... I'm sorry George but ...

... you know those nice Apache helicopters we bought from you to attack Saddam. Well we - erm - can't use them as yet. You see it seems that we haven't got any pilots. Erm and we have not got the proper upgrades so that Saddam will be able to hear all our communications - but of course that's not a problem if you've got no one to fly them.

It seems that we decided to privatise the training of the pilots and we - erm - got it a little wrong. First there was this argument with you guys on the software simulator - as your General G put 'We're not letting a bunch of *%$*ing civilins *&*$s using our *%$*ing software - they're all *%$*ing faggots and pinko liberals.' We had the impression he didn't approve and well Tony did say. 'We are a sovereign nation we must do what ever the Americans tell us.'

Then we had problems with sorting out our 'value for money' contracts. This has to be done thoroughly as we don't want our lawyers to run out of money and our civil servants need something to do.

Well and then there was the mistake about training. Our estimates were based on training in the US. We British being more sophisticated sort of chaps should be able to learn quickly than your ill educated chaps. Unfortunately the estimate was worked out on the fact that your people train in Nevada, whereas our training will be in good old Blighty - that's an affection term for Britain, George.

The calculation seemed to forget that it rains in Britain and I gather that in Nevada that they haven't invented rain yet. So we have built some very nice hangers, with lovely sliding doors and in a nice part of the country and we will store the Apache helicopters there until 2007.

We have one or two other minor problems with our army. We don't appear to have guns that work properly. Apparently after 300 years of tradition our army has still not got round to cleaning guns properly. An official enquiry by the Ministry of Supply has completely cleared the Ministry of Supply of any mistake. And anyway I would believe the word of officers and gentleman every day over some of those rough sergeants who keep saying that the cleaning procedures don't work.

We have also solved the communications problem by arranging with the O2 mobile company to set up a new 'World Warrior Tariff' so that our troops will be able to buy, out of their own pockets, the best. As an emergency we are supplying tin cans with large lengths of string as a backup system, with a set of semaphore flags - who says our boys don't get the best.

Oh yes, George asked about the boots, after the exercise in Oman. OK so we used to have an empire that owned 25% of the world's real estate. A lot of it hot. So we in procurement know a lot about boots. By improving our purchasing and procurement procedures we now supply our soldiers with boots, that have a label on them that says they are effective anywhere in the world. There is a really good picture of a tough soldier, with his face blackened, climbing in the mountains, on the label. Unfortunately there is this slight problem with sand and heat - erm - which we discovered in recent maneuverers that makes the boots melt and well our marines, being the tough men that they are, can fight in bare feet.

But not to worry our ministers will say we have the best equipped army in the world. And you should know as we buy most of our equipment from you.

Well George - getting back to Saddam - could you delay the invitation for maybe five, oh lets make it seven years. We should be ready by then. We would also like to apologise about messing up the invitations and badly drawn maps for light refreshments and party at the '100% Proof Brewery'