In a stunning blow to the world's most deranged fan club (the ISIS fan club, not the Taylor Swift one), a 19-year-old Austrian charmer has been slapped with 15 years in the clink for plotting to turn a Taylor Swift concert into a bloodbath. The would-be maestro of misery, whose brain clearly contained more explosives than common sense, was foiled by British intelligence. Because of course it was. While the rest of Europe was busy arguing about olive oil, MI6 was apparently reading the terrorist's grotty little diary where he'd drawn pictures of a massacre set to "Shake It Off."
Let's get this straight. A young man so enamoured of violence that he planned to butcher screaming teenagers in a stadium full of glitter and emotional vulnerability. The audacity. The sheer lack of imagination. I mean, if you're going to commit a terror atrocity, at least pick a target that hasn't been the subject of a billion breakup songs. But no, he chose Taylor Swift. The woman who wrote "Bad Blood" about a feud with Katy Perry. The woman whose fans are so loyal they'd probably shield her with their own sequined bras. The sheer guts it takes to plan a terror attack on the one artist whose concerts are essentially a secular pilgrimage for millions of emotionally fragile young women. It's like trying to assassinate Santa Claus at a mall full of children.
The plot, we're told, was "Islamic State-inspired." Which is newspeak for "a young man with a grievance, a grudge, and a Google search history that would make your soul cry." He was caught, praise be to the British spooks, who apparently have nothing better to do than monitor the internet for dipsticks who think killing Swifties will earn them a golden toilet in the afterlife. The Austrian authorities, meanwhile, were probably busy deciding whether to rename something after a dead composer.
And now the British intelligence services are patting themselves on the back for "foiling the plot." But let's be real. This isn't to foil a mastermind. This is like intercepting a toddler's tantrum. The real question is: how many other similar plots are we clueless about? How many other lonely young men are sitting in their mum's basement, browsing for bomb-making kits and crying into their Cheetos because Taylor Swift doesn't love them? This is the age we live in. Where the enemy is not a nation-state, but a bored teenager with a YouTube tutorial and a death wish.
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift continues her world tour, blissfully unaware that she nearly became a footnote in the history of cowardice. She'll write yet another album about this, probably titled "15 Years of Sadness" or "The Ballad of the Dimwitted Jihadist." And the rest of us will continue to pretend that the biggest threat to Western civilisation is not climate change, or a pandemic, or the collapse of democracy, but a man with a cheap ticket and a poorly-concealed hatred for pop music.
So let's raise a glass of airport gin to the British intelligence services. For doing what absolutely should not need doing in 2024. For saving Taylor Swift's life so she can continue to remind us that heartbreak sounds better with a synthesizer. And for proving, once again, that the bumbling terrorists are still, mercifully, bumbling. Though one wonders, as I sip my lukewarm G&T in this newsroom, whether their next target will be a Coldplay concert. Or perhaps a literary festival. The horror. The horror.
Biff Thistlethwaite, out. Now where's my gin?
