An Electrifying Plot

After two horses collapsed and died in the paddock at Newbury racecourse on Saturday, rumours are rife that they were electrocuted by a faulty underground cable. Yeah. As if. A mysterious cable that's allegedly been there for years suddenly, out of the blue, strikes down two nags - not very likely. It's a cover-up. Trust me, what really happened was that those two horses were struck down by an invisible horse-killing ray. How else do you explain the fact that the stable boys with the horses weren't electrocuted as well? I mean, a charge powerful enough to fell a horse would easily fry a human being. No, the only credible explanation is a ray that only affects horses. But why, I hear you ask, would anyone be targeting race horses with such a sophisticated weapon? That's easy - it's all part of a plot to hold the racing world to ransom. Those two nags were killed as an example of what could happen if the race course owners, the trainers, jockey club and bookies don't pay up - mas equine carnage every time they try to hold a race meeting.

Now, I know that you are probably thinking that this seems like a pretty small-scale scheme for some super-villain or international secret criminal organisation to be involved in, but hey, there's a recession on. It just isn't as easy as it used to be to get financial backing for those old-school schemes like hijacking nuclear warheads and holding the world to ransom, contaminating the US' gold reserves with radioactivity or abducting space craft to provoke a war between the US and Russia. This is the new austerity era extortion campaign. Besides, if, as I strongly suspect, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE are behind the horse slayings, they're probably working on the basis that, if they confine their schemes to the UK mainland, then their nemesis James Bond is unlikely to intervene. Domestic security threats are the province of the Security Service (MI5), and Bond works for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which operates only overseas. I've no doubt that Blofeld has seen Spooks on the BBC and knows that MI5 aren't much cop. He's probably working on the basis that the worst he'll have to face will be some Dick Francis-style ex-jockey turned private eye working for some consortium of wealthy race horse owners. Anyway, if they don't pay up. I'm sure we'll some more equine 'electrocutions' this coming weekend...