Journal of the Plague Years

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Light relief is in short supply, so here's a page to cheer you up...

• Who reads the papers, rules the country.
• Dramatis Personae.

Who reads the papers, rules the country.

23 March 2008 .

The outstanding light political comedy to come out of UK or US television, in my opinion, was 'Yes, Minister'. The following is half-remembered from that, with an addition or two. It's our newspapers, and who reads them, here for my own amusement only:

The Times: read by the people who rule the country.
The Mail: read by the wives of the people who rule the country.
The Telegraph: read by the people who think they rule the country.
The Guardian: read by the people who think they ought to rule the country.
The Independent: read by people who doubt that anyone's ruling the country.

The Financial Times: read by people who know the country is ruled from abroad.
The Morning Star: read by people who think the country ought to be ruled from Russia.
The Express: read by people who think the country ought to be ruled by Princess Di.
The Sun: read by people who don't care who rules the country, so long as she's got big knockers.


Dramatis Personae.

08 March 2008 .

From time to time on this site I go a bit overboard on this website in according respect to my liege lords, to the understandable bewilderment of at least one visitor from Europe. So, herewith a short list of some of the actors who strut across our English stage:

The Great Leader, aka The Supreme Leader, aka The Father Of His People, aka The Great Helmsman, aka The Unassailable Moral Arbiter: Prudence Manse-Brown, Prime Minister of this great nation. A foreigner.

The Great She Elephant: A predecessor.

The People's Dear Leader and President-for-Life-Apparent His Excellency Field Marshall Doctor Idi Blair Dada QC, Peace Plenipotentiary Extraordinaire in partibus: The People's Dear Leader and President-for-Life-Apparent His Excellency Field Marshall Doctor Idi Blair Dada QC, Peace Plenipotentiary Extraordinaire in absentia.

Him, aka That Other One: Dave, a pretender.

Gussie Fink-Nottle: Mayor and breeder of newts in our fair city.

Brenda: A Queen.

Brother Tony: A teacher and an holy man.

Robespierre: Himself. [Many times reincarnated, this man of the people may keep losing his head but he returns to each new life still convinced that pure reason under his strict but benign governance will lead us all into the sunny uplands of a perfectly ordered world. Currently travels incognito, under the alias of 'Blunkett'.]

Jacqui Smith: A jester.

Wandsworth the skool dog: Ed Balls.

The Great And Dear Leaders: An occasional double act of no great significance (c/f Laurel and Hardy).

The Lady of Misrule, aka The Horrible Hodge: A creature of Dreadful Warning from a mystery play. [As Minister for children, she accused a victim of child-abuse - in the borough where she'd been mayor, which has been something of an epicentre of abuse - of being at one and the same time somebody she'd never heard of and a well-known troublemaker*. (The guy had in the meantime become a highly respected lawyer.) As Minister for culture, she described the Proms as being the sort of event that damages our collective culture.]

The Blair Babes: A girl band devised by the marketing men; developed by technical wizardry from a single ovum.

Bush: Satan.

Names courtesy of assorted politicians, Private Eye, New Statesman and the Ayatollah Khomeini. (Except for one or two - such as Pru, whom I made up for myself, rather cleverly, I thought, until I googled and found him already out there on half-a-dozen sites.)

*The events surrounding the abuse of children in The People's Republic of Islington, Mad Marge's mayoral see, were tangled; but one strand has been picked out. It was council policy that gays couldn't be child abusers; so paedophiles seeking jobs with access to vulnerable children simply claimed in their job applications that they were gay.

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