Capital Growth

Patriots will rejoice to see that His Majesty's Government's favourite Islamic fundamentalist head-choppers remain as zealous as ever in their implementation of British values. During the year just gone, the House of Saud supplemented its moderate rampage in Yemen with a sensible massacre of alleged drug traffickers and various others, the quantity of executions exceeding the impressive record set during the year before. Rights organisations and other malcontents have carped and criticised as ever, and some have even claimed that the House of Saud's dedication to law and order undermines its modernising efforts. In light of modern Britain's intensive concern with decapitating human rights, this is surely a grave injustice.

Royal Discretion

Whatever lessons our Mother of Democracies may have learned from the case of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Gentleman, it appears that Norway has yet to absorb them. The son of the local Crown Princess is to face trial on charges of illegal sneak-filming, domestic violence and four counts of rape, though he apparently denies everything except a minority of the violence. On the mainland, of course, the idea of putting Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on trial was always a self-evident absurdity: the Crown Prosecution Service can hardly be expected to turn the monarch's relative into a mere subject of inquiry. Instead the matter was dealt with internally, with a few Ruritanianisms lopped off the mode of address and a certain enforced economy of accommodation. As a result, not only has the taxpayer been spared the expense and prurient temptations of a trial; but the nation's overstretched and under-resourced women's health and rights organisations, unlike their Norwegian counterparts, have not been inconvenienced by a sudden surge in business.