The great English Tory satirist Michael Wharton has died aged 92.

The death has caused fitting columnar mourning. . The servants at the
Great House at Simpleham are united in fittingly servile weeping. The
villagers of the parish move with heads bowed.

Outside the parish the Rev John Goodwheel and the Bishop of Bevingdon
Dr
Spacely-Trellis, vie for the privilege of presiding at the funeral. J.
Bonington Jagworth roars through near deserted streets and lanes, but
his heart isn't in it. Phantomsby, Lord Mountwarlock's butler and the
only practising werewolf in the Midlands, looks listlessly at the full
moon, while his master's cyclopean eye cascades bitter tears. In
Hampstead, Marxmount, the fine white mansion of Mrs Dutt-Pauker has
taken on a shade of unexplained grey, while Mrs Dutt Pauker
distractedly
fingers the skull mounted on a silver base of a saboteur executed
under
Stalin, a much loved memento given to her by Beria when she visited
the
great experiment before the war. The editor of the Feudal Times and
Reactionary Herald frets over his thoughts on the passing of a
proprietor whose like fears he will not see again.

Black-clad horsemen carry the news to the four corners of the column.
The columnar armed forces remain steadfast to repel any invaders from
obituaries. But all is uncertainty... will the column survive forever
in ethereal form or will it be dragged screaming and kicking into the
ghastly purview of the modern world?

Yours sincerely,


Robert Henderson
--


The Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald

Leader

The Death of a great Proprietor

In these benighted times it is rare indeed to find a man of such sound
principles as Peter Simple holding the ownership of a great organ such
as our own. In a world of proprietors formed from speculators and
worse,
Peter Simple was a singular example of that older and more substantial
England in which breeding had its proper place and mammon was not God.

Does his death toll the knell of any hope for a return to that happy
state? Who can tell, but our readers may rest easy in their beds that
The Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald will cleave to the principles
of
our late owner. We shall have no truck with modish or the transient
fancies . We shall expose the foaming radicals who now infest our
politics for the scoundrels they are. We shall work tirelessly to
promote the interests of the landowning classes, those who have the
greatest and most enduring stake in the country. We shall campaign for
a
return to the happy electoral circumstances which were so recklessly
overturned by the ill-named "Great Reform Act" of 1832. We shall tend
to
the true interests of the labouring classes by calling for the
protection and revivification of their natural employments in
agriculture and in the domestic service of the more substantial classes
and by ending the cruel practice of giving them unsettled ideas above
their station through the pernicious provision of education beyond the
three "Rs".

The Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald stands and will stand for what
it has always done: the past.