Читать книгу Scotland’s Jesus and My Shit Life So Far 2-in-1 Collection - Frankie Boyle - Страница 11

The Batman villain The Scarecrow produces a fear gas that gives his victims terrifying hallucinations. I was laughing with my kid the other day, saying that Batman got hit with the fear gas on an early mission and everything else is just the effects of the gas on him. The larger-than-life villains are just local teenagers being beaten to a pulp by this madman. He probably doesn’t even put his costume on. The Joker is just some children’s entertainer who gets regularly victimised during his flashbacks and The Penguin is a local pigeon.*

Really we’ve all had a blast of the fear gas. If you see a Muslim on a plane and think terrorist, that’s a delusion. People walk about thinking they’re going to be mugged or raped, and do you know why? They’re pumping us full of fear gas, man, and it gets into the house through your TV. That’s why in the Western world, in these times of plenty and no real threats, we’re governed by stress, the hormonal response to danger and famine.

Politics nowadays isn’t so different from the way things were during the time of the Roman conquests. After their military victories the Romans held parades called ‘Triumphs’, in which the leader of a conquered territory would be paraded through the streets of Rome, symbolising in his person his defeated people. Compare this to Saddam and Gaddafi, and their very public deaths. Why did the Romans conquer? To provide popular support for their leaders and benefit financially from other countries’ resources.

The Romans would enlist local leaders into their service by offering them money and patronage. It’s not so different from David Cameron’s relationship with our modern Romans. Oh, and the Romans aren’t the Americans by the way; they’re the corporations. The corporate interests that control the US thus control much of the world, like a modern empire. We’re just one of those tribes whose leaders have struck a deal, so we ignore the plight of the imperial slaves who make our phones and we ignore our own people when they starve on our streets.

And, of course, we think of the Romans as this civilising force because we’re a product of the Romans. They were barbaric brutes who crucified their enemies and got the popcorn out for prisoners being mauled by lions and bears. Similarly, we think of the corporate US as a democratising, civilising force because we grew up under its cultural occupation and have internalised its values.

There are the literal meanings of words and then there are the doctrinal meanings. The doctrinal meanings are what things are understood to mean within the system and are often different from literal meanings. So, for example, ‘terrorism’ literally means something done to terrorise the general population. Yet Britain and the US terrorise civilians every day with drone strikes and so forth, but we don’t call this ‘terrorism’. The doctrinal meaning of ‘terrorism’ is that it only includes acts against us, not by us – a pretty important shift of meaning.

I saw this recently when the comedian Stewart Lee wrote an article titled ‘Where are all the right-wing stand-ups?’ Lee’s career since he got his own show is a bit like that episode where Father Ted gets an award and uses his speech to bitterly settle scores with everyone he’s ever met. Anyway, it’s interesting doctrinally, and interesting to me because Lee dismisses the idea that I’m a left-wing comedian. He wrote, ‘The Daily Mail inexplicably demonises Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle as “politically correct left-wingers”, yet to sensitive souls they appear callous, apolitical nihilists’, but at the end of the same paragraph he concludes I’m ‘too likely to be bluntly anti-war or pro-Palestinian to help Radio 4 out of its Trotskyite ghetto’. Of course, he’s absolutely right in strictly doctrinal terms because doctrinally ‘left-wing comedian’ means ‘a middle-class person concerned about social issues’. These will typically be people talking against the coalition, cuts and so on, but who generally draw the line at being bluntly anti-war or pro-Palestine.

Of course, to people outside a doctrinal system these things can look very strange. You’d have to explain to them that Stewart Lee – an Oxbridge graduate with a militant anti-piracy stance who appears on BBC Two punching up at the big targets of the day, such as the autobiography of Chris Moyles, mild-mannered comic Russell Howard and the ugliness of Adrian Chiles – is in fact a political comic. Someone like me, who was described by the Daily Mirror as a ‘racist comedian’ after a career of telling anti-racist, anti-war jokes, who took the newspaper to court and used the damages to help a Guantanamo Bay prisoner sue MI6 for defamation – I’m apolitical.

That’s the real reason doctrinal thinking is encouraged: it fosters an ability to be deeply irrational. Possessing the moral agility required to say that blowing up civilians with flying bombs is not ‘terrorism’, or even simply to call Paddy McGuinness a ‘comedian’, is tremendously useful to a society like ours. Because we don’t really need commentators to explain or reason; we need them to justify.

Of course, you’re welcome to take Stewart Lee’s view that the best place to criticise the behaviour of a crocodile is from inside its belly, perhaps in the hope that some day you will be so counter-cultural and innately radical that you’ll be given your own show on BBC Two and the opportunity to edit Radio 4’s Today programme. I’d argue that would never happen with a genuinely left-wing comedian who thought outside of the doctrinal system. Someone like Bill Hicks or George Carlin would have raised too many awkward questions. For a start, they’d have written an article titled ‘Where are all the left-wing stand-ups?’

As soon as you enter into something doctrinally important, language becomes charged and contested. In Iraq, troops fighting the US were called ‘insurgents’ in the BBC coverage. That’s quite an important choice of word, as an insurgency is something that happens against a legitimate government rather than, say, an occupying foreign army. In Libya, the troops trying to overthrow Gaddafi were referred to on the BBC as ‘activists’. Like they were the sort of people who’d get a petition up about him, rather than publicly sodomise him to death. The doctrinal importance of attacks on American soil is semi-religious. Blood spilled in the Temple. The Boston bombers got the same publicity they’d have achieved by attacking the Kabul Marathon with a dinosaur.

The modern doctrinal era begins with the destruction of the World Trade Center. The Americans, in an understand-able rage at the half-million dollar cost of the attack being funded by Saudi Arabia and carried out largely by Saudi Arabians, invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s good to remember that in years to come this whole period we’re living through will be written off in a couple of sentences under the heading ‘The Oil Wars’. ‘Britain over-reached itself in the Oil Wars, was destroyed, and became Sexcamp 3 for Workers of Shanghai MegaProvince’, the history books will read, as they sit in a petrol-soaked pyramid waiting to be lit as a warning signal to the Lastmen of the Garbagecities that their enemies the Crabmen have begun their final sideways march out of the sea.

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said we should be proud of what we’ve done to promote peace in Afghanistan. He plans to visit soon; he’s just waiting till they’ve found a full Kevlar bodysuit in his size. We went into Afghanistan to get bin Laden and our mission there is more important than ever, now that we killed him, quite a while ago, in Pakistan.

The US is to open direct peace talks with the Taliban after more than a decade of war. Good to see the US has only waited twelve years and the loss thousands of lives before resorting to ‘speaking’ to them. The meeting will take place at the Taliban’s new office in Doha – I like the fact they’re opening new branches, so long as it doesn’t get like Starbucks where you’ve got a Taliban on every high street. I wonder why they need an office – perhaps they’re branching out and are going to start dealing with both insurgencies and van hire. I bet it’ll be another call centre – we’ll be plagued by the Taliban ringing up to ask if we need replacement windows or do we want to wait until after the car bombing?

There was outrage when burnt Korans were found at a NATO base in Afghanistan. They’d only been partially burnt. That’s because the book on how to maintain a bonfire had been burnt the week before, on a bonfire of books about codes of conduct in sensitive areas. US soldiers don’t understand why the word of the Koran should be precious, as most of the Christian beliefs they hold bear no relation to the literal word of the Bible.

It’s thought Afghan soldiers were passing pencilled notes to each other inside the books they take with them to battle. US soldiers could never do that; it’s hard to get pencil to show up on a cum-stained computer game. It’s been said that because some people have burnt Bibles it’s OK for troops to burn Korans. I’ll take that as giving me permission to restart my culling of Britain’s bouncers. The books were burnt because stuff was written in the margins that the soldiers didn’t understand. A translator is only $4 an hour, but they thought they’d take advantage of the spoils of war and splash out on a whole can of kerosene.

Can you believe it’s over ten years since we brought freedom to the Iraqi people? The freedom to choose exactly who shoots and tortures them. Tony Blair says he’s given up trying to tell people his decision to go to war was right. Instead he tells them it was ‘complex and difficult’. In the way that lying is often more complex and difficult than telling the truth. An angry protester breached security at the Leveson Inquiry to call Tony Blair a ‘war criminal’. Blair could easily stop people thinking of him as a war criminal. He just needs to have sex with a goat.

• • •

So, Abu Qatada has finally gone. Mrs Qatada should move in with Mrs Hamza. As both their husbands are now inside that would basically give us an Islamic fundamentalist version of Birds of a Feather . . . Dorien comes round boasting that she’s shagging the gardener and gets stoned to death. We’d all watch that.

Abu Qatada seemed to vary between being free and occasionally going back to jail, where either he would stay, be released or, ultimately, be deported. To truly get to grips with the twists and turns in that story what I did was every time Theresa May began to speak I’d just gently hum the tune of the hokey cokey. I’d time it so she finished as I got to the ‘in/out’ bit, and then when I’d shake it all about I’d pretend I was being electrocuted by the Jordanian secret service. Jordan, of course, gave assurances that Abu Qatada would be treated like any other citizen and be entitled to a full trial by firing squad.

When your arch-enemy is a court of human rights it might be time to take a deep breath and think for a moment what that makes you. Abu Qatada was considered a threat because he spouts ridiculous, hate-filled tirades; if he were white he’d be presenting a phone-in on talkSPORT. To give you an idea how dangerous this man is it’s believed he’s radicalised almost as many Muslims as Tony Blair. As an extra security measure he was apparently given a dodgy compass so that none of his prayers would get answered.

Of course, we couldn’t throw Abu Qatada out of the country just because he was ‘very dangerous’, otherwise there’d have been nobody left in the Cabinet. The Tories demanded that ministers ignore the courts and throw him out. I’m guessing the Tories might not be quite so keen on ignoring the courts when tens of thousands of disabled people refuse to pay their bedroom-tax fines. He was called bin Laden’s right-hand man – and that was enough evidence to lock him up? If we called him the new Shirley Bassey could he get a plum variety slot on ITV?

A Welsh double-glazing salesman called Ahmed Abdulla has been stopped from flying to the US because his name is similar to the name of an al-Qaeda leader. The strange thing is that for the last ten years al-Qaeda leader Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah has been travelling about under the name Dai Llewellyn. His attempts to organise atrocities keep being interrupted every five minutes by a housewife in Swansea who wants new windows fitted.

Islamic extremist Emdadur Choudhury was fined £50 for burning poppies at the last Armistice Day parade. I say, if he wants to live here he should protest about the occupation of Afghanistan the British way. Just shrug his shoulders and reach for the remote when it comes on the news. Burning poppies is a pretty piss-poor way of showing disrespect to our soldiers. It’s not a patch on failing to give them proper body armour. Lots of people desecrate the two minutes silence. At least Choudhury had an opinion about war; surely it’s more offensive when people just continue browsing through the Disney Store? How dare he publicly protest against the occupation of Afghanistan? Especially after all our efforts to bring it free speech. I’m told he’d planned a more lavish protest to bring the infidel British puppet government to its knees. But he couldn’t buy the fireworks as his benefit cheque didn’t arrive in time.

Abu Hamza was extradited to the US despite claiming he was too ill to face trial – well, to be fair, he does have one hand in the grave. My son was shocked. You see, I called his pet hamster Abu! Believe me, that’s where the resemblance ends – his prosthetic, paper-clip paw’s actually shaped into a trident . . . don’t ask, but it’s not cruel as all the animals involved get given badges to use as shields. I wondered why Hamza was so terrified of what the Americans will do to him; then I realised, he lived in Afghanistan for a bit. Actually, you’d think he’d have found a more realistic prosthetic in Afghanistan. We’ve been bombing them so long human hands must be left on garden walls like lost children’s gloves.

Abu Hamza is a disabled man who commands great respect from his followers; if he conformed to our culture he’d be in a Channel 4 documentary about how no one wants to shag him.

He’s been transferred to a US jail known as the ‘Colorado Supermax’. Which is also the name of a feminine hygiene product for cowgirls. The European Court of Human Rights said it was satisfied Hamza would be well treated in America. Which in essence means that before flicking the switch on his electric chair the executioner will tell him to have a nice day.

Three guys in Birmingham were jailed for a suicide bomb plot. If I lived in Birmingham I’d be working on a suicide bomb plot. I’m not sure we should have been too worried about the destruction they could have reaped, given that they couldn’t even manage to successfully burn the piece of paper with their plans on. With the plan of blowing up Birmingham they must be the only suicide bombers who’ve received financial backing from English Heritage. What could make someone who’s raised in this country hate this country so much? Apart from being raised in this country.

This year we also had the Woolwich attack on Drummer Lee Rigby, and terror levels suddenly rose from ‘not bothered’ to ‘holy fuck’. David Cameron returned from Paris immediately he heard that the black guy the police shot had actually done something to deserve it. Cameron activated COBRA, where the government show terrorists they’re not scared by gathering behind steel doors in a bomb proof room. An emergency meeting was held with Cameron, Boris, Pickles, Warsi and May – I wouldn’t even trust this lot to make jelly and ice cream without starting a chemical fire.

The killer welcomed a Brownie guide leader, Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, when she approached him – he must’ve thought he’d completed his Death to the West badge. She wanted to keep him talking to prevent any further violence. That’s unusual, as our scout leader always wanted to stop us talking. Usually with threats that nobody would believe us. Can you imagine being in her Brownie group now? Every time she asks what you want to do, you nervously gaze round to see if she’s distracting you from a police marksman. Lee Rigby was wearing a sweater that showed a picture of a soldier being stretchered away with his thumbs up. There’s a poster for the myth and reality of the job. You can tell his murderers were psychos; they left the body on a double red line. The killers’ travel history is being analysed to find out how they got radicalised – I’m not sure whether that includes ‘going to the newsagent’. People got off the bus near the attack to see what murderers looked like, as that bus hadn’t run a night service for a while.

Nigel Farage said it was terrible this happened on the ‘peaceful streets of South London’. Is he taking the piss? The police had to push their way past two stabbings and a shooting just to make the arrest.

It’s interesting when people discuss whether a crime was motivated by religion or mental illness, as if those were two different things. Police found the training manual they used for the attack. George Michael’s autobiography. The video of the jihadist ranting is going to be one of the toughest ever for Alex Zane to link to on the next series of Rude Tube. If it’s an eye for an eye, who replaces the finger you blew off your own hand, you idiot? The killer said ‘in our land’ women see beheadings daily. In Lincolnshire? Are they still executing the left-handed? Still, thank God we held on to that Olympic feelgood factor.

The EDL, who named themselves after the way they text spell the word England, staged a drunken protest. I noticed the EDL rioters seemed to be covering their faces up. That’s a bit Muslim of them. I think the EDL wanted to make a point about Muslims not respecting British law, and what better way to do that than to fight the police? Attacking a mosque in revenge for this murder makes as much sense as attacking JD Sports in revenge for Jimmy Savile. Muslim communities have to denounce these killings because they’re so rare. If rich white guys had to denounce every death in their name they’d never get anything done.

We’ve got to the stage where ‘asylum seeker’ is an insult, whilst the government debates the vagaries of the term ‘rape porn’. ‘Asylum seeker’ means you will be killed if you go home. And not in the ‘I’ve had an extra pint after work’ sense, though in some countries it will be because they had the pint, or went to work. ‘Asylum seeker’ is an insult and ‘WAG’ is a compliment. We have more sympathy for a woman whose husband might miss a header than for a woman whose husband might be missing his head.

• • •

More defence cuts have been announced. The Ministry of Defence insists operational capability will not be affected as the armed forces are already highly ineffective. If we’re not careful we’ll soon only have a military big enough to reflect our true status in today’s world. We could slash Trident replacement costs by doing what Saddam did with his tanks and buying dummy stuff. I can’t see any reason why inflatable submarines wouldn’t work. BAE Systems is axing three thousand jobs. Oh dear, if only we hadn’t toppled governments of its major clients. Sell the bomber jets to easyJet – at least it’s a more honest way for our stag nights to enter Prague.

Cameron is insisting on the same number of new submarines to replace Trident, but Clegg wants fewer. I’d go with the Lib Dems. Look at our military requirements for the next fifty years – it just has to be easier hauling two subs across a desert rather than four.

And on top of cuts, stolen military kit worth millions is being sold on eBay. I’ve bought night-vision goggles, part of my plan to gain the psychological advantage on Mastermind by choosing ‘The various sleeping positions of John Humphries’ as my specialist subject. Meanwhile, ex-military chiefs have been caught offering ministerial access for money. Arms traders shouldn’t lobby. They should follow the proper channels and just show off their coolest stuff in conflicts, because for defence ministers CNN is basically a shopping channel. Indeed, many US arms dealers’ catalogues are made up almost entirely of photos from Afghan wedding photographers.

A CNN journalist said she’d like to urinate on a dead Afghan. Luckily, she works with Piers Morgan so she can get a mocked-up picture of her doing it. I’m willing to offer my services if she’ll accept a put-on accent and a bucket of spray tan. I’d happily kill three thousand of her friends if it helps? This is not the first time I’ve seen a video of four American lads pissing on someone, although I must say the dead Afghans exhibited a more realistic enjoyment of it than the girls on Xhamster. These Afghan soldiers were told they would meet a group of virgins after they died, and it looks like that was correct. We’re a strange society that pixilates the willies in that footage but not the corpses. Why would soldiers at the end of a tour of duty wee on dead bodies? The probable answer is that they’d simply run out of cum.

I liked it when al-Qaeda posted pictures of an all-female unit of terrorists training on an array of weapons. They’ve been dubbed the ‘Burkha Brigade’. I doubt they’d be that effective in the UK, because if a team of them were spotted crouching down behind a wall the neighbours would be straight on to the council reporting that someone has been putting their black bin bags out on the wrong day.

A lot of our general culture is war propaganda. Did you see G.I. Joe? It’s a film based on a children’s toy. I’ve got a few ideas in the same genre that I’d like to pitch. How about Kerplunk? Bruce Willis’s children are suspended between two skyscrapers by enormous lengths of steel piping, creating a net that they rest on. Willis has to remove one pipe every hour or his children WILL die. Or what about Hangman? We could splice together archive footage of the death of Saddam Hussein with some random clips from Countdown.

We’re told that terrorists are talking to each other through online games like Call of Duty and Halo. Al-Qaeda should be careful; these shoot-’em-up games can desensitize a person to violence. Sad we’ve only found out this link between games and terrorism so late in the day. I can’t help but wonder whether the world would be a happier place if only someone had had the sense, in the 90s, to ban Jenga.

• • •

North Korea announced nuclear missile tests targeting America but they’re purely for scientific reasons – they want to find out what happens if they blow up America. The US government has warned North Korea to stop making threats, or else they’re going to fucking kill them. Some North Korean generals suspect their delivery system is too basic to get a missile to Washington, believing the US will probably recognise the stamps.

The West despises North Korea as a dictatorship. Dictatorship is when someone tells the people what to do. Democracy is when the people get to choose who tells them what to do. Naturally, we all laughed at the scenes of national mourning in North Korea when Kim Jong-il died, until Thatcher went and we did exactly the same. We didn’t even have the excuse that we’re delirious from hunger. Oh no, actually we did. It’s a communist tradition to have endless TV footage of the embalmed corpse of a tyrant at rest. We don’t do that here – we’d rather go for endless TV footage of his begging for mercy before being shot in the face.

Kim Jong-un has a girlfriend. By all accounts, Kim has spent weeks getting to know her, having had her family surgically implanted with bugging devices. I haven’t seen her dating profile but I’m guessing it includes: ‘Hobbies, venerating the great leader, collecting pebbles, trying to stop my imagination morphing people I meet into giant talking items of food.’

If there were a nuclear conflict in the region North Korea would be left a barren wasteland. So they’ve nothing to lose. David Cameron is very concerned that they can reach us with their missiles – to be honest, Dave, I think you should be more worried that there are plenty of people in this country who’ll be able to reach you with a stick. Let’s face it – if North Korea blow up the government before we do then we should all be ashamed of ourselves. I’m not that worried about Korean missiles hitting us here – mainly because I used to have a Korean car and it could barely reach Sainsbury’s.

Our government assures us Britain is ready for nuclear war. Really? We weren’t ready for snow in April. With the way things are going you could well be reading this on a scrap of scorched paper you’re using to bandage your weeping radiation sores as you fend off the other mutants with a spatula. Nuclear war in Scotland wouldn’t change much, as we already spend most of our time indoors with the curtains closed, the windows shut, avoiding all contact with other humans and never eating fresh fruit or vegetables, or drinking water. It seems the only difference is that we’d be pissing into Coke bottles at the request of the government rather than because we can’t be arsed getting up off the couch. Cameron was also scaremongering about Iran having missiles that could target Britain. Actually, they barely have anything that could reach Israel. If they do target us we have two choices – either diplomatic talks or sending scientists to help them build a missile capable of going far enough to hit America.

David Cameron’s released this information so we can act ourselves – so lock your doors at night, leave a light on so Iran thinks you’re in when you’re not and report any strange missiles you see in your area.

Barack Obama said the US government requested that Tehran return the surveillance drone captured by Iran’s military. I hope he’s not holding his breath as the Japanese still haven’t returned that bomb from Hiroshima. What’s wrong with Iran? Why are they so paranoid? Anyone would think the West had at some point overthrown their democratic government and installed a brutal puppet, or cynically perpetuated their war with Iraq by selling arms to both sides. Israel is doing all it can to stop itself being a target. Well, everything short of not bulldozing Palestinian homes and building on land they promised not to.

Israel has apparently been assassinating Iranian scientists. Let’s hope they don’t try to assassinate any of ours; they’d have to queue behind anyone who ever bought a D:Ream album. Iranian clerics are denying Tehran wants the bomb, claiming they only need lumps of weapons-grade uranium for throwing at particularly promiscuous women.

Israel will have ‘no greater friend’ than the US in pursuit of peace in the Middle East, Barack Obama promised. Of course, Israel need a multi-billion missile defence system from America – how else are they going to protect themselves from children throwing stones? Israel are worried about Iran attacking them but it’s all academic anyway – America will still beat them both to the Most Murderous Regime in the Middle East Award again. The US is determined to bring peace to the Middle East and they don’t care how many millions of unarmed shepherds, women and children they have to brutally kill in order to do it.

Israel insists it’s targeting specific militants. Though in bombing the most densely populated place on earth that’s a bit like finding a bee hive but only targeting specific bees by using a mallet. It’s easy to badmouth Israel but the fact is that one way of reducing the risk of injuring civilians is to reduce the number of civilians actually around to get injured.

Netanyahu insists there could be a Palestinian state. But not till Israeli settlers have nibbled so many bits off the West Bank that the Palestinians can only fit into what’s left by stacking themselves up like a motorcycle display team.

There’s understandable concern in the UK that the conflict could spread across the Middle East. It would clearly be a calamity – another 5p on petrol. Basically, the Palestinians took a wrong turn back in 2006. They were offered a free democratic vote, and they went and voted for the wrong party. Let’s look at this historically and realistically. Germany should buy Crete from Greece and give it to one or other of them.

Like most of the international community I’d like to see a two-state solution, where people live side by side. I’d like to see one state occupied by Israel. An aggressive, destructive military power who stops at nothing to bulldoze and bomb their neighbours. And I’d like the second state to be Essex.

But congratulations are due to US Secretary of State John Kerry on getting the Israelis and Palestinians in the same room together. Apparently his trick was to give the Pales-tinian representatives a room first, then put the Israelis in one next door, and wait. Initial talks went better than expected due to Kerry’s radical approach. He told Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair they were being held in Turkey. Blair’s not had the best record in his role. He has more the air of a man sent ahead to check stabling facilities for the Four Horsemen.

Allegations of chemical weapons being used by the Syrian government have raised the possibility of Western intervention. To summarise, the Syrians are killing each other with the wrong type of weapons, so we’re going to kill them. Syria’s war is much easier to bear if you think of the past two years of death and destruction as an elaborate opening ceremony to World War Three. Poor Syria. Now the papers have started printing pictures of dead children, maybe we will see the ones killed in US drone attacks, or shall we wait for the hardback coffee table book? The heartbreaking photos have opened the world’s eyes – if you want people to care about your dead children make sure they die in a way that’s not icky to photograph.

One of Syria’s tactics is trying to destabilise Iraq by flooding it with refugees. A bit like a humanitarian version of Buckaroo. Interesting how it’s often the militant Islamists whom Arab dictators are killing; wonder where they got that idea from? Looks like any invading American force would have to start their mission by saying, ‘Now . . . this is awkward . . .’

I can’t believe our MPs voted not to back the US. The UK’s going to look as stupid as back in the 1960s, when we chose not to follow them into Vietnam. As I write, we’re being told that, unlike Danny Dyer, America must now act to maintain its credibility. The UK said any bombing would only be for 12 hours – but remember to always round projected war timings up to the nearest decade. The big question is all about UN approval. Does the West need to bother pretending to get it or not? It’s all about making surgical strikes. From 100 miles offshore. Like having your appendix removed by a circus knife-thrower.

Things are now so bad there that Bernie Ecclestone’s put in a call to President Assad about hosting a Grand Prix and we’ve been dropping in troops as ‘advisors’. It’s all perfectly legal so long as when they shoot someone they say ‘I advise you to die.’ In some ways I suppose Syria’s lucky. Imagine how bad things would be there without the years of skilful work by Mr Blair.

Blair says we must take a stand against al-Qaeda in North Africa. Although obviously he doesn’t mean that he personally will be taking a stand as he doesn’t want to get shot. He’d like you or your kids to get shot, for something that the untrained eye might think should possibly be the business of, and I admit I’m going way out on a limb here, North Africans. Cameron’s warned that the UK could be fighting al-Qaeda there for decades. Or to put it another way, until the oil runs out.

Cameron even did a tour of North Africa’s most dangerous spots. That’s a bit like the head of an abusive, violent family visiting the foster homes all his grandchildren have been placed in, then lecturing them that they need to behave if they’re ever going to get anywhere. Cameron visited Martyrs’ Square in Tripoli, where the riots began. Wonder when he last popped in on Tottenham?

No one seems to be concerned that we’re just about to launch a war against Africa. I’m guessing the public will only begin to take notice when a cluster bomb intended for a primary school hiding enemy combatants accidentally kills a baby elephant. If the war in Africa escalates, Broadway musicals will be uniquely placed to react to events with a topical show by simply performing The Lion King and Miss Saigon in the same theatre. This might be the only campaign where the RAF drops red noses before doing a loop and then launching missiles.

Western leaders have expressed their support for the new government of Libya, telling them it’s a time for calm, reflection and rearmament. Hopefully, the rival clans will now be brought together by their rich shared history, going back almost sixty years when their country was created by the French and the English whipping out a pen and ruler after a piss-up.

Libya is far from poor. Apart from its oil, being 90 per cent desert has made it the world’s largest exporter of egg timers. They could now make a fortune from tourism. The beautiful coastline and Roman ruins make it ideal. Plus all the random weaponry would be ideal for men on stag weekends to rent for drunken camel shoots.

The campaign was a triumph for NATO, their in-house magazine praising the campaign of air strikes with the headline, ‘4 schools, 2 hospitals . . . but no weddings this time!’ The campaign does send a strong message to the remaining tyrants in the Middle East. Look what might happen if you drive too hard a bargain with our oil companies.

*I don’t really think this. Murderers (for good reasons) tend not to leave witnesses. The whole Batman story is just the revenge fantasy of a little boy dying in an alley.