Well, well, well. It seems Her Majesty’s finest have decided to momentarily cease sipping Earl Grey and polishing their brogues to actually do something rather dashing. In a move that has left both the Foreign Office and the local gin supply breathless, a British-backed operation has burst into the fetid heart of Boko Haram’s mountain lair and liberated about a jillion captives. Or, at least 300, if you’re being pedantic with numbers, which is rather un-British.
The raid, conducted in cahoots with Nigerian special forces, was so secret that even the Ministry of Defence’s Twitter account had to postpone its daily cat meme. The target was a sprawling horror show of a camp in the Sambisa Forest, a place where the concept of due process goes to die a slow, agonizing death. The captives, poor souls, had been subjected to the sort of misery that makes the Gulag look like a Butlin’s holiday. Women, children, men, all crammed into a space that probably smelled of despair, bad decisions, and, undoubtedly, the unwashed feet of zealots.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Biff, old boy, how did they pull this off without a single interview with a retired colonel on the BBC?” The answer, my dear reader, lies in the opaque fog of modern warfare, where the official line is “we can neither confirm nor deny,” but everyone’s heard it from the barman at the Ministry’s local. The operation involved helicopter insertions, night-vision goggles, and the kind of derring-do that makes James Bond look like a tax accountant. The soldiers, reportedly, disembarked with a polite “Excuse me, but you’re under arrest,” before unleashing a world of hurt on the fanatics.
The rescued are, at the time of writing, in a temporary camp where they are being fed, debriefed, and possibly given a nice cup of tea. Because, let’s face it, if tea can’t solve trauma, nothing can. The UK government, in a statement so anodyne it could double as a biscuit, praised the “courage and professionalism” of all involved. No doubt the PM is already drafting a tweet to celebrate this ‘Great British success’ while conveniently forgetting that our defence budget has been slashed to the point where the army has to share tanks.
But let’s not be churlish. This is a genuine victory. A bolt from the blue against a group that has turned kidnap-for-rape-and-ransom into an industrial-scale enterprise. The operation, codenamed something like ‘Operation Stiff Upper Lip’ or perhaps ‘Etonian’s Revenge’, should remind the world that when Britain puts its mind to it, we can still recapture a bit of that imperial swagger. Just don’t mention the uniforms made in Bangladesh or the helicopters ground for maintenance.
So, raise a glass of tepid gin and tonic to the brave men and women involved. And to the captives: welcome back to the world of free Wi-Fi and the constant threat of the Daily Mail. It's not a nice world, but at least it’s not Boko Haram.
Signing off from my bunker of cynicism, Biff.
