MI6 enters the Labour leadership debate with vintage "Red Smear" piece in the Torygraph

[Paul Rigby]

Lord Minty of Felch ---- ::laughingdog::

I actually had to look up the word in an urban dictionary. :hock::

There appears to be some confusion over this perfectly respectable proper noun. Let me dispel it at once: Felch is a charming, if hitherto obscure, Gloucestershire hamlet, not an insalubrious sexual practice.

I refer all in search of enlightenment on the matter to a work by the late Helmut Schlapper, the eccentric academic widely believed to have been assassinated, in a Berlin nightclub toilet, by remotely-controlled lederhosen. This eminent German historian, and keen student of Anglo-American geopolitics, devoted a chapter to this rural idyll in his seminal 2002 work, The Topography of Secret British Power: Weaponized Eros in the Age of the Washington Consensus (Obertitting: Kummerspek Verlag).

"Felch: Gateway to the Cotswolds - and centre-left power" is even today the only substantial expose of New Labour's answer to Chipping Norton and its notorious set. The village boasts all the expected features of traditional rural life several exclusive London estate agencies; a delicatessen worthy of Knightsbridge (Julian and Sandy's); two fine gastro-pubs, The Dripping Sod & The Boar's Head, at either end of its short main street; three hair salons; five antique shops; and an evangelical boarding school (The Anthony Earl Williams Academy) and is therefore blessed with regular sightings of the finest New Labour has to offer, from both Balls, through Andy Bunkum, Liz Airhead, and Lord Minty himself, Keeper of the Queen's Stool.

As for communications, it's within easy reach of RAF Brize Norton, Cheltenham's GCHQ, not to mention Maurice de Vere Gamp's home for confused urban youth ("Camp Gamp"), with the George Soros Media Centre only an armoured SUV's-throw away at nearby Strobe-on-the-Wold. From the latter, New Lab's finest make impassioned pre-recorded speeches to such human rights black spots as Dagestan, Tibet, and, of course, Ukraine, to whose Azov battalion Peter Tatchelenko so memorably dedicated his most recent Yule log.

I trust that ends all the tittering, ober or unter.