WAKING with a hangover so excruciating that only by injecting coffee directly into my eyeballs can I mitigate its ill effects, I look back on the start of the World Cup and what it might hold for the church. 

As ever, my staff were pushing me to come up with initiatives to boost church attendance and wondered if some sort of tie-in with the current tournament might be expedient. And so, after a few moments’ thought, I came up with the following text, to be disseminated across the land by leaflet and electronic communication.

‘Rather chew your own gonads than watch this World Cup, dominated by the joy-sucking, double-cunt duo of Trump and Infantino? I mean, 48 teams, what the heck? Then don’t watch the matches, come to church instead! Don’t worry, no prayers or any of that, we’ll just hang. Snacks provided, but please bring a bottle.’

The impact of this invitation was immediate. Rather than watch Mexico versus South Africa, Britons turned out in droves to their local church, with standing room only in the aisles, the liquor flowing freely, and sonorous chants of ‘Forget Trump’ ringing out across churchyards up and down the country. 

Gratified, I take a light breakfast and peruse a periodical. Therein, I read that actor Gwyneth Paltrow has been criticized for an advert for ‘51 Park’, apartments for sale in Herzliya, Israel, a city established on land from which Palestinians were expelled in 1948. 

Jesus on a stick, all of this makes your exhortations to women to shove eggs up their noses to boost their ‘feminine energy’ look like a load of goop about nothing! Shilling for an apartheid state, in the week they added to the mounting pile of corpses by shooting to death a baby? If only your grinning, super-rich vapidity amounted to nothing more than a mild health risk for anyone stupid enough to take your prescriptions. But now you’re an influencer for genocide, which is a low even for influencers! Just go to heck, you terminally dreadful human being!

In its reporting on the attacks on immigrants in Belfast, the BBC described houses ‘going on fire’ as angry right-wing mobs rioted. 

‘Going on fire’? What is that? It turns out the odd phrasing is just Ulster English, but you mean by sheer coincidence? They spontaneously combusted for no reason while a mob of racist idiots whipped up by the musketeer just happened to be standing innocently outside? Shove your passive voice right up your rear, you overbearing liability of a broadcaster! They were torched, egged on by the sort of people you’ve been promoting since you first decided to make Question Time the Nigel Farage Hour!

Meanwhile, the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson has taken the time to berate the family of the attempted beheading victim for behaving like ‘no normal shocked family’ after they called for calm rather than retribution against immigrants.

Gee, it’s always the ones you most expect, isn’t it? In your ever-worsening drift from soft liberal broadsheet commentator to far-right provocateur, you have to earn your pieces of silver with toxicity like this. Do you have any friends from the old days left, Allison? Any family that still talks to you as you use your platform to encourage fascist violence and arson against families and children? I hope you choke on the small talk you make at the next Spectator garden party, you trolling travesty!

Finally, armed forces minister Al Carns has quit, hot on the heels of defense secretary John Healey, after a row about insufficient military spending.

Heck, no one would like to see Keir Starmer’s bollocks held to the fire more than me but please, don’t bring him down over this, not over a bunch of chancers who’ll no doubt go on to work for the arms trade! Healey was looking for the UK, this irrelevant, tepid little rock, to boost its military spending by 40 percent, making us the biggest military spender in the world after America, China, and Russia. Why? It’s not the 19th century, the globe isn’t mostly painted imperial red! Britannia doesn’t rule the waves, it barely rules itself! It would make no difference, except to a bunch of corrupt contractors, if we had a military spending budget of 15 pence!