England’s water crisis: decades of underinvestment, privatised firms extracting rents, and a state too broke to fix pipes. Fortunately, the establishment has a brilliant plan: escalate with Russia, trigger a limited nuclear exchange, and get a neat lattice of new reservoirs in the form of fresh craters - conveniently clustered around the Home Counties. As an act of war, NIMBY rules won’t apply.

So next time you think war spending is fiscally insane, remember: it’s not waste, it’s water strategy. World-class ingenuity from the people who once ran an empire.