Moral Leadership

An anniversary ending in a zero is as good a time as any to encourage virtue in one's inferiors, and Her Madge Gawblesser has taken her accustomed dutiful approach to the opportunification. A jubilee scheme whereby plebs plant trees in Her Madge's name has received sponsorship from several corporate deforesters, and certain unpatriotic voices are already querying whether the likes of McDonald's, Rentokil and Drax are quite so committed to the battle of Britishness against climate change as their public-relations departments like to claim. For her own part, Her Madge has no objection to trees provided they keep in their place: she has planted more than fifteen hundred on other people's land, but prefers to reserve her own property for artificial moors where birds can be fattened to dimensions meet for the marksmanship of the chinless classes and their chums.