You must respect Britannia's mighty trident

Following the recent unfortunate incident when one of Britain's nuclear weapons delivery systems experienced a trivial navigational malfunction that sent it hurtling in the direction of the United States of America, it has come to my attention that various whingers and enemies of the people have been using this tiny mishap as an excuse to criticise our glorious and totally independent nuclear deterrent.

This sort of defeatist talk needs to stop now. We live in a dangerous world, where Britain's reputation abroad lies in the hands of a foreign secretary with a lifetime's experience of personally insulting almost every nation and ethnic group on the planet to which he doesn't belong and who seems intent on alienating those few remaining parts of the globe which still hold this nation in any kind of regard, with his trademark combination of instinctive bigotry and buffoonish incompetence.

So of course we need the to retain the capacity to incinerate hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings and wipe whole cities from the map - the threat of brute force and intimidation are now the only things we've got left that might conceivably make foreigners carry on respecting us.

Besides, it was only a test. For crying out loud, there was no warhead on the damn thing. And even if there had been, it wouldn't have been a problem. Think about it. Who do we have those things pointed at? I know we're not supposed to say and nobody's supposed to know, but we all really know that it's Russia. Now, back in the days of the Cold War when the Russkies were our enemy and Uncle Sam was on our side, flattening the odd American city would have been a tad embarrassing. But these days, what with the Trump-Putin axis, it's a lot simpler. Fire your missile east and you hit the bad guys. Fire west and you hit the bad guys' closest ally, which is practically the same thing.

Of course, the usual prophets of doom and moaners will start carping that recklessly launching a nuclear strike against a massively better-armed adversary would inevitably invite a retaliatory counter-strike that would turn these islands into a smoking radioactive wasteland. These people have frankly lost touch with political reality. To hear them talk, you'd think it was government's job to try and make life better for the people who live in Britain. These dinosaurs clearly haven't noticed that we gave up on that sort of old-fashioned socialist rubbish in the 1970s.

In the Twenty First Century we have a far more mature and sophisticated way of doing things. Forget trying to improve things for the ungrateful proles and concentrate on distracting them by blaming everything on foreigners, then picking unnecessary fights with them, preferably from a position of overwhelming weakness and with the minimum of forethought and preparation. Our position on nuclear confrontation should echo the wise words of our warrior queen, the Boadicea of Brexit herself, when she almost said:

I’m interested in all these terms that have been identified – hard nuclear apocalypse, soft nuclear apocalypse, black nuclear apocalypse, white nuclear apocalypse, grey nuclear apocalypse – and actually what we should be looking for is a red, white and blue nuclear apocalypse.

That is the right apocalypse for the United Kingdom, what is going to be the right relationship for what remains of the UK with the charred ruins of Earth once we’ve left. That’s what we’re about, that’s what we’ll be working on.

It might result in an overwhelming catastrophe but, by jingo, it would go down in our glorious national history, like the Charge of the Light Brigade. And even that French chappie had to admit that Cardigan's fellows were magnificent, even if he did have the impertinence to claim that it wasn't war (damn cheek from a Frenchie, trying to tell us how to fight a war, but what else would you expect from a ruddy foreigner?).