The UK’s Daily Mail – newspaper of choice for the infernally bigoted and the eternally stupid – is carrying the scoop of the year: Australian republicans tried to assasinate kill the queen!!!1!

The Queen and Prince Philip were the targets of an assassination plot in Australia, a retired detective has claimed. It happened while the couple were on a state visit nearly 40 years ago, said former Detective Superintendent Cliff McHardy.

According to Mr McHardy, details of the incident were covered up by the authorities. But the secrecy was to hamper the police investigation. ‘We never came up with any decent suspects because if we interviewed people we seemed to be talking in riddles,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t disclose what our inquiries were about.’ 

The ‘Lithgow Plot’, as it was known, occurred mid-way during the couple’s state visit as they travelled from Sydney across the Great Dividing Range of mountains on what was known as the Commissioner’s Train.

The train had just entered a winding cutting near the Blue Mountains town of Lithgow, two hours from Sydney, when it struck a large log which had been wedged across the rails.

So, a log is stuck in some railway tracks in the middle of a forest (where there are lots of, umm, fallen logs). And the queen is miraculously saved because her train hits this log at low speed (naturally, since the log was located at the end of a winding cutting). The police catch no culprit, receive no information and find no evidence of any ‘plot’. And now the answer is revealed – it was the republicans!

I cannot concur. I reckon it was global warming.

Next week in the Daily Mail: ‘Oswald’s bullet really intended for Prince Charles’ and ‘Queen sues Paul Keating for digital rape’.