Barbary Apes

A mean-spirited, inept hard-right government in a clapped-out colonial power with a bit of separatist trouble has been violating international law by annoying a mean-spirited, inept hard-right government in a clapped-out colonial power with a bit of separatist trouble. Mariano Rajoy's Spain, which is seeking to criminalise abortion and is suffering from rumblings in Catalonia, has mounted hundreds of unlawful incursions into the territory of one of Britain's various colonial rumps; much to the irritation of the Bullingdon Club, which has banned books for prisoners and is suffering from rumblings in Scotland. The Spanish ambassador has been repeatedly summoned to the Foreign Office to be cowed and abashed by the statesmanlike squeakings of Willem den Haag; only for Spanish government vessels to continue inexplicably upon their merry way, for all the world as if they were the Royal Navy and the territorial waters of Gibraltar were some far-flung Gulf of Woggery in need of some brisk peace-keeping.