Choked With Mirth

A London coroner has risked being branded an enemy of the people and a mung-bean-munching tree-hugger by ruling that one of Boris Johnson's major legacies contributed to the needless expenditure of a pre-earning human resource. The coroner found that Ella Kissi-Debrah's fatal respiratory failure and severe asthma resulted in part from her lifetime exposure to air pollution in excess of World Health Organisation guidelines. Her death occurred in 2013, at the buccaneering height of Johnson's jolly stint as mayor of London, during which his amusingly libertarian approach led him to preside merrily over what the humourless Nazi Euro-wogs considered criminal levels of air pollution. Still, it wouldn't be a Boris story without a bright side, and the bright side in this case is that the child in question was not exactly Eton material, being only a female piccaninny with a watermelon smile and one of the surprising quantity of children not to have been fathered by Boris Johnson.