Gravely important news from the frothing abyss of international diplomacy. Your very own tax-sucking British intelligence services, those delightful folks who spend their days reading other people's mail and perfecting their eyebrow lifts, have apparently lent a hand to our Gallic cousins. The French navy, presumably fuelled by a stiff breeze and existential ennui, seized a Russian oil tanker in the English Channel.
This was no ordinary tanker, my friends. This was a floating wallet for Vladimir Putin's war effort, a black gold gusher funding the grisly business in Ukraine. And our spooks?
They pointed the French at it like a drunken uncle at a karaoke machine. A resounding victory for the good guys. One imagines a shadowy MI6 officer in a tweed suit, sipping a G&T, and muttering: 'Right then, Jean-Claude, the target is 300 metres off your port bow.
Try not to ram it with your baguette.' The Russians, naturally, are furious. Their ambassador, a man whose face appears to be permanently mid-gargle, has denounced this as an act of piracy.
He's not wrong, is he? It is piracy. The glorious, legitimate kind.
The kind where you board a vessel and say 'Sorry, old chap, this oil is ours now, we're using it for some terribly important fish and chips.' But let us not get carried away. One seized tanker does not a winter make.
Putin has more ships than a fever dream. He'll simply send another one, painted a slightly different shade of murky grey. The real victory here is the message.
It says: 'We see you, Vladimir. We know your oil is bleeding through the cracks in the sanctions. And we have a very large, very French navy that loves nothing more than a spot of hull inspection in choppy waters.
' It is a small but gloriously petty move. It is a step. A stumble.
A polite cough in the face of a bear. But by God, it is something. So raise a glass to the spooks, the sailors, and the French.
They did a thing. A small, bureaucratic, deeply satisfying thing. And in these utterly ridiculous times, that is almost enough to make one believe in the entire bloody enterprise.
Almost.
