Forced Perspective

By comparison with the cleansing of Gaza and Lebanon, and possibly also with the economic achievements of the Persian Crusade, Tsar Vladimir's ongoing war crime in Ukraine remains a model of fair play and humane restraint. Hence few will be surprised that the jury at the sixty-first Venice Biennale has made an exhibition of itself over Russia's participation in the festival. The jury resigned after the European Commission stated its intention to cut off funding and the Italian culture ministry sent in a team of interrogators, because Russia had turned up again after missing the last couple and had been permitted a pavilion, provoking squeals of moral indignation all round. By contrast, the participation of the Righteous State and its arbiter of taste, the Kingdom of the Trumpster, has thus far been greeted with artistic equanimity.

Some Have Crassness Thrust Upon Them

The Farage Falange Gauleiter of Scotland, who is so aspiring a public servant that he took a week's holiday in the middle of an election campaign to sail one of his boats, has been Trumpsterising the little people with information about how wealthy he is. Amid much edifying talk of houses and hobbies, he claimed to have employed a great many people over a forty-year career, during which his annual tax payments have averaged rather less than two-thirds of the cost of his most recently purchased toy mansion. No wonder the Farage Falange Gauleiter of Scotland considers his privacy sacred when it comes to the details of his financial doings. Even so, his half-dozen homes demonstrate clearly and conclusively that there is no particular housing crisis for anyone who matters; so the leader of the SNP criticised the great man's remarks in true moderate and sensible fashion, as potentially not very effective public relations.

Holy Smoke

Serenity in the modern world is notoriously difficult to achieve; which may help to explain the activities of twenty-three allegedly felonious monks now helping Sri Lankan police with their inquiries. Twenty-two of them had been on a plain-clothes holiday in Bangkok, and returned carrying a hundred and ten kilograms of quality cannabis concealed like a higher truth behind the worldly walls of their luggage. The twenty-third supposedly organised the spiritual retreat and had told his brothers that all those packages were a donation. Should they all end up sentenced to a lifetime or more of community service, their orange robes may at least save the Sri Lankan penal system some jumpsuit expenses.

Royal Diplomacy

Never let it be said that His Majesty's Government always defers to the White House. In the wake of the latest tribute to the Second Amendment, Team Starmer has reiterated its confidence in the royal sock-puppet while prudently declining to permit the Trumpster and his head-tribble any chance at a public dressing-down over the mainland's lukewarm support for the Persian Crusade, or even at some genial, statesmanlike banter about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Gentleman, and what he might be up to nowadays. The two monarchs will pose together for the cameras, but no pretence of substantive discussion will be required, and the eminently qualified Yvette Cooper will be present to leap into action as necessary and ensure that nothing of substance is said.

Manifold Difficulties

Shareholders at British Petroleum have voted against restricting their own rights; presumably because capitalist investors tend to have a more rational view of their self-interest than either the great British public or the corporate serfdom in the Kingdom of the Trumpster. The board of directors, led by the AI-bot-named Albert Manifold, has abandoned the greenwashing commitments of the previous administration led by the unimprovably-monickered Bernard Looney; the board therefore wished to avoid any obligation to give an account of its climate-vandalising activities. With minds doubtless concentrated by the share price roller-coaster resulting from the Persian Crusade, investors expressed annoyance at the board's preference for shutting down debate rather than adapting to reality. It certainly is a good thing that the directors of Royal Britannic Albion Holdings plc would never resort to tactics so crude, immoderate and unsensible.

Cruel to be Kind

Some rich idiot has been squashed to death in Gabon after surprising some female elephants with a calf. The mighty hunter was an American millionaire on an antelope-busting trip, and an acquaintance was quoted in the Rothermere Daily Stürmer to the effect that all his kills were registered as "conservation in culling animal numbers." There are more than twenty million American millionaires in the world, any dozen of whom probably do more human and environmental damage than the remaining half-million elephants and hundred and fifty thousand yellow-backed duikers; nevertheless, it remains as yet unclear whether the rich idiot's demise will be registered as conservational culling also. It is to be hoped, at least, that none of the elephants was unduly inconvenienced by the surprise.

Targeted Savings

Those who fear that His Majesty's Government lacks the capacity for joined-up thinking will rejoice at Team Starmer's latest purge of antisemitic tendencies from the hallowed haunts of Whitehall. Before his recent martyrdom on the altar of prime-ministerial self-preservation, the sainted Olly Robbins further discharged his sacred duty of protecting the Government from anything it doesn't want to know about; in this case by shutting down the department at the Ministry for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets which monitors Israeli war crimes. Evidently the ministerial process of deciding that Russia and Iran are worse, and that arms sales to the Righteous State must therefore continue, is now to be fully automated; doubtless to the incalculable benefit of international law, economic growth and Holocaust remembrance.

Straight Talk from the Grown-Ups

Having spent several years pandering relentlessly to the Farage Falange demographic, Team Starmer is naturally wagging its finger at the Farage Falange. Apparently someone has discovered that various cadres among the legions of the forthright have made unsuitably racist remarks, and Team Starmer seems to imagine that this will be some sort of electoral turn-off for the great British public, which has lavished upon the Falange and its strutting Caudillo the sort of favourability levels it once reserved for the equally statesmanlike Boris Johnson. The depth and perspicacity of Team Starmer's political judgement can perhaps best be gauged from the fact that it has chosen this week of all weeks, with its CEO mired in new and entirely gratuitous strata of ordure from the free pass granted Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring, to lecture the Falange on vetting procedures.

Alaska Imperilled Yet Again

Having thus far failed to antagonise enough allies this week, the Kingdom of the Trumpster has begun a squabble with South Korea, whose government is insufficiently antagonistic towards the North and is threatening to treat the demilitarised zone as if it belonged to Korea rather than to the USA. A South Korean minister publicly identified a supposed nuclear site in the People's Republic, which the Americans wanted kept secret despite having spent the last few decades squealing about the existential threat from the North's independent nuclear deterrent. Since a deterrent cannot deter if kept secret, and since the Korean War is still officially going on, presumably the information was classified in order to prevent the North's disincentivising the Trumpster and his head-tribble against pacifying the peninsula with any Israeli-style ceasefires.

Too Brown to be Racist

Heckled over Team Starmer's migrant-bashing and refugee-kicking, the Minister for Wog Disposal very forthrightly and Britishly played the race card, proclaiming with what she presumably imagines to be salt-of-the-earth sweariness that as a brown woman she has every right to malign and deport whomever she dashed well pleases. Although the heckler was himself a member of the swarming hordes, he had internalised white liberal values and was therefore no better than some antisemitic Jew denying the Holocaust under the transparent pretext of criticising the policies of the Righteous State. Patriots with legitimate and understandable concerns will rejoice that the Minister has not only the policies of the Reverend Tommyrot Yaxleyson and the Farage Falange, but their manners as well.