Payback Time

Lord Ashcroft biffed off to Belize
And there had a jolly fine wheeze:
Commission some polls,
Attain Tory goals -
And after, what might he not seize!

But what is a poor chap to do
When the help will not give him his due?
Eight million quid
Seems a fair enough bid
For an office of state, maybe two.

We cannot but say it again:
Lord Ashcroft''s the nicest of men;
Though sometimes, mayhap,
He'll claim that a chap
Will fuck a dead pig now and then.

Humper Hogshead

Profit Makes Patriots

Until the snooper's charter is passed in full force and at last empowers everybody to spy on everybody else, our brave spooks must defend British values as best they can. Since torture is inconvenient, and treating Muslims as normal citizens is out of the question, MI5 has resorted to paying selected legal Islamics to spy on their fellow aliens. This is at least as economical a means of getting information as strapping people to gurneys and half drowning them; and the presence of financial incentives means the information itself could be nearly as reliable. Nevertheless, as one would expect, radical imams are already denouncing the whole idea, with one hate-preacher calling for an apocalyptic programme of "genuine community engagement".

Offending Management

Wishy-washy liberals in the prison officers' union are blaming, of all things, efficiency savings for recent disturbances in the offender-packaging industry. Riot squads were called in last Saturday to take assertive managerial action at separate facilities in Cambridgeshire and Lancashire; and the Prison Officers Association is trying to shift the responsibility onto the Ministry for Profitable Incarceration, which in real life has no responsibility for anything except funnelling taxpayers' money towards hard-working families like Serco and G4S. The loony lefties at the POA even went so far as to blame "a lack of purposeful activity and prisoners being unsupervised" when, as we all know, in a fiscally responsible prison system supervision and purposeful activity must be earned, not taken for granted.

Behind the Times

British values, as our Head Boy recently proclaimed, do not include free speech or leaving people alone just because they haven't done anything illegal. Accordingly, Britain's Head Boy has been tale-tattling in Big School about radical students who continue to defy his programme of cultural cleansing. A London university has responded with some asperity to the Head Boy's accusation that it played host to extremist preachers, although it is certainly true that the preachers in question spoke against such long-cherished British values as usury. The heretical university is the School of Oriental and African Studies, which apparently believes that there is more to the world of wogs than plotting to privatise their water or encouraging their children into the local equivalent of National Service. The university's insistence on information and definition over the question of what constitutes a "hate or extremist speaker" only serves to confirm that, even today, there is a long, hard way to go before the taint of evidence-based thinking is fully expunged from higher education.

It's A Texas Hole, So Keep On Diggin'

Horror at clock terror bomb fury

Enforcement professionals in the Christian state of Texas have released new evidence to justify their arrest and interrogation of a 14-year-old man for bringing a suspicious device to a school.

An incriminating photograph of the "home-made clock" showed that it had wires like many bombs. However, realising that harder evidence would be needed, officials also produced conclusive proof that the suspect had a Muslim name.

"He calls himself Ahmed Mohamed and that's the clincher," said Texas enforcificator Claiborne T Minuteman.

"Anyone going under an alias like that ought to be real careful about showing stuff with wires and stuff during 9/11 week."

The suspect was saved from being shot to death and posthumously defamed only by his relatively modest melanin content, securitisation personnel said.

Muslims have a long and troubled history of engagement with "science". During the Middle Ages, Muslim philosophers and doctors were among the best in the known world.

Many historians believe that this prevented the Middle East at that time from greatly resembling either mediaeval Europe or modern Texas.

Corbynundrum

He has no idea how to dress!
His jacket and tie are a mess!
We've called him right out
With snigger and shout -
But why won't he talk to the Press?

We've called him all things, more or less:
A fool who will fail to impress,
A Communist muppet,
Islamazoid puppet -
And yet he won't talk to the Press!

It's causing us terrible stress!
We cannot imagine or guess
What imp of perversion
Has spawned this aversion
And made him not talk to the Press!

Rupert Brooks

A Wedgie for the Wog-Panderers

Whatever else may be lacking at the Home Office (competence, honesty, decency and occasional acquaintance with the present universe being only the top items on a very long list), not even the mad old cat lady's barracuda stare can hide the fact that the ministry possesses a fully functional, true-blue sense of humour. The Home Office has responded to inquiries from the public about helping Syrian refugees with a document advising people to contact Naccom, a group of organisations dedicated to aiding and abetting asylum seekers. Naturally, the charities lack any infrastructure to cope with the demand; even more naturally, no representative of Her Majesty's Government bothered to contact anyone at Naccom before the document was published; and most naturally of all, there will be no Government funding to help matters - the Big Society thingy, the free market and the marauding swarms will just have to sort it all out among themselves. Meanwhile, the belches of Bullingdon glee will be ricocheting up and down Whitehall for weeks.

Painful Viewing

A recent edition of Panorama is under investigation by the regulator because its depictions of CIA torture methods were insufficiently cuddly for one viewer. The programme reconstructed various methods of enhanced interrogation, as used by the defenders of democracy whenever extrajudicial assassination just isn't subtle enough. Prior warning was given that the report might be disturbing, but it appears that somebody sat through it anyway and then complained of having been disturbed. It is as yet unclear whether the letter of complaint was signed by Tony Blair or Jack Straw; nor is it clear whether the substance of the complaint was that depictions of torture should not be disturbing, or merely that disturbing scenes should not be broadcast, with or without warning, before the magical watershed that protects infants of all ages from everything except advertisements, the news and daytime TV.

New Toys in the Great Game

The Ministry for War, the Colonies and Wog-Bombing has refused to confirm or deny that British military personnel are collaborating in the CIA's assassination programme. A spokesbeing was prepared to admit that the US has let embedded personnel from the mainland play with its toys "in support of operations in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq", but declined to clarify whether the two fiascos and the war crime have now been spiced up with a bit of murder by remote control. Providing answers to the proles on such a delicate subject would obviously jeopardise international relations in a way that mere Libya-smashing, Yemen-whacking or Paki-bombing would not.

Bleaching the Pachyderm

Soulless bureaucrats with no appreciation of the finer aesthetic instincts of the Bullingdon school of public works are to launch an investigation into a minor, if representative, instance of the Osbornomic miracle. Since poverty and homelessness are now things of the past, the chancellor has thrown thirty million of taxpayers' money at a project to build a garden bridge over the Thames; and has induced the London Haystack, who never saw a white elephant the proles couldn't pay for, to match the funding. The architectural contract was awarded to Thomas Heatherwick on the grounds of large cost and little experience, which are of course the identical criteria used in selecting ministers from Chris Graybeing to Michael Gove to Jeremy C Hunt and beneath; but it seems that Parliament's public accounts committee has decided to take a stodgy, Stalinist view of the matter - and this even though, in the best Osbornomic tradition, yet more money will be required before the real cocking-up can begin.