Posh Spice Kidnap Story and Burrell Case Are Laughable

We know that John Leslie took coke, because we saw it with our own eyes. And we know that Angus Deayton took coke because many, many people can corroborate the story, which is one of the downsides of having threesomes. Besides, if he didn't do it, that would make him the straight man, and everybody knows that there's only room for one straight man on a comedy show (it's Ian Hislop, since you ask). I'm prepared to believe that Turkey might well elect a pro-Islamist government because I can think of no good reason to make that up. Everything else in the news, however, sounds radically improbable.

It sounds like the kind of thing Orwell might have made up for the distraction of the proles in 1984, if he'd had any inkling of how inane we'd all turn out. I'm not talking about this week's main story, "Harry Potter film in even better than last one shock". That I can believe because if you're aiming at an audience that thinks it almost beyond the boundaries of human genius to make a load of digitally animated owls all fly in the same direction, then you're not aiming very high. No, I'm talking about what the butler didn't do and mainly I'm talking about Posh Spice. Let's go through this second story again - a kidnap ring was infiltrated by a reporter from the News of the World before it could execute its dastardly plan to kidnap Posh Spice. Then the police nabbed the ring, but seem to have dispensed with the kidnap charge, for the time being, in favour of that classic criminal catch-all, the thieving of bejewelled turbans. The alleged victim of this theft was Sotheby's, which hadn't mentioned it had any turbans missing, possibly fearing a PR disaster that would turn it into the nation's least favourite auctioneer for the future flogging of fabulously pricey headwear. Now, the alleged turban theft is part-way explained by the fact that the kidnap wannabes had a well-placed connection in the auction house, which is fair enough. But it does make you wonder, if they had connections that good, surely they could find someone other than a News of the World reporter to drive their getaway car (they offered journalist Mazher Mahmood £15,000 to take part in the Posh smash-and-grab - one of their fateful errors).

For the holding of Posh, a safe house had been chosen in south London. Uncorroborated rumours suggest that it was rigged up for the extremely loud playing of It's Raining Men (the Halliwell edition), should Beckham fail to come up with the dough. Clearly, a more seasoned crime ring might have chosen a slightly less visible victim. A victim, say, who couldn't be recognised and named - and probably identified by screams alone - by everyone in the entire country. While a terrorist might go for someone high profile, if you were just in it for the money common sense would choose someone infinitesimally less rich and infinitely less famous. Oh, but this was a deliciously exotic brand of bandit - three Romanians, a Kosovan and a fifth man with a foreign-sounding name have so far been arrested. They ain't from round 'ere; normal rules of "does this sound completely made up to you?" don't apply.

If that all sounds too spectacular to be true, the Paul Burrell case stretches credulity in the opposite direction. I refer not to the intervention of the Queen, which is exactly what you expect from a head of state. (Come on, if freemasons can halt sticky court cases by standing up and making a noise like a duck, a Queen can get away with quite a bit, surely?) No, I'm wondering how it turned into such a major criminal case in the first place. With piercing awareness of how short life is, I haven't read a list of his (wrongly) alleged pilferings, but as far as I can make out, it amounted to a bin bag of Chris de Burgh CDs, and a bunch of postcards starting "Dear Mushroom". How did that ever make it to the Old Bailey? You wouldn't wish tripe like that on a booze-nosed JP at the twilight of his career. You could have tried Paul Burrell at a supermarket checkout and still been wasting people's time.

The thorny task ahead of us as conspiracy theorists - I'm assuming you're all with me here - is to work out what the actual conspiracy is. The Posh story could be there to persuade us either a) that eastern Europeans are out to get us; b) that none of us is safe - not even in our own cars; or c) that Posh has a new single out soon (I'm not ruling out a combination of all three). The Burrell trial could be there to make us all distrust our household staff, but I can't see what the long game is there. Alternatively they could, taken together, form a spicy/banal news pincer movement to distract us from something truly massive going on, just out of view. Maybe the referendum on the euro is actually today, and if we forget to vote, that counts as a "Whatever You Think's Best". Maybe we've just mobilised troops for a war against an oil-rich state that nobody's really that keen on (the war, I mean, not the state; well, actually, both). Whatever the real story is, I feel certain it has nothing to do with turbans, Romanians, Posh Spice or soft rock of the late 80s. That is, unless she really is bringing a single out.