here the procession halted and the coffin was carried inside, to be placed within the grave hastily dug beneath the luminous pink floorboards. The more illustrious dead were usually shelved until they had rotted sufficiently to be sealed in sacred urns and kept on the mantelpiece and occasionally waved about for curative purposes; but the epidemic had proven itself resistant to traditional medicine and sacrifices were required even from the deceased.

But before the propitiations had been proclaimed or the mysteries mumbled, the inferior citizens fled shrieking from the tomb. The specially scrubbed shook their heads in disapproval, and the clergyman gave vent to a carbolic-scented anathema upon the follies of the ignorant and superstitious. Entering the mausoleum in a state of exalted moral indignation, they found the floorboards taken up and the grave almost neatly dug, with the Father of Teeth sitting on the edge. He was picking his third-yellowest dentures with a splinter of bone and whimsically dangling his unspeakable feet.

"What is the meaning of this outrage?" demanded the clergyman.
"I'm not outraged," said the Father of Teeth.
"You have outraged our culture and community," said the clergyman. "by interfering in the necessary and rightful interment of a respectable citizen."
"I have spared the community a health risk," said the Father of Teeth, "by removing from its midst some highly infectious matter. It's arguably more pious to get rid of such stuff as rapidly as possible, before the fatal miasma it exudes has time to penetrate the holy carbolic."
"I trust the service was to your satisfaction," said the clergyman, after a sudden intake of breath caused no doubt by some unforeseen importunity of the spirit.
"What matters most in such cases," said the Father of Teeth, with a belch that ricocheted around the tomb most sonorously, "is the quality of the dish, not the quality of the waiters."

No Darkies on the Climate Front

If there's one thing infotainment consumers absolutely cannot stand, it's an ill-balanced composition in a press photograph. More than mere omission or falsehood in the text, more even than the legalistic intricacies of ensuring that both casual and ideological racists get a fair crack of the whip, an off-centre picture can result in complaints, cancelled subscriptions and, in the worst cases, legal actions and social media trigger warnings. Hence the commendable caution exercised by Associated Press in removing from a picture of climate activists at Davos a dazzling white building, which distracted the eye and gave undue weight to the left. The fact that an African activist was also removed, leaving four Caucasians in harmonious balance with the pictorial ecology, constituted no more than a benign coincidence. While Africa has so far contributed little to the causes of the climate emergency, it is highly vulnerable to the effects; which means that African climate activists can hardly be in business from the most lily-white motives anyway.

Doing Well By Doing Good

We are all aware, because that Churchillian historiographer Boris Johnson has proclaimed it, that the real "tragedy of Africa" was the white man being forced to lay down his burden too soon. Fortunately for the piccaninny powers, the Johnson administration is ready to make due restitution for the world-historical error of decolonisation, which was forced upon the civilising nations by noisy welfare-state lefties and the Nazi-Soviet appeasers in the Brusso-Strasbourgian Politbunker. This very week the People's Haystack opened an investment summit with a rah-and-blah about sending electro-convulsive lightning bolts through the renewables industry, which he evidently considers ripe for lobotomy. Meanwhile, the Dark Continent is to be taught the rudiments of extracting oil and gas, to be used of course in the cleanest and greenest way possible given current economic realities and the requirements of market forces. Token funding of a few clean energy projects can safely be left to that perennial mark, the British taxpayer, who will soon be righteously demanding why that rather pitiful fifty million couldn't have been spent on preventing floods in Brexitannia or deporting more wogs.

Crowning Triumph

The Heathen Chinese
Have got a disease;
All over the globe it is moving,
While ministers bless
Our great NHS
With terminal bouts of improving.

Now doomed British proles
Can die in their holes,
With valour and honour unswerving
According to station
And leave this great nation
Exclusively for the deserving.

Mickey Bedpan

Beastly Barrister Snubs Sterner Sentencing

One of the main problems with mere experts, aside from their tendency to let the weight of mere facts warp their loyalty to the Government, is their habit of treating simple headline-grabbing proposals as though they were meant to solve actual problems. The People's Haystack has pledged to win War on Terror II by Christmas with his Churchillian scheme for subjecting terrorists to lie detector tests and forcing them to spend more time in the penal warehousing system, where they can learn the rudiments of a useful tax-free trade in the recreational substances industry. Nevertheless, rather than doing his duty for Queen and Cummings by providing appropriate rah-rah, the Government's adviser has maintained a laser-like focus on the mere facts that the polygraph is unreliable and that most terrorism offenders have been stopped short of committing actual terrorism. He even seems to think that Britain's security forces should engage in research, rather than fulfilling their proper function as messenger boys for the Trumpster administration; so it will come as no surprise that he also seems to believe that sentencing should be carried out by unelected enemies of the people just because they happen to know a bit about the law. It would of course be uncharitable in the extreme to infer that Boris Johnson, of all people, might have his own reasons for preferring lie detectors that don't work.

Miracle on Route 93

Vulnerable to the blandishments of Satan thanks to centuries of atheistic Muslim propaganda under the recent Kenyan occupation, Pennsylvania state police have arrested a woman for asking until it was given, seeking until it was found and knocking until it was opened. Specifically, it appears that upon the day after Epiphany she travelled the highway for some hours until God was persuaded to take a moment from running the Universe and indulge in a bit of back-seat driving; whereupon He guided her into the opposite lane and crashed her into an oncoming car. The petitioner and two of the other car's three occupants were injured; yet instead of giving thanks for God's mercy in not turning the incident into an apocalyptic pile-up, the earthly powers of Pennsylvania are acting for all the world as if the woman had done something irresponsible. Even in a country where trust in God is sacred enough to be flaunted on the currency, it seems the secular arm can sometimes get ideas above its station.

Outrage Upon Outrage

We are used to the lesser breeds' inability to remember who won the World Wars; but who could have imagined anyone forgetting the War of the Spanish Succession? Britain's victory in that noble conflict, without even American help, would have placed a Habsburg prince on the Spanish throne had not the British betrayed his candidacy at the last minute, possibly on the grounds that his anti-Gypsy policies were as yet insufficiently genocidal. In the confusion Britain filched a big stone with monkeys on it, some of whose descendants are now embroiled in a bizarre conspiracy to make themselves slightly foreign. Gibraltar, which voted against the British people in 2016, is exacerbating its guilt with crypto-Iberian noises about joining the Schengen area. Should the treacherous plot succeed, visiting Britons would have to defile themselves applying for visas and paying fees, for all the world as if they were immigrants trying to stay in their own British homes. It is to be hoped that Her Majesty's Government's fellow far-rightists in Vienna will remember their nation's historic debt of honour, should Britain now be minded to seek back-up from the Austrian navy.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Daniel 6 xxiv-xxviii

Having attained high rank under the kings of Babylon, Daniel falls victim to the malice of other officials who manipulate his patron King Darius into throwing him into a lions' den. God protects Daniel through the night, and Darius has the accusers cast into the den along with their wives and children, whose bones are broken in pieces. The king praises God and Daniel prospers.

God's addiction to collective punishment of the most violent sort is once again demonstrated in His evident contentment with the execution of the wives and children. As theologians concerned with moral and spiritual rather than historical truths, we cannot permit ourselves the relativist evasion that such punishments were customary in the ancient world; nor can we rationalise away the problem by denying the literal meaning of the text. Women and children are placed among lions and all the bones in their bodies are broken, while the desire for mercy over sacrifice occurs neither to God nor to his prophet; and as a result God is praised and His prophet prospers.

Nor may we truthfully state that the New Testament overrules or contradicts the morals of the Old; God's enthusiasm for mass murder is as consistent and unalterable as the law of the Medes and Persians. The only notable difference is that Jesus proclaimed even harsher measures as the penalty for somewhat smaller derelictions than attempting the felid-facilitated demotion of a rival courtier.

Culture Wars: A Ameaça Fantasma

Brazil's aspirations to the exalted cultural status of Bozza's Brexitannia or the Trumpster's MAGA-Murca have suffered a setback with the sacking of Jair Bolsonaro's culture secretary. A religious lunatic who not only believes that rock music encourages abortion and Satanism but appears to find something undesirable in the idea, Roberto Alvim spouted some right-wing platitudes about culture which echoed similar platitudes by Goebbels. The fact that he spoke to the music of Lohengrin, "said to be Hitler's favourite opera," didn't help matters, even though Hitler's favourite opera is also said to be Rienzi. Alvim was announcing an arts prize for exhibitions in which "virtues of faith, loyalty, self-sacrifice and the fight against evil will be raised to the sacred territory of works of art," which proved too much even for other right-wingers. Presumably works of art was the phrase that made them release the safety catch on their Brownings; if Alvim had only thought to say children's stories instead, he might not only have kept his sinecure but raised Brazilian culture to the heights of George Lucas and James Bond.

Not Playing the Game

Despite their long and hilarious history of losing wars with the mainland, it seems the beastly Euro-wogs still have not learned to show dignity in defeat. Departing MEPs will receive neither a medallion nor a redundancy payment, thanks to the Brusso-Strasbourgian Nazi-Soviet Politbunker's continuing refusal to recognise Britain's hard-earned immunity from EU law and practice. Former independence fighters had been agitating for a flag-lowering ceremony to echo what one victorious Résistant called "that India moment, or Hong Kong." Presumably he was referring to the British Empire flouncing off in a huff and letting the lesser breeds sort themselves out, rather than to the Government simply running out of money (India) or, worse yet, standing by a treaty (Hong Kong). However, the beastly Euro-wogs have issued a diktat that the Brexiteers must keep their nasty little rah-rah to indulge after their auto-deportation at the end of the month, and have even threatened to put the Union Jack in a museum, as if the country of Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Jacob Rees-Mogg were somehow out of date. Fortunately, since the trade negotiations have been cunningly set to a hopelessly unrealistic timetable, due punishment for such unconstructive attitudes is undoubtedly soon to follow.

A Murmuration of Britishness

Two hundred dead starlings were discovered littering a road in Anglesey last month, doubtless prompting many helpful theories as to the cause. Mere experts have now thrust their hard, unpleasant beaks into the matter and announced that the birds most likely did not die from anything so plausible as Russian novichok poisoning, EU red tape, Labour antisemitism or the endlessly brewing racial malice of the Duchess of Sussex. Instead, it seems they died from impact trauma, suggesting that the flock encountered a predator which might have killed one or two of them, and took evasive action which involved a couple of hundred at the rear making a kamikaze raid on the tarmac. In this context it would certainly be churlish in the extreme to point out that Anglesey voted for independence from the Brusso-Strasbourgian yoke; while any attempt to traduce the infallible patriotic instinct for averting an inconvenience by inducing a catastrophe would no doubt be positively treasonous.

Ever Wider Hostility

Few criminals, even foreign criminals, are more insidious than those who haven't got around to committing any crimes; so British patriots will note with gladness and relief the Government's extension of the hostile environment to immigrants who don't live in Britain. An Indian who was brazen enough to work, pay taxes and even help the homeless in the UK was sent a Wogs Go Home letter from the Home Office, despite having sneaked off to Germany during the very centenary of Britain's victory in the First World War. Had a friend not been living at his former address and picked up the letter, he might easily have gained a criminal record and been deported from the EU: although Her Majesty's Government clearly considers mere give and take a filthy foreign habit unworthy of a trading nation, in cases of dusky complexion the Ministry for Wog Control might condescend to stretch a point. In this case, however, it appears the necessary moral fibre was lacking. After only a little more than a month, a Ministry underling oozed out the usual subjunctive apology "for any inconvenience this may have caused," since the sensibilities of the Asiatic swarms have yet to prove themselves refined enough to be inconvenienced in objective reality. By way of recompense, Her Majesty's Government granted its magnanimous permission, should he choose to accept it, for the culprit to return to the UK and place himself once more at the Ministry's mercy.

Our Best Export

Whatever legitimate and understandable concerns may persist among the British yeomanry about the insidious evils of sharia destabilising our thousand-year kingdom, it is clear that British values remain alive and well among Whitehall's favourite moderate fundamentalist head-choppers. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's pledge to minimise the use of capital punishment has been fulfilled in spectacularly British fashion, with a record number of executions last year including, on one law-and-order gala occasion, thirty-seven in a single day. Many of the death sentences were imposed on the basis of confessions extracted in a manner of which the British Home and Wog Control Office would be proud; some were imposed on people arrested as children for the very British crime of proposing radical solutions to serious problems. Doubtless it is a measure of the universal and enduring nature of British values that nobody in the head-chopping House of Saud seems to be complaining.

The All-New, All-You, Full-Colour Holocaust Reboot

Oh, but why stop there? If it's relevance and humanity you want, why not deck out the site itself as a theme park: special trains, a new dimension to the queueing experience (twins half-price, courtesy of Dr Mengele), a tour of the gasworks and then off to the restaurant and souvenir shop. By the hundredth anniversary of the liberation, by which time such elder statesbeings as Dominic Raab and Michael Gove will doubtless be complaining that Mr Churchill's personal role has been much underestimated thanks to the beastly Russians and their fifth column among the historiographical élite, we may even have the resources to raise the dead from the lime-pits and let them toddle authentically about the place on minimum wage.

Even the Christian churches, which rank among the most blatantly materialistic and cynically showy enterprises in European history, have managed to grasp the idea that the way to keep something sacred is to leave it alone. That's why those inefficient Communists and philosemitic Catholics demolished the Führerbunker and left Auschwitz I (the Polish part) standing, despite the future potential for ticket sales at both. Now that Auschwitz has been humanised, for those who cannot detect humanity in monochrome, by transformation into a showcase for a special effect, what relevance will it have that it lacked before - other than to give the deniers yet further proof that these days you can fake anything?

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: II Pulp cxiv-cxxviii

In an unrelated capacity, therefore, the Father of Teeth found himself on the way to a prestigious social function in the company of a wealthy lady. Compressed carbon glittered in her earlobes, and her shoulders were sheathed in the poisonous pelts of exotically toxic raccoons. She was a masterpiece of the primper's art, and the Father of Teeth held her saggy elbow reverently in the less hideously gnarled of his claws, because it stopped her from rattling too loudly as she stepped over the paupers sleeping in the street.

"Alas," the wealthy lady lamented as she minced, "what has happened to these people?"
"Bad luck, mostly," said the Father of Teeth. "One of the Creator's more reliable innovations."
"No, that can't be it," said the wealthy lady, "for if luck were involved, these jewels and furs of mine would be the repayment for my personal virtues in only the most limited and contingent sense, while in another and larger sense they might be considered little more than the leavings of mere chance. No creature endowed with a moral sense could live under such conditions, therefore it is plainly impossible."
"Well then," said the Father of Teeth, escorting her around a sleeper whose wheelchair made him a particularly inconvenient obstacle, "what has happened to these people?"
"They have lost all enterprise, all sense of the art of life," the wealthy lady said. "In olden times the poor entertained their betters with song and dance, with juggling and repartee, or with wrestling matches in which bones were broken, eyes gouged out and various animal species amusingly mistreated. These days there are no minstrels, no jesters or troubadours, and the only animals we see are these mangy idlers. A person of taste once said that one must play one's part well on the stage of life, otherwise the gods will throw things. It's no wonder the poor are so wretched these days, as they've forgotten their duty to the galleries."

Her various dewlaps wobbled so alarmingly that the Father of Teeth caused a curtain of velvet darkness to descend upon her, and made of himself a peep-hole through which she could look upon the gods. Immediately she did so, the carbon in her earlobes liquefied and trickled down her neck, while the dye ran screaming from her hair.

"You see now the quality of your audience," said the Father of Teeth, inserting his most glittering fangs. "Not a very friendly crowd, unimaginative and anything but charitable. Stage blood does not amuse them, and fake pain makes no impression." The hole in the darkness grinned, and extruded a furred and yellow tongue which yanked on a golden rope; the curtain ascended with a rattle, and a howl of anticipation went up from the cheap seats.

Boris Bus Checksum Error

Buses are a bit of an issue for the People's Haystack. Before the notorious promise of £350 million a week for the NHS, there was the New Routemaster: one of several vanity projects forced into mewling, abortive existence at the taxpayer's expense while the Haystack was playing at being mayor of London. The New Routemasters were commissioned to replace double-length, single-decker "bendy buses" which supposedly encouraged fare-dodging; they were to have lots of doors and a conductor to take your threepenny bits although, true to the spirit of the mayor whose vision of the London Underground was driverless trains travelling between staff-free stations, the conductors were quickly sacked. The new buses proved unpopular with passengers, who tended to broil in warm weather; if the Haystack had any noticeable head for details one might suspect a deliberate strategy to punish the plebs for being too idle to afford chauffeured limousines. Naturally, it now turns out that the New Routemasters facilitate fare-dodging at twice the rate of less rah-rah models, and I am sure we can all be confident that the promise of a Brexit dividend for the NHS will turn out at least equally well.

Cow and Chicken and the Big Orange Guy

Britain's beef-eaters will be safe from hormonally-inflated American imports, and connoisseurs of poultry will not be required to consume chickens whose cleaning extends no further than a quick dunk in a swimming-pool, according to the Environment Secretary. Although Theresa Villiers has had precious little to say about the climate crisis, the flooding crisis or the continuing illegal levels of urban air pollution, she was happy to surprise the BBC's Countryfile audience by re-stating the provisions of the Brexit withdrawal process. These provisions have, after all, only been discussed for the past three and a half years, so it is quite understandable that the great British public hasn't quite fathomed the complexities yet. EU rules will remain in place when Britain formally withdraws at the end of the month; there will follow a transition period during which the Government will flap around without the inconvenience of parliamentary scrutiny, and in December the People's Haystack will order the Parliamentary Brexit Party to vote through whatever the EU has seen fit to bestow upon him, or else he will take it upon himself to crash the country out with no deal at all and thereby formally take the British economy into the Third World. The EU's food hygiene and animal welfare standards will undoubtedly join the National Health Service in Bozza's bargain basement, if during the flapping-around stage a tiny tangerine paw should happen to be waved in a fashion hinting that such is the will of the Trumpster as determined by his hydrophobic head-tribble.

The End Justifies the Meanness

Even among the beastly Euro-wogs, the realisation appears to be dawning at last that Brexit really does mean Brexit. The standard definition - all the privileges of membership and none of the obligations - is of course also the Whitehall definition of membership, as a report into Her Majesty's Government's abuse of the Schengen police database makes clear. Although the Recrudescent Imperium has never condescended to membership of the disgustingly border-free Schengen zone, the Government has been given access to the information system owing to a malignant Euro-wog delusion of common cause in fighting crime and finding missing people. As long as there is a single child refugee waiting to steal British jobs, the mainland's border guards will always have better things to do than entangle themselves in Brusso-Strasbourgian red tape. Besides the usual disinclination towards reciprocity with lesser breeds, the UK is also suspected of illegally copying parts of the database and handing them over to its masters in the United States; it remains as yet unclear whether the relevant departments being in the hands of people whose idea of a password is "password" may count as a mitigating circumstance.

The Faceless Face of Humanitarianism

For the second year running, the International Rescue Committee has put Yemen at the top of its annual list of countries most likely to face humanitarian catastrophe. Thanks to the ongoing compassion and mercy of Her Majesty's Government's favourite fundamentalist head-choppers, it is estimated that about eighty per cent of the people will be in need of humanitarian assistance, and another five years of the same could cost £22,000 million, though not to anyone who matters. The Elder Milibeing, who heads the IRC and seems to be nearly as memorable a fund-raiser as he was a government minister, did a bit of hand-wringing about the human suffering and proclaimed, for anyone who might be in doubt, that somebody ought to do something about it. The Elder Milibeing does not appear to have specified how many more of the countries on the IRC's list have been basking in the ministrations of Britain's wealth creators and their friends; and such was the profundity on display that Britain's leading liberal newspaper never thought to wonder.

Old English Cooking

Heatwaves in England over the past four years have contributed to the deaths of over three and a half thousand mostly elderly people, including almost nine hundred last summer alone, according to a report by mere experts at Public Health England. Climate researchers and even a few seat-warmers in the House of Expenses Claimants have warned that Britain is failing to adapt to climate change; a heatwave plan for England has been in place since the third elective miracle of the Incarnated Blair but, being suited neither for profiteering nor for wog-bombing, has apparently made little difference. Fortunately, the Government cares almost as much about public health as it does about the climate emergency; nevertheless, English patriots may one day be duly grateful for the Prime Minister's prodigious yet modestly concealed procreative exploits. A significant decline in the population could easily encourage the heresy that we might find room for a couple of dozen more child refugees, with the usual devastating consequences for our thousand-year tradition of world-beating entrepreneurial buccaneeritude.

Backing Vocals

Having punished Iran for co-operation by withdrawing from the nuclear treaty and assassinating government officials, the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble now intend punishing Iran for non-co-operation by using Islamic State measures against the legacy of peoples more civilised than themselves. Her Majesty's Government has hinted obliquely that the Recrudescent Imperium would go along with such tactics, extruding a spokesbeing to make polite sniggering noises about international conventions. Concerning the terrorist bombing at Baghdad International Airport, the spokesbeing deemed it legal on the grounds of America's precognitive talents, which have so often proved their use in self-defence against threats which make up in imminence and severity what they lack in mere worldly existence. Although the Trumpster did not deign to inform his little yap-dog of the head-tribble's cunning plan, the People's Haystack has apparently been made a prefect, for he was given the very important task of urging his fellow underling in Iraq to keep calm and carry on with the fight against the Islamic Sons of Tony. It remains as yet unclear whether the Johnson side of this conversation partook more of "If–" or "The White Man's Burden."

Bad Theology

Text for today: I Kings 11 i-xiii

King Solomon's reign draws to a close in diplomatic triumph and religious tolerance, with the royal household graced by wives and concubines from all over the world. In ancient society, royal marriages were essentially treaties between ruling families, and the vast number of Solomon's wives is therefore a symbol of his willingness and skill in speaking peace to other nations. However, despite the wealth and prestige which this openness has brought to His chosen people, to say nothing of its likely financial contribution towards the First Temple, God is displeased with Solomon.

Solomon was the son of David and Bathsheba, whom David famously acquired by disposing of her husband on the swords of the Ammonites. Characteristically, God tempered might with magnanimity by inflicting His punishment not on the adulterous couple but on their first child, appointing the prophet Nathan as palace abortionist. Nathan warned David that the sword would never depart from his house, and it is no doubt in order to fulfil this prophecy that God inflicts Solomon's own punishment on David and Bathsheba's grandson Rehoboam. God rubs the message in with His usual hob-nailed sense of justice by willing it that Solomon choose an Ammonite for Rehoboam's mother.

Under Rehoboam's rule God divides the kingdom of Israel, having first plagued Solomon's death-bed with mutterings about the consequences of fraternising with beastly immigrants and copying their nasty foreign ways. Rehoboam is permitted to keep a single tribe for himself, apparently because God has equity in Jerusalem which He is as yet disinclined to liquidate. Solomon's example was not forgotten by God's true son, who ordered His disciples to live like birds or plant life while comparing Solomon's glory unfavourably to the latter.

Burdens of Leadership

The Trumpster's Minister for Gook-Splattering has registered a certain annoyance with the beastly Euro-wogs for greeting the assassination of Qassem Suleimani with insufficient enthusiasm. Regional partners such as the head-chopping House of Saud and the Trumpster's fellow wall-builders in the Righteous State have apparently paid due homage; but the response from France and Germany has been lacking in zeal. Despite his diplomatic acuity and personal refinement, the Trumpster's Minister for Gook-Splattering naturally has little time or inclination to distinguish between minor nationalities, which presumably accounts for his carelessness in referring to Her Majesty's Government as European. A less relaxed government might well construe such ignorance as deriving from the wrong kind of racism; no doubt the People's Haystack will hasten to forgive the faux pas as soon as the demands of being on holiday permit him.

Indignant Virtue

Even in the Not Awfully Bright Party an occasional penny may drop, if only by the law of averages or instability of the pound sterling. The ludicrous Sayeeda Warsi has been vaguely worried about Islamophobia almost since she lost her position as Pigsticker Dave's token darkie chairbeing; and now one Tom Tugendhat seems to be suffering a bit of cognitive dissonance, if cognitive is the word I want, about Britain's standing in the ranks of global bullies. Apparently the Trumpster administration did not see fit to inform Her Majesty's Government of its intention to rally the anti-impeachment troops by starting a fight with Iran, despite Mr Churchill's having won the war and so forth. There are reports that the People's Haystack was unaware of the plan to assassinate Qassem Suleimani; although since the People's Haystack is busy being on holiday, this does not necessarily mean he wasn't told. Tom Tugendhat, who chaired the foreign affairs committee in the last parliament, has gone whining to the BBC that the Allies aren't treating him with the respect he considers his due, and that this is sad and a bit of a shame and a matter of concern to Tom Tugendhat. In the face of such an onslaught of statesmanship, we can only hope that the Trumpster administration will have the sense to mend its ways.

Take a Large Hoe and a Shovel Also

It has been some time since Her Majesty's Government pledged to bestow "parity of esteem" upon mental as compared with physical health problems; or in Standard English, to treat both with similar neglect, at least as far as the hated NHS is concerned. If a survey of GPs by the mental health charity Stem4 is to be believed, the results are much as one would expect: such is the Conservative Party's esteem for mental health that more than forty per cent of doctors are advising parents of afflicted children to pay for private care. "Parents whose child has cancer or a serious physical health condition would never have to pay for private care," commented the founder of Stem4, who clearly underestimates what parity of esteem may yet achieve in NHS efficiency savings. Doubtless our approaching liberation from the Euro-wog yoke will offer more opportunities to tackle the matter in a proper British fashion, with the reintroduction of National Service and the removal of all those nasty, oppressive restrictions on child labour. Meanwhile, the offspring of real people may be permitted anxiety, self-harm, eating disorders and depression; among the less deserving, such complaints merely indicate a lack of sufficient moral fibre to hire a proper nanny.

Cultural Coin

Aside from the inevitable numismatic rah-rah for Mr Churchill's triumph over the proto-Brussels menace (not peace, not never again, but victory will be the inscription), the Royal Mint has plans to immortalise one or two other cultural milestones in the sacred medium of currency. Naturally, there will be honours for the expected perpetrators of VJ Day in the Tokyo Olympics; and the demise of King George III will be celebrated with a five-pounder to mark the bicentennial of a much-loathed, obscenely rich drunken fatty's graduation from mere regency to supreme power. While 2020 will be the bicentennial of Melmoth the Wanderer and the centenary of at least two other significant events in British literature (namely the birth of the author of Shardik and The Girl in a Swing, and the publication of A Voyage to Arcturus), a two-pound coin will be issued to commemorate a bestseller. Similarly in keeping with the times, another two-pound coin will memorialise the departure of a hundred and two heavily-armed Christian souls for their part in God's genocide of America's lesser breeds.