1 June 2007
Charles Leslie Falconer
The Lord Chancellor, Baron Falconer of Thoroton, PC, QC
The Lord Chancellor's Office
54 - 60 Victoria Street
London
SW1E 6QW
Dear Sir
I have just finished a book by Jeremy Paxman bleating on about royalty and how good it is that Britain has a constitutional monarch, put there simply because of her genes and not her savoir. Paxman is a capitalist Tory, so I can understand his sentiments. You, however, are a Labour man - a liberal thinker who roomed with the greatest PM Britain has ever known, Tony Blair, but your titles almost meant I had to go onto the next line to type in your address. I thought this nonsense of barons and viscounts was a Tory hangover; a time when the hoi oligoi ran riot, class wars were waged and the hoi polloi were brutally suppressed by the bourgeoisie upper crust. What really is going on in New Labour? Surely this was what you and Tony would discuss over a few sherries (no pun intended!) in London and make your lifetimes' ambition to eradicate?
My apologies, Sir, I digress.
My neighbour, Ted Old - granted a whinging Australian who still has the Queen as his Head of State - has told me the law is an ass. What he told me next made me think that the law is not an ass, it is rather a mule: a beast which is as stubborn as it is impotent.
He has it on excellent sources that money is to be made by ripping off schools and colleges that take students on excursions to some of Britain's great cities such as Edinburgh, Cardiff and Dublin. He heard that a student visiting Central London got lost for ten minutes, was found by a London policeman who contacted the school involved, and the child was reunited with the group not one hour later. The damage? £5,000 for gross negligence! Litigators implored this school to settle out of court as there was no way the case could be won. Money to be made indeed!
I have a plan. I am going to enrol several teenagers I know from Amsterdam through Dutch contacts my sister-in-law Maretha has (if we can drag them away from the coffee shops that is!) at schools around the country, tell them to get lost deliberately, and then sue each school for £5,000. If each student costs about £1,000 for a two week course, then I will be making a tidy profit of £4,000 per student per two weeks, which is a return even capitalist scum like Bill Gates would be proud of.
Maretha promises me that she can organise at least 20 students - perhaps more if excursions include a stint in Notting Hill where Nigerians are peddling drugs with hauteur. £80,000 is four times the amount of money most people could hope to make annually so no doubt, when people hear of this, there will be a killing to be made.
You are clearly a man of many means: anyone with such titles does not need to approach Virgin Credit Cards for an interest-free special on balance transfers. I do not think a "small donation" into the Labour Party coffers is necessary then to induce an answer. I am Labour through and through. That is all you need to know. What I need to know though is this: is this possible? Ted Old may be a man of much wisdom, but he's been known to make mistakes in the past. Is the law in such a state that innocents can be toyed with in such a way?
I need to know soonest as Maretha may also be able to enrol some Moldovan students. It may take a while for their visas to process such is the state of the Home Office's affairs, dealing with thousands of foreign criminals being kept in Britain, housed in council houses and on a full state pension.
Let's make hay while the sun shines!
Yours truly
R S V Peters
