The Legacy Of The Vicar Of Albion

An ordinary soldier lies bleeding in pieces on a London street. A death so shocking that I can't take it in. And over it all like the ghost at the banquet hovers the spectre of the Vicar Of Albion, whose religious rightness made the seed bed in which these things have taken root.

The Vicar and his ally, the Idiot Vacant Son of the spy President, went to war against a run-of-the-mill tyrant of the East. Pretending that they did it for us, to protect us from - from what? Instant death in three-quarters of an hour? Well, it says so in this book, this book that we've worked so hard to fabricate for you.

And years later, years later, we reap their slow storm of a harvest, gestated in the whirlwind of their righteousness. An ordinary soldier lies bleeding in pieces, his life hacked from him by two fools of Islam, all intelligence squeezed out of them by bigoted, evil men, and replaced with the antithesis of civilisation.

Special envoy. Envoyed by whom? With whose authority? The irony is so rich, it would make you weep with laughter if the tears of despair had not long since filled your eyes and spilled out onto your cheeks. The way that blood spilled out and spills out still on the flesh of tens, thousands, tens of thousands, of the uninvolved. At least the Idiot Son stays in simple retirement in an anonymous American ranch. The last I saw of him he was buying a paper to take home for his dog to read.

Our hearts are ripped apart, they said today. We believe them. The proud soldier in red tunic smiles from our papers, our screens, innocent of what was to come. But it came, and ended yet another life. And another and another to come, to add to those already counted. Too many to count, in honesty, literally too many to count.

The Idiot Son will sleep soundly tonight. He has no whit of what he did. He will sleep the soundest of all, ignorant of many things but particularly of what he did.

But the Vicar - does he sleep? Is he chased by the memories of those he cast out? Does the evidence weigh on his head? While the Lady Of The Parish counts more monies in her posh Scouse head, does he wonder how he will ever sleep again?

God, I hope so, I really hope so. He did it in Your name, after all.