Stop press

I read in my Bloomberg's feed this morning of an interesting new contract that has been let by UK Border Force to an obscure company headquartered in the Cayman Islands and seemingly in the pocket of one Harry Poynter; a contract to supply ten gunboats by the end of December for deployment off the white cliffs of Dover. The contract was let under immigration emergency regulations nodded through at the end of October, on the recommendation of Lady Lichen, currently Parliamentary Under Secretary of State and Minister for Agricultural Innovation and Climate Adaptation, who bought her title with sustained donations to the Conservative Party of around £250,000 a year. It seems that Lady Lichen has been conducting a long term, not to say life time, relationship with Mr. Poynter, but they prefer not to mix their private and public interests. However, it is understood that she buys her hair care products from Leonor Greyl and rides to hounds whenever her various duties permit.

UK Border Force was unable to say how many millions the contract ran to.

But it has leaked out that Mr. Poynter is buying up German made inflatables at French police auctions and is fitting them out with army surplus tanks. Army surplus in the sense that the necessary budget to take them for outings has been cut out of the estimates.

He is subcontracting the crewing of these gunboats to Group Four, who will use staff redeployed from a detention centre that had to be closed rather suddenly, and it hoped that the first boat of the fleet will be on sea trials on Rutland Water before the middle of December. More usually the locale for paddle boarding organised by another of Mr. Poynter's companies.

Just to be on the safe side, he is sourcing special snorkels from Plasan of reference 5. Tested by crossing the Red Sea and much better than the German originals from the Second World War.

Management and command structures will be finalised over the next few days, but it is likely that Group Four will supply a Rear Admiral who will report directly to the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, KCB ADC. Conveniently for present purposes, a Navy man.

References

Reference 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/border-force. The punter.

Reference 2: https://www.bloomberg.com/europe. The feed.

Reference 3: https://www.g4s.com/en-gb. The subbie.

Reference 4: https://www.leonorgreyl.com/en/english/. The look younger potions.

Reference 5: https://www.plasan.com/. The snorkels - and a glitzy website.