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.