all hands to the sandbags
Lifted straight from the weekend’s Guardian here’s our very own northern Edward Snowden, Lucy Mangan’s riotous expose of recent email exchanges between our boys at the top. Enjoy:
From: King Boris, the mayor of London
To: Davehead, PM
Flood Londinium! ‘S all right by me. I’ll tell ‘em I’m giving them a Venice in every high street. It’ll be great. They love me. Basia culos meos!
From: Owen Paterson, environment secretary
To: All badgers
Flood the countryside! Hear that, badgers? See what happens when you move the goalposts on me? I’ll drown the lot of you in your beds! Mwah-ha-haaaa!
From: Ian Duncan Smith, work & pensions secretary
To: Everyone
We must take a practical, level-headed view. Flooding towns, pros:
1. Lots of poor people who don’t have much to lose.
2. We could lose a lot of poor people.
3. Poor=idle=time on their hands to make sandbags.
4. Replace Job Seeker’s Allowance with sand allowance.
5. Prospect of death by drowning will teach self-reliance and provide motivation to work.
Flooding towns, cons:
1. Old people on most costly pensions and benefits generally live in the country and would sadly survive.
2. Would destroy lots of homes but could get the unemployed to mix in recycling newspapers and make loads of one-bedroomed papier mache apartment blocks. Place in pros column.
3. Full employment and out of recession for ever. Place in pros column.
From: Jeremy Hunt, health secretary
To: Whoever it may concern
Flotsam, more of it in towns. Plenty of great material for homemade splints, crutches, stretchers etc. reduce NHS to dinky little private cottage hospitals in…er, cottages. Sell off current hospital sites & building to London-based property developers. Job’s a good ‘un.
From: Davy Boy, The Prime Minister
To: The Bullingdon Boys
Could we arrange to lose the Cotswolds? Just in case anyone wants to start having dinner parties, lending horses, or sending vague but seemingly significant emails again.
From: Nick Clegg, deputy PM
To: The bigger boys
I don’t mean to be rude but I was just wondering what will happen to any of our potential voters who don’t have second homes to go to?
From: Nigel Farage, UKIP leader
To: Earth Humans
It’s a bladdy conspiracy! Everyone in the EU flushed their loos at the same co-ordinated time and they’re trying to drown our great nation!
From: Georgie Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer
To: Davehead, PM
Either way, the bankers in penthouses will be all right, yeah? And, between us, this will play perfectly to the making of our ‘haves’ and ‘have-yachts’ society!
