Why the Norman conquest works for me every time

Usually, at this time of the year, I am wandering, or renting, in Western Europe. But, for various reasons too uninteresting to recount here, I am spending this August at home. This removes the one drawback of being on holiday abroad: the search, in la France profonde, or wherever, for the British newspapers; and the knowledge, when they are found, that they are a day late, and that events must surely have moved on.

This year it would have been especially agonising. Lord Tebbit discovers spotty youths in Central Office! Such a phrase, as various authorities instantly pointed out, is a euphemism for Mr Iain Duncan Smith himself. For ‘spotty youths’ read ‘Iain has been captured by the gays, the women, and the ethnic minorities, insofar as the three categories are distinguishable’. The authorities explain that in the Middle Ages, when barons wanted to attack the king, they attacked the spotty youths advising him.