Car bomb in Time Square

[Paul Rigby]

The Editor, the Old Grey Lady:

Sir,

This whole correspondence has turned into a complete nightmare. A piece of honest-to-goodness, self-interested, reflexive sycophancy has been entirely misconstrued.

I have just received a stern rebuke from a very charming State Department official - of long Oxford acquaintance and no little diplomatic heft - to the effect that I have been working from “an expired propaganda functionality matrix.”

I have no idea what any of this means, but I was left in no doubt that this was unquestionably “a bad thing,” one which threatens to culminate in the ultimate atrocity – to wit, the termination of my annual thick brown envelope from Uncle Sam’s trench coat mafia.

I therefore propose you ignore everything I have ever written on the subject of the CIA drill which recently took place, under controlled conditions and with considerable precision, in New York. These wonderful men – particularly the women – who serve America with such unfailing patriotism and dedication have been subject to a gross calumny by ill-informed foreign observers, not least me.

I have retired to my chastened rural seat for the duration of the forthcoming well-hung parliament.

A grovellingly penitent

Sir Buxton Strobe-Thribble, MP,
Chairman, Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence Oversight.