According to Labour Party insiders, a recent court case where a British man had been found guilty of trying to induce an American man to commit suicide via the internet, could hold the key to Andy Burnham being able to solve the UK’s defence spending black hole. “If this individual truly can kill people simply through the power of persuasion, then surely he could be a valuable national security asset,” a source close to the new Prime Minister told the Sunday Bystander. “Far cheaper than maintaining a nuclear deterrent, that’s for sure. Because maybe this is the way ahead for Andy in the whole defence spending debate – eschewing conventional weapons and warfare for an unorthodox approach that directly targets hostile leaders. A well-timed call to Vladimir Putin, for instance, could end the war in Ukraine in an instant!” The question, of course, is just how this individual’s power works and if it could be replicated to produce a small army of deadly persuaders. “Obviously, right now we don’t know exactly how he does it – nearly get that Yank to kill himself, that is – whether it was through subtle psychological means of tapping into a victim’s deepest fears and inadequacies, or even through hypnotism,” the source explains. “Then again, maybe he’s just incredibly dull, with a droning voice which, after a few hours of him describing his collection of used bus tickets to them, would drive anyone to cut their own throat. In which case, it shouldn’t be difficult to replicate his powers. After all, it’s not as if we’re ill equipped as a nation in terms of individuals who can bore people, quite literally, to death: pubs are full of them and if that isn’t enough, just read the comments section under the average online local newspaper story.”
Already, though, there are those who think that, rather than being jailed, this deadly persuader should instead be immediately deployed against what they consider to be the greatest current threat to global peace: the Trump Administration. “Look, I wouldn’t deny that he’s been guilty of some pretty heinous behaviour, but then I got to thinking about it: just how heinous this is depends upon the potential victim,” says Rutland County Councillor Bart Hoopster, of the Radical Freedom Alliance, a radical splinter group of the Monster Raving Looney Party, who has previously represented both the Greens and the Liberal Democrats at local level. “I mean, if this bloke is really skilled at persuading Yanks to top themselves, perhaps, instead of jail, we could set him to trying to persuade Trump, Vance, Hegseth et al to take their own lives. That way, he’d be doing the world a favour and would deserve a medal. Maybe even a knighthood. Plus, it would be difficult to trace their assassinations back to the UK or, indeed, show that they were assassinations at all!” Hoopster’s comments have been condemned across the political spectrum, with Defence Secretary Wes Streeting assuring the Commons that the assassination of democratically elected world leaders, even if it could be done stealthily by getting them to take their own lives, was not the policy of the British government.
Streeting’s statement, however, hasn’t stopped speculation that the recent sudden death of right-wing US Senator Lindsey Graham and the mysterious hospitalisation of fellow Senator Mitch McConnell, might have been a test run in the deployment of this individual’s powers. “I wouldn’t put it past the intelligence services to have run this as a ‘Black Op’ without official sanction, as a trial run,” muses Hoopster. “While they succeeded in offing Graham, clearly their man could only bore McConnell into coma – maybe due to lack of time, or maybe due to the old bastard’s resistance to all forms of death. I mean, he sold his soul years ago.” Hoopster maintains that Britain’s intelligence services have long been experimenting with the use of so-called ‘psychic warfare’. “I have it on very good authority that they’ve been looking into whether ‘Astral Projection’ might have offensive capabilities,” he claims. “If so, then maybe someone could project themselves to the White House and see if their astral body could throttle Trump to death while he slept. Or get one of those ‘firestarters’ to burn down Mar-a-Lago remotely.”
The government, it seems, might be thinking along similar lines to Hoopster, with the Downing Street source confiding to the Sunday Bystander that they might be considering widening their search for unconventional warfare assets beyond just ‘deadly persuaders’. “Why stop at natural bores and weirdo persuaders who can get people to kill themselves?” they ask. “Why not go the full psychic warfare route? We could really put all those cranks out there who claim to have ‘special powers’. Why not set up a programme to develop mutant powers, with Keir Starmer as Professor X, (he, after all, has well established powers to make peoples’ beards spontaneously ignite, as Jeremy Corbyn found to his cost)?” As ever, potential savings in the defence budget are the main attraction of this approach. “Just one person could do the work of several squadrons of RAF planes, for instance, if we could find someone who could, reliably, destroy entire city blocks remotely,” the source enthuses. “Or, even better, telepathically induce panic in opposing forces, making them turn and run before a shot is fired – we wouldn’t need an army of our own then, would we? Damn it, if we were really lucky, we might be able to identify some of those ‘scanners’, who can make heads explode!”
Others on the left, however, believe that the shift to psychic and unconventional defence policies could have other advantages. “Why confine their use just to overseas enemies?” opines Jake Thurstenner of the left-leaning think tank Red Shift. “After all, this could present the government with an ideal opportunity to deal with all those racist bigots and neo Nazis currently clogging up British politics. If, for example, Rupert Lowe’s head was suddenly to explode, nobody would suspect psychic foul play, instead it would just be put down to the result of a dangerous build up of internal hate and outrage. Likewise, if Nigel Farage was to suddenly keel over clutching his chest as his heart was crushed by an astrally projected assassin, people would just put it down to a fatal heart attack, the result of his excessive drinking. Damn it, the possibilities are endless!” Thurstenner agrees with Hoopster that perhaps the best thing about this approach is that there is no way that it could ever be proved that HMG was behind any of these assassinations or sabotages. “It would be the perfect means of assassination, leaving no evidence behind it,” he muses. “Personally, I’d like them to start with that Tommy Robinson, the poison dwarf of British racism. Maybe they can get that bloke who nearly persuaded that American to top himself to give him a call from prison and bore him to death, or whatever it is he does.”
