It occurs that there is a gap in the market for a satirical novel.

It could be set in a Magical Kingdom – Far Far Away.

There a class of shiftless layabouts live off a class of hard-working merchants.

In order to attempt to look less like shiftless layabouts, they spend their days making up regulations to make the hard-working merchants’ work even harder.

Eventually the hard-working merchants begin to question why they are working so hard. They remain hard-working, for such is their nature, but they cease to be as productive as they might be, because they are wasting their time with regulations. Some begin to wonder why they bother.

Even the shiftless layabouts realise there is a problem: they care nothing for the hard-working merchants, but it dawns on them that they need the hard-working merchants to survive. Without them, they might have to work themselves – horrors!

So the shiftless layabouts do what they always do – they set up a committee to study the problem.

Then the committee does what committees always do – it recommends that a bureaucracy be set up to regulate the regulation.

Then the bureaucracy does what bureaucracies always do – nothing.

Then, when the hard-working merchants see no improvement, because there is no improvement to see, what do the shiftless layabouts do? Seek genuine improvements? Of course not! No – spend the money instead on more publicity so that people think there have been improvements!

There is, however, a problem with this novel. It is not, as one might imagine, that the story is too far-fetched.

On the contrary, the problem is that there might be a copyright issue, for this is not a tale of a Magical Kingdom but of the United Kingdom, and its “Better Regulation Executive”.

Satire has become redundant.