THE posturing of Dave and Silly Billy over events in the Middle East would almost be funny if it weren't so embarrassing.

Stern words from the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of Great Britain might once have brought Johnny Foreigner abruptly to heel, but with little bean counter George decimating the armed forces, they contain less threat than a chocolate hand grenade in the desert.

The world's pretty much had it with Britain anyway, what with Yo B having helped light the blue touch paper on several heavy duty conflicts before his Damascene conversion to pacifism; the main snag with that being that his time spent as Middle East peace envoy is in inverse proportion to the amount of peace currently to be had at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, instead of dispatching a gunboat, Dave's sending proud HMS Ark Royal to be a helicopter landing pad in the Thames; marginally less ignominious than becoming a floating casino in Hong Kong, or watching it come steaming back at us one day in the colours of the Argentine navy.

Its replacements won't be ready for four or five years, and even then the fighters capable of using them won't fly until 2020 (that's the year, not twenty past eight).

But at least Ark Royal's crew heard about its demise from the BBC and not via a round robin email. Apparently that's all penpushers at the spendthrift MoD believe British soldiers are worth. Such muddled thinking has also led to 100 newly-qualified pilots, trained at a cost of £300m, getting the sack because the Royal Air Force already has 630 of them. As there are 38,000 people on the RAF payroll, and assuming it were possible to explain what they all do, couldn't someone have found a more imaginative interpretation of the word redundancy?

While lecturing the rulers of Bahrain, Libya and elsewhere on listening to the voice of the people, Dave and Billy continue turning a deaf 'un to the clamour here for a referendum on independence from the tyranny of Brussels. So no chance of Dave hearing anyone shout: "The Emperor's got no clothes."

THE rancid waters of our political cesspool keep swirling, so that Lord 'Chris' Patten, compensated for losing his MP's seat with an EU Commissioner's post, then with sinecures as the last Governor of Hong Kong and Oxford University chancellor, now surfaces as £110,000 four-day-a-week BBC chairman. It ain't what you know