Verses on the Death of Dr Kissinger

Diplomacy has lost a titan's voice:
A champion of democracy and choice
Who helped to give the good old USA
That destiny still manifest today.

(Latinos, too, he hammered into shape:
Death-squad democracies from Gulf to Cape.)

All students of the governmental art
Admire him as a diplomat apart:
His peace prize an achievement truly rare,
For making of a peace that wasn't there

(While rolling back the tides of Red disease
To rescue Nam from the Vietnamese).

Though from the Nazis he was forced to flee,
He proved himself our kind of refugee;
And though it's very likely he did not
Thank Hitler, it's a fact he learned a lot.

Ward Cole

Bad Etymology

Creator, n. (when capitalised) corruption of creature, a subhuman puppet manipulated for underhand purposes.

Imprison, v.t. from imp a devil and Middle English resoun reason: to bestow upon a malefactor the moral and practical teaching of those more experienced in crime.

Are There No Limousines?

As befits a ministry whose former Secretaries of State include the intellectual firebucket Chris Graybeing, the oafish war criminal Butcher Hoon, and the selection of funny faces that comprise Grant Shapps, the Department for Transport has in recent years shown itself largely concerned with depriving people of transport. The present incompetent is Mark Harper, a sometime Home Office thug in charge of Tumbledown Tessie's Wogs Out vans; and his spokesbeing's answer to research demonstrating the effect on public transport of fifteen years' worth of tax cuts and poor-bashing was predictably disdainful of metropolitan élitists assembling mere facts. To indications that bus services have declined by more than eighty per cent outside the capital, the Ministry for Motoring responded with a boast that during the past couple of years it had also cut a billion from rail services.

They Don't Deserve Us

British decency remains as evident as ever in the wog warehousing business, which has achieved an enviable rate of success in motivating the merchandise to rehearse its own disposal. Over the past six years, four of the Home Office's largest luxury hotels have induced incidents of self-harm sufficiently severe to require medical treatment at the rate of nearly six a week; while staff are recruited and trained with such fiscal discipline that they don't always understand even the paltry handful of safeguarding obligations which they are still not permitted to ignore. Fortunately, a spokesbeing was on hand to reiterate the seriousness of the Ministry's rigour and the utmostness of its commitment, which are doubtless equalled if not surpassed by those of the authorities in Rwanda.

Sharia Gammon

Consumers of the Spectator and the Waily Toryguff may soon be empurpled by moral indignation more patriotic even than their usual, as both publications are in peril of being bought (or seized, as Britain's leading liberal newspaper hath it) by the ruling house of Abu Dhabi. Charles Moore, who has edited all of the rags now on sale, bleated they are great British institutions which should not be controlled by a foreign power; the Australo-American ownership of the Murdoch Times being quite a different matter, as it was never sufficiently great to be edited by Charles Moore. Sir Iain Duncan Scum called for the Government to intervene in the free market and prevent "somebody in the Middle East" from buying the lily-white pages comprising what people of Sir Iain Duncan Scum's intellectual eminence regard as a paper of record and molesting them with his swarthy Arab digits. Mainland bidders include a gambler with shares in GB News, favoured channel of the Farage Falange, and the owner of the Rothermere Daily Stürmer; so clearly there remains some hope that those charming Barclay boys may yet find a worthy heir.

Jam Tomorrow - Now in Manageable Helpings

In transferring the benefits of its entrepreneurship from the beastly Euro-wogs to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, Global Britain is set to increase its GDP by no less than four one-hundredths of one per cent. Our great nation's famous geographical and cultural proximity to the Pacific Ocean states will also facilitate deals with a noted sheep-and-hobbit reservation and a former open-air prison; which in combination might elevate the greatest economy in the world by one-tenth of one per cent within less than a dozen years. Yet despite all this (and despite an official rah-rah from the glistening pink Head Boy emeritus at the Ministry for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets), some traitors, remoaners and other metropolitan bloblings at the communistic Office for Budget Responsibility have dismissed the flagship trade deal as some sort of small boat. Well, of all the cheek.

Lower Still

Sensible moderates in the Netherlands are considering their options after a far-right chancer won the greatest number of seats in the House of Representatives. Conservatives have already declared their willingness to support Geert Wilders on some issues: a slightly more nuanced position than that of the Conservative, Unionist and Team Starmer wings of the British Neoliberal Party, whose embrace of Farage Falange rhetoric and policies has been wholehearted and unequivocal. Meanwhile, the Dutch finance minister has warned that, although Wilders may present himself as a barmy old bigot with mediaeval ethics and a near-British capacity for hypocrisy, he may in fact be something altogether less endearing.

Bad Etymology

Intimate, adj. from Latin in- and timor fear: an acquaintance close enough to facilitate blackmail.

Spiritual, adj. from Latin spīrāre to breathe and rītuālis a rite: characterised by the formally choreographed emission of hot air.

Grown-up Thinking

Among the many grounds for fiscal confidence on which Fishy Rishi married his wife is, apparently, a share in some profitable child exploitation, which the company's chief executive now fears could bring less profit in the future. As befits a service-based economy, the childcare sector has been filleted of investment while successive administrations spent the past decade and a half making parents' lives more expensive. The chief executive noted that, while access to childcare makes some difference to British breeding stock's ability to work, the likes of Fishy Rishi and Jeremy Chunt have apparently failed to make the connection. Remarkably, she seems to have noted it with every appearance of believing that things might be otherwise. At their humblest, of course, high-flying politicians breed in order to lend their pronouncements pleb-cred when Speaking as a Parent; the offspring of the more sold-out form part of a calculated marketing strategy, as with Sir Edward Davey's look-at-me-I'm-a-carer electoral begging bowl, or his partner in cripple-kicking's use of his own disabled child as an NHS-friendly equivalent of the unfortunate husky that symbolised his devotion to the green crap. It is remarkable that an entrepreneur of the stature of Fishy Rishi's wife should risk investing in a business run by someone who actually seems to believe that real people breed children in order to care for them.

Merely Reasonable

Enemies of the people have concluded that it is reasonable to call Tory scum by its proper name. Protesters who applied the epithet to the reasonably scummy Sir Iain Duncan Scum two years ago were acquitted last November of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, whereupon the director of public prosecutions requested a judicial review. The high court found in favour of the original judgement, on the grounds that the personal scumminess of Duncan Scum was being utilised as a synecdoche for the general scumminess of Conservative policy. Nevertheless, it appears that no verdict was delivered on whether the protesters might reasonably be accused of criminally understating their case.

Coming Soon

Lest We Recall

African and Caribbean nations are once more conspiring in black ingratitude over the civilising influence of the Atlantic slave trade. Two blocs comprising seventy-five countries have agreed to press for reparations and for the former colonial powers to cancel debts and invest in, of all things, healthcare and education for descendants of the slave trade's beneficiaries. Lesser breeds among the beastly Euro-wogs have buckled in accordance with their lack of moral fibre; the master race has responded with a staunch refusal to contemplate anything of the kind, just as one would expect from the only country to have abolished the slave trade without noticeably engaging in it.

Another Promising Start

Outside the journalistic profession, there may possibly be some few who recall the Head Boy pomp of Fishy Rishi's glistening pink Minister for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets. The reign of integrity began with a promise not to impose chaotic top-down reorganisations on the NHS (complete with waving of disabled and deceased offspring to prove it) and, with help from the Liberal Democrats, proceeded almost immediately to a chaotic top-down reorganisation of the NHS. A little later, having lost a vote to wog-bomb Syria because he was too lazy and self-complacent to win the Commons numbers, the glistening pink Head Boy lost the EU referendum because he was too lazy to face down the far right and too self-complacent to win the public vote. The reign of integrity ended with a promise to see the result through, which the glistening pink Head Boy immediately broke; a promise to continue representing his constituents, which the glistening pink Head Boy immediately broke; and the purchase of a luxury garden shed.

Flushed with the chance of renewed greatness, the glistening pink Head Boy emeritus has now come over all Little Lord Fauntleroy and proclaimed his intention to be more charitable to our little brown brothers, with help from feudal retainers of the quality of Andrew "Mr Propriety" Mitchell and the director of the Love Among the Posh film franchise. It is to be hoped that the lesser breeds will be appropriately grateful.

Bad Etymology

Adversity, n. from ad an instance of commercial propaganda, and verse a rhyme or jingle; hence an episode of misfortune, disaster or discomfort.

Privatise, v.t. from privy and Old French tirer to snatch away: to reform a public asset by stealing what is saleable and flushing the rest down the toilet.

Un-Framed

Nine Extinction Rebellion activists have been acquitted of criminal damage to the London headquarters of a well-known drug money launderer. They took hammers and chisels to HSBC's custom-glazed windows at an ungodly hour of the morning in order to publicise the company's investments in fossil fuels, causing damage which the unfortunate multinational criminal enterprise was forced to repair at a cost equivalent to nearly a dozen executive lunches. Although the prosecutor noted that the legality of a protest is not determined by the justice of its cause, the jury apparently disagreed; which, should the precedent be followed with undue effect on profits, presumably means that jury trials will shortly follow legal aid, the courts and the prison and probation systems into government-accelerated decrepitude.

Reverently, Discreetly, Advisedly, Soberly, and in the Fear of Schism

Gay marriages in the Church of England may soon, on a trial basis, and subject to the scruples of those who share the rabid homophobia of their nasty little god, look very similar to the weddings of real people; and doubtless those who condescend to perform such ceremonies will find it a most worthwhile, stimulating and enjoyable experience. The General Synod voted narrowly to defy the commandments of its invisible employer as set forth in Leviticus and unequivocally endorsed by the Saviour; and received in return the usual loving-kindness from both the Bible-bashing gay-baiters and the gentle-Jesus dupes. After the relevant amendment passed by a single vote and the motion for further moral hedging by a barely-lukewarm twenty-four, the bishop of London noted astutely that the Church of England, despite having had sex on the brain for more than twenty years, is not of one mind on the matter.

Watchdog Rolls Over Again

Ofwat, the moisture profiteering guard-poodle which has always seemed short of a consonant or two, concludes its latest round of vigilance amid accusations of meaningless gesturing. Since Thames Water responded to recent whines with more than the usual snigger of contempt, the regulator has reduced the amount which the company will have to hand back to customers. To have done otherwise would have been to reduce the financial incentives that Thames Water requires to repair the infrastructural neglect for which Thames Water is being penalised. Hence, far from making meaningless gestures, the watchdog has once more pressed its toothless gums affectionately to the burglar's ankle and then, having vigorously humped the arrow-patterned trouser leg, has further obliged its masters by fetching a few choice objects to help refill the bag marked SWAG.

Done in Oils

Connoisseurs of ethical Britishness will rejoice at the National Portrait Gallery's jumping out of bed with a fossil fuel company only to leap back in with the lawyers of several more. The Gallery put out for BP over three decades, but chose last year not to extend the relationship when the contract ran out. Instead the artistic patron formerly known as the BP Portrait Award will bask in the even catchier title of the Herbert Smith Freehills Award, as the defenders of BP, Chevron and Bank of America donate a week's executive lunch-money towards the prestige of Britain's daubers. It is certainly to be hoped that the more intemperate environmental campaigners are not provoked beyond their current performative tributes to the Suffragette movement; let alone towards the mistreatment of any genuine icons of national culture.

Terms of Service

Thanks awfully, you plucky little chap;
Now you have died for us, we'll shut our yap
On this condition, let us make it clear:
For no more than two minutes in the year.
We must be brief, lest agents of defeat
Rewrite your sacrifice as "no repeat!"
Carve this in stone for your memorial:
Though you fall mute, our cannons never shall.

Victor Brittan

Bad Etymology

Peaceful, adj. from Latin peius worse and -ful: tending towards the inconvenient, unpatriotic and unprofitable.

Protest, n. from Latin pro on behalf of and Middle English testif headstrong: an act of moral, verbal or physical intemperance directed against one's betters.

Britain Bumps Along

We are all aware, because post-Uxbridge Conservatives have been squealing about it with such grown-up volume, that the fiend Sadiq Khan is the gloating centre of a malign woke conspiracy against the noble race of motorists. The ultra-low emissions zone is merely the toxic tip of a bloated and betentacled iceberg of un-Britishness which is even now extending onto the nation's roads the crypto-European jackboot of chronic disrepair. Despite nearly a decade and a half of efficiency savings and tough decisions, potholes in British roads are causing an unpredecented quantity of breakdowns among the non-helicoptered classes. According to the RAC, the number of callouts in the summer was forty-six per cent higher than the number for the corresponding months of last year; and the onset of winter is expected to improve matters in much the same way as it does for fuel bills, the NHS and other non-tax-cutting fripperies. Other than Khanite extremism, what possible explanation can there be? Fortunately, the profits of fuel retailers are well above normal, so clearly the forces of British fair play are beginning to fight back.

Dangerous Actions

Although fossil fuel corporations care little enough about keeping the world fit for human habitation provided the profits keep flooding in, they are occasionally capable of concern for the safety of others provided the profits keep flooding in. Shell plc is so worried about the safety of climate protesters that it is suing Greenpeace for between 2.1 and 8.6 million dollars. The benefactors of the Niger delta have been traumatised by Greenpeace activists' occupation of an oil platform in January and an attempted lawsuit against eleven Shell directors which aimed to hold them, of all things, personally responsible for the strategies of their own company. The lawsuit was rejected on the obvious grounds that Shell was too big to obey the law; although a less British legal system did order the company to cut its emissions by forty-five per cent over the decade, in accordance with the Paris agreement. Shell appealed that ruling on the grounds that agreements to limit climate change are the concern of governments rather than of anyone involved in accelerating climate change. Few Greenpeace protesters could ever aspire to so idiosyncratic a sense of responsibility.

Fresh Perspective, Sparkling Insight

As if we needed further proof that net zero in a Westminster context is less a policy of carbon reduction than a measure of brain cell quantity, the relevant minister has proclaimed that the problem does not lie with fossil fuels, but with the emissions they produce. Much as guns don't hurt people and wokeness causes racism, the climate emergency is by no means the fault of those who profit by exploiting fossil fuels; the blame lies entirely with those who distort and dirty the free market with the sewage of demand. If only the little people were less insistent on being housed, fed, watered, lighted and transported, the whole ghastly problem would vanish in a jiffy. Happily, the minister in question will be attending the forthcoming blah-blah in Dubai, where Johnny Foreigner will once again be set straight on why everyone else is to blame and why the Heathen Chinee ought to be compelled to do something about it; so the hollow laughter of the global majority will not fall exclusively upon the unfortunate reciter of the King's Speech.

A Proper Charlie

O rah for the Speech of the King,
Our Mother of Parliaments thing!
His birthright the part
Of a silly old fart
Tricked out in Imperial bling!

O rah for the King's great address,
So worthy of Black Rod's ingress!
The future on vellum,
And no-one to tell him
The country's a bit of a mess!

His Government's gospel to preach
For Members upright, all and each;
Of grifters, some few
And a sex-pest or two:
Rah rah for the King and his Speech!

Auric Gluteus

Bad Etymology

Insect, n. a member of a swarm, rarely significant in itself and often intellectually negligible; from Latin in and secta a faction.

Regal, adj. from Old French rigale to entertain: signifying a national diversion comprising adjustable proportions of pageantry, buffoonery and scandal.

No Taxation Without Obfuscation

Mere centuries after a few more or less non-Muslim types tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the king inside, the fact that the Royal Family's security budget is an official secret is a tribute to British sang-froid. The Guardian is trying to determine the total cost of protecting the spawn of the Old Queen over a period of three years, without asking for any information on budgets for individuals or the details of the arrangements. Naturally, the Ministry for Britishness Enforcement responded with a flat refusal, in case any such disclosure should be an aid to terrorists or, worse yet, "enhance democratic debate about the cost of the monarchy." The information commissioner agreed, on the eminently sensible grounds that "the resulting figure may be surprisingly low and, were this the case, then it could put those concerned at significantly more risk." By the same brilliant logic, of course, any attempt to subject the defence budget to public scrutiny would be the act of a Putin-sympathiser and a minion of the Heathen Chinee. Accordingly, we can no doubt look forward to the information commissioner's opinion being extensively recycled at the Government's convenience, particularly in departments where ministers find the taxpayer a bit niggardly with bungs for the chums.

A British Home Secretary Manqué

As might be expected given its origin and provenance, the Government's inquiry into Nazi atrocities on Alderney prior to Mr Churchill's victory is turning away evidence on the grounds of formatting. With characteristic concern for facts, the "Holocaust envoy" and globbering meat-weeble Eric Pickles has decreed that documents which are not submitted to particular specifications will be disdainfully ignored; with the result that at least one historian has submitted his to the Observer instead. Among these papers is a letter from Heinrich Himmler which shows a charmingly British attitude towards labour relations. Possibly rattled by a recent uprising at Treblinka extermination camp in Poland, the Reichsführer-SS orders trouble-makers summarily shot and, if the trouble continues, the entire workforce massacred. Himmler ordered this command kept secret, thereby demonstrating a dedication to tough decisions, government openness and the sanctity of British soil in near-perfect harmony with the sensibilities of Mr Churchill's spiritual heirs. Meanwhile the Pickles inquiry continues its attempt to find out the number of Nazi murders that are verifiable in a format convenient to Lord Pickles, who doubtless is also concerned to discover how many among the Alderney workforce were Zionists and how many deserved what they got.

Not Quite the Sort of Freedom We Had in Mind

Like good old Douglas Haig's shells falling at the Somme, squeals of patriotic outrage have descended over plans to disfigure the annual climax of British military rah-rah by exercising the liberty for which its past dupes supposedly sacrificed themselves. Fishy Rishi and the security minister, both of whom an optimist might imagine have better things to do these days, are alike incandescent with righteous indignation at the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign for holding a march on Victory Saturday, thereby apparently desecrating the memory of Britain's war dead slightly more than did the still all-too-recent presence at the Cenotaph of Fishy Rishi's patron, the National Johnson. For its own part, the PSC has no intention of going anywhere near either the Cenotaph or the hotbed of armchair generalship that is Whitehall; and even the Metropolitan Rape and Racism Club has admitted that the organisers of the march are co-operating, although naturally facial recognition software will be utilised to identify potential blacklistees. It is to be hoped that anyone indiscreet enough to have looked a bit republican at the Coronation will have the courtesy to stay away and not distract officers from their sacred duty of policing by consent.

Sweet Southern Air

Like many religious institutions, the Christian state of Alabama has nothing against scientific experimentation in its proper place, and the state supreme court has duly obliged with an opportunity. After a couple of failed attempts to execute convicts by lethal injection, the court has authorised correctional personnel to try killing someone by suffocation instead. The method, whereby the beneficiary of justice is forced to breathe nitrogen without oxygen, has not been tried before; but fans have "theorised" that it will be painless. At least the experiment should lay to rest a lawsuit that the scheduled guinea pig is pursuing over the lethal injection procedure, which the Christian state of Alabama attempted last year and which the divine will somehow neglected to help accomplish, having presumably taken into account the fact that the condemned carried out his murder at the behest of a pastor.

Contrition on the Cheap

Britain's colonial wrongdoings in Kenya were not quite abhorrent and unjustifiable enough to merit an apology, according to an improving royal speech to the natives. A decade ago, in a legal case brought by over five thousand Kenyans, the UK settled out of court for ministerial lunch-money and a doubtless heartfelt "statement of regret," and His Majesty's Government evidently intends to maintain this economically viable stance of reconciliation. The concentration camp régime which Britain imposed during the rebellion of the nineteen-fifties was so firm in its moral guidance that parallels with the recently-defeated Nazis and the recently-othered Stalinists were evident even to the colony's attorney general; and with a magnificent access of moral Britishness the same attorney general went on to draft legislation that permitted beatings provided they were carried out with due discretion. A full and formal apology would risk implying that the heirs of Empire have made some sort of progress in the past seventy years; which would be a hypocrisy too hilariously blatant even for His Majesty's Establishment.