Britishness Unboxed

Fanatical forces of woke subversion are conspiring to undermine a long-gestating rah-rah for the creativity of a master race no longer boxed in by red tape, migrant hordes, international treaties or mere facts. Though Her Majesty's most patriotic Government anticipated that the festival would attract slightly more than the population of the United Kingdom, with two months to go visitors have yet to exceed the population of Islngton. The chief creative officer claims that he only assumed the mantle after ministers assured him that he would not be expected to produce anything jingoistic, much less Brexitannic; which must have been even more believable while Mad Tessie May was fulminating against citizens of nowhere than it is now. So corrupted has the event become that it has attracted ten avant-garde projects, all of which are explicitly against the eternal British values of freedom to bully and tolerance of intolerance. One of them even goes so far as to be French, prompting anonymous spokesbeings from the Department for Cultchah, Murdoch and That 1966 World Cup to complain that the whole business doesn't seem to know its place.

Censorship by Lack of Omission

Once more the entrepreneurial glories of England's island story are to suffer the horrors of woke historical revisionism. City councillors in Edinburgh have unanimously accepted the recommendations of a report on the city's links with the Atlantic slave trade. A formal apology will be made, and although statues will not be taken down and street names will not be altered the public will be informed, if you please, about the necessary sacrifices which colonialism and slavery imposed upon the lesser breeds. Even so, the perpetrator of the report let slip his malignant motivations with the claim that "many people say 'we weren’t there, it wasn’t our doing'," thereby dismissing from history the relentless purple legions of Rothermere Daily Stürmer readers who are still fighting two world wars to protect Britain's borders from the beastly migrant hordes. We didn't get where we are today by keeping people informed, you know.

A Tainted Line

An outbreak of naval Britishness has paralysed NATO's wog-bombing flagship a day out from Portsmouth. Her Majesty's Ship Prince of Wales, the incestuous transsexual sister of HMS Queen Elizabeth, fell prey to its latest difficulty as it was due to deploy across the Atlantic for an arctic rah-rah with the World Cop and some other chums. The current trouble is far from the first to beset the unlucky vessel which, in the glorious British tradition of submarines that are blind underwater and armoured vehicles that can't move and shoot at the same time, tends to succumb to waterproofing issues when placed upon the ocean. As a result, during its first two years in service HMS Prince of Wales spent less than three months at sea, despite being named after an expensive old crock who has been adrift for seventy-three years.

Healthy Realism

As on a number of previous occasions, the Bishop of Rome has found it necessary to correct an error of the Saviour's. On a visit to L'Aquila, where God played one of His little pranks thirteen years ago, the Pope praised the humility of his thirteenth-century predecessor Celestine V, a masochistic anchorite who was elected in desperation following two years of argumentative deadlock. Having made much of his reluctance to accept the office, Celestine resigned after five months, and his humility so impressed his successor that he threw Celestine into the clink for the rest of his life. The idea that Celestine showed humility in relinquishing power rather than in wielding it may come as a surprise to those acquainted with the Saviour's dictum that the greatest of all should be the servant of all; but it seems the Messiah's grasp of Catholic doctrine had its shaky points even beyond His notorious prejudice against worldly wealth.

A Healthy Balance

Despite Her Majesty's Government's filleting of the international aid budget, which is intended to incentivise the world's more idle nations with the benign goad of treatable yet untreated illness, Togo has been stamping out neglected tropical diseases for more than a decade. As might be expected from a former colony of the beastly French, the west African country has been so disobliging as to try and usurp Britain's world-beating status as a hardy hotspot hub of thrusting scientific pluck, and has even received an award from the sovereignty-sapping bureaucrats at the World Health Organisation for eliminating four out of a set of twenty preventable conditions which tend to be neglected in health budgets. It's all the more fortunate, therefore, that the master race is on hand to compensate for the Togolese expulsion of trachoma, Guinea worm, lymphatic filariasis and sleeping sickness with some old-fashioned British hospitality towards polio, rickets and cholera.

Finally Facing Our Loo Water

Britain's new-found independence from the Strasbrussels yoke has predictably infuriated the beastly French, some of whom appear to believe that the English Channel has more than one undisputed owner. A conspiracy of unelected bureaucrats posing as elected representatives has blatantly requested the European Commission to seek political and legal measures with the explicit purpose of undermining Britain's world-beating water companies. Of course, even when subject to the Euro-wog Diktat plucky little Britain was never afraid to ditch the clean crap, as at least one little piccaninny might testify were she still alive. However, even now that Britain is free to impose ever stricter rules which somehow result in ever more laxative standards, unhelpful and ill-informed comments may yet serve to distract an incautious populace from the warm brown shades at the seaside and the interesting new flavours of their shellfish.

Back to the Eighties

Market forces have responded to the energy crisis with their customary efficiency, bearing forth the spirit of the sainted Thatcher by massacring the small business sector whose aspirational values supposedly animated her shrivelled Poujadist heart. In a superb access of Britishness, the energy cartel which has made prices unaffordable is now refusing contracts to business customers on the grounds that they might not be able to pay. Since many enterprises are expected to go bust, the energy companies are extorting five-figure kickbacks as a reward for deigning to consider them. Particularly grandiose savings are anticipated in the hospitality sector, implying that Britain's service economy may soon be subject to the kind of benign and cleansing restructure which the old bag herself imposed on the enemies within during days of yore.

And Did Those Feet, in Ancient Time

Presumably owing to the continuing laxity of its abortion laws, the Christian state of Texas is experiencing a severe drought. Big-government restrictions on water use, imposed by the anti-Trumpster conspirators in Washington, have caused the Paluxy River to dry up almost entirely, exposing rocks which mere geologists implausibly claim are more than a hundred and thirteen million years old. Anticipating this insulting overestimate of His creation's longevity, God has imprinted the river bed with fake lizard tracks in order to test His gasping faithful. Scarcely less likely is the possibility that the tracks date from after the first six days, having been left by a fifteen-foot-tall, seven-ton chicken as it stomped the antediluvian mud in search of Noah's ark. Whatever the physical explanation for the footprints, it is probably safe to assume that their moral significance to the Christian state of Texas will include lower taxes, more guns and more coathangers.

Moderately Helpful

After all the extremist rhetoric that has marred Britain's struggle for independence from the Strasbrussels yoke, it's reassuring to observe that Her Majesty's Government may have resumed at least one of the more sensible policies from the golden age of Blairite moderation. The Hindu nationalist government in India has imprisoned a Briton in connection with Sikh nationalism, and Britain's intelligence services have been accused in the high court of colluding in his unlawful arrest and torture. Britain's National Johnson was just about able to acknowledge the arbitrariness of the man's four and a half years of detention without charge, and to refrain from quoting Churchill on the beastliness of the Indian race; but since no death sentence has yet been passed, the business of getting it increased must be left to his successor. It may not be quite so glamorous as helping the World Cop fill up Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo Bay; but it's still good clean fun.

Red Meat

On 7 September Brazil will celebrate the bicentennial of its independence from Portugal, and Jair Bolsonaro will mark the occasion by according full military honours to a lump of dead flesh. In keeping with the Roman Catholic fetish for souvenirs in the Ed Gein style, the heart of Emperor Pedro I was extracted after his untimely death and pickled in formaldehyde, to be hoarded in a golden urn by priests at a Portuguese church. The urn has now been dispatched to South America, where the Boris Johnson of Brasilia will pay it hypocritical homage before placing it on seventeen days' public display at the foreign ministry. A liberal monarch who respected the constitution and planned to phase out slavery, Pedro represented everything Bolsonaro hates; but it is hoped that the relic will conjure up the emperor's "bravery, passion and immeasurable strength" rather than anything so worldly and vulgar as his politics.

Modesty Forbids

As with Christian charity and its persistent non-application to infidels, blasphemers, shirkers and Christians of the wrong denomination, Christian humility has always been a conditonal sort of business. Even so prodigal a fount of hypocrisy as the Church of England demonstrably finds it difficult to maintain a modest façade while preaching faith in an omnipotent deity who takes a personal interest in preparing one for eternal life and who conveniently happens to share one's more uncharitable opinions about women and gays. Nevertheless, councillors in the Cornish town of St Austell have been surprised to receive an epistle from local church leaders claiming to know the mind of God. The pretext for this particular orgasm was a piece of public art, a thirty-seven-foot ceramic totem pole pinned in place by a plastic sword; the source of the holy men's indignation is its title, intended to celebrate that Earth which the God of Genesis supposedly thought rather good. However, the Earth's designation as a female risks hinting to the Deity that His attentions may not be required: a position which is "offensive to God" and which will presumably be credited with whatever plagues, floods, poverty and other manifestations of divine benevolence should happen to smite the town of St Austell, the county of Cornwall, the nation of England and Creation at large over the next few decades. One of the town councillors responded with a quotation from St Paul, who was humble enough to claim no more for his faction than possession of the mind of Christ. Whether this citing of Scripture for the devil's purpose has had any calming effect remains as yet unclear.

A Truce in the Great Game

Although Britain's latest expulsion from Afghanistan was famously marked by solicitude for animal shelter inmates, our plucky little nation has been notably more cautious in tightening the lip of toleration towards the bipedal lesser breeds. A former senior judge, in hiding from the Taliban in Pakistan after her Kabul home was attacked and some of her colleagues assassinated, was recently given the standard treatment by the Ministry for Wog Control, and her legal representatives are now appealing the decision. The refusal of the bench-stealing migrant's initial application may be credited to the Ministry's famously fathomless administrative competence; but her own lawyers made the elementary tactical error of citing the European court of human rights, whose more provoking provisions include the wholly un-British right to respect for private life. While Her Majesty's Government is well known for its steadfast defiance of legalistic pedantries such as the law, the Taliban's dislike for the judge is presumably more gender-based; but it's refreshing to see that good old British pragmatism has enabled the two sides to unite against a common enemy.

A Duty and a Privilege

Forever enshrined mong the sacred and inviolable liberties of Britishness is the right of neighbourhood espionage and denunciation, and the water companies' belated action on the drought has already provided fertile ground for the seeds of native civic virtue. So eager are the great British public to get their neighbours in trouble that police have had to request that they not use the emergency service to report violations of the hosepipe ban; especially where no hosepipe ban is yet in force. Unauthorised use of a hosepipe is a civil rather than a criminal offence, and should be reported to the water companies, which understandably prefer "education over enforcement." Anyone routinely wasting two or three thousand million litres a day would indubitably find a lecture more convenient than a penalty.

Hubris and Nemesis

Some ninety years ago Lord Dunsany wrote a play called The Use of Man, in which a pursuer of the uneatable complains that he cannot see the purpose of crows, rabbits or mosquitoes, and pre-empts the modern British love of animals by advocating a general holocaust of badgers. That night, the gentleman's master of hounds is summoned to a beastly convocation which attempts to find the use of humanity. Things do not go well: the bear hates zoos, the mouse hates traps, and birds hate cages. Farm animals dislike being imprisoned, or else have had all spirit and intelligence bred out of them. The dog's obsequious worship of humanity does little to convince anyone, and the cat will not speak up because she is miffed that the mouse's testimony took precedence. Eventually one animal intervenes to reprieve humanity from extinction: the mosquito needs food.

Nearly a century on, it appears that humanity's saviour may have over-reached itself. Research into the mosquito's apparatus for detecting the next meal may ultimately lead to this illustrious family taking its place among the entomological casualties of the Anthropocene Extinction Event. It's to be hoped that this humbling experience will impart a useful lesson to all non-human animals about the perils of relying on an unsustainable diet.

Greasy Palmers

When the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat accomplices began their assault on the poor, protesters camped outside St Paul's Cathedral; the Church responded first by complaining about the loss of revenue, and then by calling in the City of London police to hose away the trash. When the gay-baiters raise a squeal about the private lives of consenting adults, the Church takes due precaution against a dupe-drain and hastily follows its Saviour in endorsing His Father's hatred as set forth in the Bronze Age ravings of Leviticus and numerous Plastic Age televangelists. And when much of life on Earth ("the whole of creation" as one believer put it, no doubt in all humility) is endangered by fossil fuel companies making large profits, the Church continues its investment in fossil fuel companies. Nobody can serve two masters, as someone or other once said; and the Church of England has always been steadfast in its fealty to Mammon.

Just Looking

In keeping with the best traditions of British intelligence, Her Majesty's Ministry of Wog-Bombing has informed the beastly Russians that it intends to spy on them a bit. A reconnaissance aircraft is scheduled to take a route which will pass over Russian territory, and given the present situation in eastern Europe Her Majesty's Government naturally expected that the fiend Putin would do the decent thing and say spasibo nicely. Alas, the Russian bear has reacted just as sore-headedly to this latest poke as to the many others administered since the comfortable resumption of Cold War relations. "All possible consequences of this deliberate provocation will lie entirely with the British side," growled the Russian defence ministry, whose allies among the Nazi-Soviet Strasbrussels bureaucrats have evidently neglected to pass on Whitehall's position vis-à-vis taking responsibility for one's actions. On the bright side, the Boeing RC-135 reconnaissance plane is an American import rather than a home-contracted design, so there is at least a chance of its being able to detect Russia.

Kulaks of Wokeness

That hotbed of subversion, the British farming industry, has permitted its members a scandalous temptation towards un-British pessimism. The National Farmers' Union carried out a survey in which more than half of respondents complained of losing production through the labour shortage. Many who would have been helping in the fields during less controlled times have either moved to better paid work or have been expelled from the country; while the only Ukrainians available for exploitation are those who are not of military age and yet can still fight their way through the Home Office's wog deterrence obstacle course. It appears that many in the farming community are dangerously close to promoting the idea that food, even when grown in the greatest soil in the world, is better for its merely nutrient qualities rather than for the Union Jack on the packaging. They should consider themselves fortunate that, while there may soon be laws against vilifying Britain, our great democratic tradition precludes any laws against starving it.

Holy Fire

Fresh from inspiring the recent Lambeth blah-blah with a due sense of the important things in life, the Deity has toddled off to administer a bit of moral improvement in the land of Egypt. At least forty people have died and forty-five been injured in a fire at a Coptic church in Giza, where the God without Whose sanction a sparrow cannot fall took meticulous care to ensure that the flames obstructed the entrance and that most of the dead were children. Since the victims were innocents who are now presumably in Paradise, the Egyptian president offered his sincere condolences.

Hosepipe Ban

Since one major achievement of the past decade has been to cripple and demoralise the National Health Service just in time for a global pandemic, it's only natural that other non-vital services should be subject to similar levels of Britishness. Accordingly, the Conservatives and their little orange accomplices have cut fire services by a fifth just in time for a record-breaking heatwave. Efficiency savings have caused staff numbers to fall by over a third in the more expendable regions, and Government funding for some services has been cut by more than forty per cent. Members of the public who see a wildfire approaching are advised to stand in their doorways and applaud vigorously, thereby causing a draught which will redirect the flames onto the homes of their neighbours and maintain the buoyancy of the housing market.

Sunken Treasures

An encouraging new maritime trend appears to be developing among the squillionaires. Three months ago a toy boat worth about six million pounds was destroyed by fire at Torquay; now a vessel worth three times that much has burned up in the Balearics. Delivered brand-new mere weeks ago, the boat had five staterooms, a private lounge with a terrace, and a pool in case the sea wasn't big enough. The owner, a car industry magnate, is estimated to be worth five hundred million dollars, and is therefore a comparative pauper in his class; but as we wait in forlorn hope for Fishy Rishi to be torn apart by a raging mob of taxpayers, and for Elon Musk to share the fate of Laika the canine cosmonaut, and for Rupert Murdoch to be crushed to death in a football stadium, we humbler folk must take our Schadenfreude where we find it.

Incredibly Meritocratic

Contrary to popular superstition, not all mute swans in the United Kingdom are owned by the Crown. Much more sanely, all unmarked swans are royal property, and the monarch retains the title Seigneur of the Swans, and employs a swan warden, and doubtless gets tax relief to compensate for all the hard work involved. In earlier times, the country's swans were distributed among the gentry, and a sixteenth-century illustrated register details the beak-brandings that indicated who owned which birds, while threatening a year's imprisonment for anyone who meddled with the markers. With their white-feathered surface serenity and black, madly paddling feet, swans were so potent a symbol of British grace and beauty that the aristocracy dined on them at Christmas, and did not care for the idea of commoners doing likewise. As one would expect for a unique item of national heritage that "gives us an insight into the incredibly hierarchical society of sixteenth-century England", the register is privately owned and will now be sold at auction.

Truss Wags the Finger

Although Her Majesty's most Britannic Government has largely abandoned the pretence of governing now that it can no longer serve the interests of the National Johnson, there are still occasional opportunities for a leadership candidate to do a bit of state-subsidised posturing. Hence the Minister for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets has suddenly remembered her nominal function as a diplomatic bag, and has summoned the Heathen Chinee ambassador to account for his nation's unionist attitude towards plucky little Formosa. The Minister has made noises in the past about holding the yellow peril to account for their racism towards the Uighurs, and has blathered that "freedom is a price worth paying" for not being dependent on the opium of Chinese fossil fuels, although it remains as yet unclear which of our few remaining liberties she considers a viable currency. In any case, the Heathen Chinee ambassador no doubt listened with Oriental politeness while the acolyte of Boris Johnson lectured him on protecting human rights, keeping international law and dialling down the rhetoric.

Sniggering at the Back

After an all-too-brief purdah of sullen silence, the National Johnson has taken up the modern equivalent of the elder statesman's mantle, namely the privilege of undermining his successor from the sidelines. Fortunately for the National Johnson's work ethic, both of his potential successors are long-term accomplices in his administration and have thereby made a fair British fist of undermining themselves. In the face of further increases to energy bills, Fishy Rishi's plans to help the public have been derisory and his rival's nonexistent; so the National Johnson has deployed his pea-shooter to express his absolute confidence that the winner will have a change of mind in a month or two. He did qualify the statement by proclaiming that the Conservatives would "continue to look after people as we’ve done throughout," viz. not at all; but it was still rather mean of him to imply that either of the contestants might favour handouts to the plebs instead of to their chums in the energy cartel.

Good Old Days

As the Church of England continues chewing its coccyx over the permissible manifestations of human love, researchers at Salisbury Cathedral have been compiling a history of the numerous nefarious activities which have taken place within the close of their venerable pile. It appears that God's chosen were just as much inclinded towards lying, stealing, brawling and not keeping off the grass even when the sodomy laws were in full force and Church propaganda was all-pervasive. "All this is a great disturber of the suggestion that things used to be so much better," observed the dean, singling out his fellow Anglicans for their "dewy-eyed" moral nostalgia; of which the Saviour, who considered Bronze Age morals too lax and liberal for the Iron Age, would certainly be unlikely to approve.

Farmed Out

Given the preponderance among British patriots of bleating sheep, silly cows, grunters, squealers and guzzlers at the trough, it should hardly come as a surprise that the great British farmyard has become less disposed towards trading with the beastly Euro-wogs. Nevertheless, certain woke and backsliding elements among the nation's agribusiness expendables have responded with less than total enthusiasm to their liberation from the Strasbrussels yoke. Rather than taking the path of entrepreneurial pragmatitude and making due preparation for the deregulated glories of hormones and chlorine, the breeders of élite animals destined for the metropolitan petting zoos of decadent Continentals have gone so far as to club together and pay for the red tape necessary to continue their treacherous trade. One farm manager even implied that Her Majesty's Government had some sort of responsibility towards commercial fifth columnists who barter and fraternise with the Euro-wog enemy, prompting a Government spokesbeing to proclaim that it was the foreigners' responsibility to take back control.

Treated Like Foreigners

Following Britain's liberation from the Strasbrussels yoke, the Portuguese government has failed to issue British expatriates with updated residency cards. As a result, authentic specimens of the master race have been detained at airports like immigrants, suffered job insecurity like workers, and been forced to pay for medical care like Americans. According to the Portuguese border force (or service as the Latins foppishly call it), an online portal has been set up through which Britons are expected to endure the kind of bureaucratic indignity that, in the civilised world, is considered fit mostly for Ukrainians. Indeed, expatriate life in Portugal so much resembles a vision of the future for native life in England that Her Majesty's most Britannic Government has felt obliged to intervene at ministerial level. The Portuguese have been righteously reminded of their duty to implement the withdrawal agreement which Her Majesty's most Britannic Government has spent the last few geological eras foghorning as an imposition and an outrage. It is to be hoped that this display of straight talk from the moral and legal high ground will leave Britain's oldest ally sufficiently chastened, since British nationals of all people can hardly be expected simply to go back where they belong.

Some of Britain Basks

Despite its obsessive nostalgia for such traditional blessings of Britishness as stagflation, the workhouse and the National Front, Her Majesty's Government remains intensely relaxed about the uncomfortably rapid transition away from temperate of the greatest climate in the world. The River Thames has shrunk by five miles, further drought is forecast (though only by people who meteorologise professionally, as opposed to genuine patriots), and local moisture provision facilitators have implemented no restrictions on use. Instead, Thames Water has compensated for its profitably decayed infrastructure, and for the fact that a £250-million desalination plant has just been exposed as another of the National Johnson's little jokes, by ordering the little people to be more judicious with their taps. A spokesbeing has also ordered Her Majesty's Government to impose rationing, though the threat of a special luxury tax for imbibing raw sewage appears to be in abeyance for the moment. Her Majesty's Government has expressed frustration at Thames Water, which seems to be taking unfair advantage of the religious doctrine that forbids democratic governments to override the will of those who can afford private pools.

Crabby Pedants

A mere scientist who also happens to be the wrong kind of Lord has had the temerity to cast doubt upon Britain's ability to become a science superpower, even now that the master race has freed itself from the shackles of international collaboration, legal obligation and other insufficiently patriotic aspects of reality. Lord Krebs, whose name seems to exude a certain whiff of migrancy, co-authored a report whose very title dared to query whether the Government's rah-rah was anything more than sloganeering. Krebs criticised the proliferation of red tape which in the Brexit universe passes for removal of red tape, and raised the possibility that many trumpeted initiatives may soon be abandoned in favour of the ever-necessary tax cuts. Nevertheless, parliamentary politeness appears to have kept the authors from pointing out Her Majesty's Government's well-documented lack of acquaintance with the physical universe, where many borders have more than one side and where swingeing cuts to a particular thing tend to result in less of that thing being available. It remains as yet unclear what malign twist of Civil Service malice placed the authorship of a report on the National Johnson's administration in the hands of a zoologist whose doctoral thesis concerned territorial behaviour in one of the world's great tits.

Cleanliness is Next to Britishness

Since a true Englishman hates few things more than a hypocrite, Her Majesty's Government has wagged an admonitory finger at a global management consultancy over its involvement in state corruption. Besides being a mis-spelling of a large Batman villain, the consultancy consulted with a former president of South Africa (not, alas, that nice Mr Botha) to re-shape the country's economy, in a flagrantly disreputable manner not at all reminiscent of certain right-wing British politicians and their chums among the press and profiteers. While casually knocking eight months off a three-year ban, the National Johnson's sometime stick insect in charge of shortages and lorry parks scolded the consultancy for its questionable integrity and for not taking its own culpability seriously enough. By a fortunate coincidence the consultancy is not one of Her Majesty's Government's strategic suppliers, which will come as a surprise to those enemies of the people who have thus far failed to credit Her Majesty's Government with a strategy.

Moral Leadership

God still hates gays, but the Archbishop of Canterbury is nevertheless disinclined to punish churches which condone same-sex marriage. While affirming the validity of the commandment in Leviticus - appropriately, a screed foaming with priestly indignation at the inadequacy of the tithes - and the Saviour's endorsement at Matthew 5 xviii, the Archbishop observed that there are places where affirming equal rights can cause trouble for the Church, and other places where denying those same rights can cause trouble for the Church. Since his primary consideration as a Christian is not the dignity of human beings, much less the opportunities for holy martyrdom or loving one's enemies, but the survival of the institution that pays his stipend, the Archbishop could clearly do no other than to take both sides at once.

Picton Unpictured

As if the woke pogrom against the nation's statuary were not enough, the beastly Welsh have dared to censor a portrait of the highest-ranking officer to be killed at Waterloo. The image of Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton, Member of Parliament and sometime governor of Trinidad, is now partially obscured by a strut in front of the great man's equipment, and has been surrounded with material providing, of all things, context. Picton's régime in Trinidad was so British that he was prosecuted for excessive cruelty, immoderate severity towards slaves, carrying out summary executions without due process, and imposing the military penalty of picketing (stringing up by the wrist) upon a fourteen-year-old free mulatto girl. Picton argued that such measures were forced upon him by European red tape, and the Privy Council duly dismissed almost all the charges. After a jury was impudent enough to pronounce him guilty of torturing the girl, Picton gained a retrial in which he was set at liberty while the court was adjourned for deliberations so thorough that no verdict was ever reached. It remains as yet unclear whether the Minister for Cultchah, Murdoch and Rah-rah intends to intervene on the portrait's behalf; presumably because Picton sat in Parliament as a Whig (a Liberal Democrat, in modern currency) rather than for the natural party of corporal punishment and wog control.