Author’s note: it seems hard to believe now, but the Tories were so useless at the time that it was actually quite hard to write satire about them. Anyway, I gave it my best shot and keen observers may note a wry reference to Tony Blair’s humiliation by the good ladies of the Women’s Institute.
Life was all rather steady and certain. And then the next article I wrote was about God declaring his perfection after the 11th September, 2001
In a terse communiqué from Conservative Central HQ today, the High Council of the Presidium of the Conservative Party explained that with immediate effect the running of the Party would be taken over by a committee of unelected members’ representatives. The move was declared as a response to the recent election in which both candidates showed a complete inability to ‘organise a piss-up in brewery’. The junta has immediately interned both Iain Duncan Smith and Ken Clark announcing that both men would be charged with ‘treasonable incompetence in getting themselves elected’
The spokesman for the junta, Generalissmo Miguel Portillo declared that he was fully behind the democratic process and confident in the member’s ability to select an adequate leader, however they had been denied a suitable choice of candidate. “The election of Iain Duncan Smith is clearly against the wishes of the majority of the party, or at least the ones that support me, and it is now time to give them a proper choice” he commented.
A new election will be organised, with independent observers sent from Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF party. The ballot papers will allow a choice between ‘his most gracious Highness Michael Portillo’ and ‘Someone else’. Each voter will be required to insert their name and address on the ballot paper and voters not selecting Michael Portillo will be interviewed by a Zimbabwean War Veterans focus group to help explore the voter’s choice.
The junta has immediately declared a state of martial law within the Tory Party. A media curfew has also been imposed whereby any party member mentioning the Euro, Margaret Thatcher or ‘baldy slap-head election losers’ will immediately be interned and put through a re-education programme involving repeated exposure to the speeches of Keith Joseph and a cattle prod.
Tony Blair condemned the coup stating that it undermined the democratic process and took the Conservatives from a squabbling set of bitterly opposed factions into the realms of a one-party party. “Clearly this is a dangerous move that could make the Tories considerably more electable. This can only damage the harmony in which the country currently finds itself and therefore I am immediately declaring the Conservatives illegal and any voters expressing a preference for them will be arrested as dangerous anti-government insurrectionists’.
In response, the Liberal Democrats have renamed themselves the Counter Revolutionary Forces of Socialism and Pot Smoking and reorganised as a people’s militia based at a secret jungle hideout. This is believed to be located somewhere in the tropical rainforests of the Eden Project in their West Country stronghold in Cornwall. Speaking from the hideout, Charles Kennedy, wearing combat trousers and a bandanna stated that the CRFSPS would launch skirmishes against both the Government and Tory Party by deploying members of the Women’s Institute to ‘ask difficult questions’ and training an elite squad of suicide jam makers.
Michael Portillo meanwhile has appealed for calm and promised a peaceful transition to the new regime. “After all” he commented “no one noticed us in the last election so who’s going to pay any attention now?”
Sex and Drugs and Growing Old 