I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of having a perfectly topping morning yanked out from under you so hard it makes your teeth rattle? Only the other day I awoke to find the sun beaming down on God’s creation, the birds outside the window giving it their best and Jeeves appearing by my bedside with a tray of eggs, bacon, buttered toast, morning paper and a rather promising looking pot of coffee. In a word, everything that would make a chappie think that this day was going to be a good ‘un, possibly a great ‘un.

But then, just as I had opened negotiations with the bacon I caught a glance of something in the newspaper which caused me to inhale so sharply that before I knew where I was the bacon was bouncing around my left lung, no doubt in a state of some anxiety. Jeeves, ever with the keen eye, noticed the young master’s distress and applied a couple of hearty, congratulatory smacks to the upper posterior which dislodged the misplaced breakfast and after a few minutes of fluent coughing I was in a decent enough state to tell him that it was too bally much.

“Jeeves!” I said “It’s too bally much!”

“Sir?” he said, concerned and, I fancy, deeply moved by the depth of my passion.

“They’ve only done it again!” I wailed “Compared me to another one of these dashed brexiteers!”

I showed him the offending article, which made the case that one of these coves (Reese-Mogg, Jonson, Farage, Smithering-Finnickhan, I forget which) was practically your humble narrator’s identical twin and implying that there was no worse insult that could be levied and still printed in a respectable newspaper. Well, I mean to say, what?

Jeeves seemed furious. Practically incandescent with rage. By which I mean, I fancied I saw him raise his eyebrow a sixteenth of an inch.

“Most disturbing, sir.”

“There’s nothing for it, I’ll have to sue!”

“I would advise against that, sir. Cases relating to libel rarely result in favourable outcomes.”

“But dash it, I have to do something!”

Those who know me will tell you that Bertram is not thin-skinned. Far from it. In fact I rather think that, when it comes to skin, I yield to no animal except perhaps a particularly resilient rhinoceros. It could scarcely be otherwise with the family that Providence has seen fit to afflict me with. Well do I remember the time my Aunt Dahlia recounted how she had once saved me from choking as a small child and how she now considered that, not a crowning moment of heroism, but one of the great blunders of a long life. And she, I remind you, being the Aunt who actually likes me.

But I mean to say, what’s a lad to do when one’s very name has become an epithet and short-hand for the nation’s premier blisters? Hath not a Bertram eyes? If you tickle a Wooster, does he not tell you to pack it in and stop acting like an ass? I say my name has been dragged through the mud quite enough, and if no one shall speak in Bertram’s defence, then Bertram must. So here it is.

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