Author’s note: This was my second attempt to satirise poor IDS and pinched some bits from the earlier article. It was also immediately rejected by Tom for being “too meta”, which nowadays would almost certainly ensure a successful career as an Instagram influencer
Exasperated comedians and satirists have confirmed that they have given up their attempts to satirise Iain Duncan Smith as “too bloody difficult”
“It’s impossible.” stated Rory Bremner, red-eyed and unshaven after spending 3 consecutive days and nights trying to modulate his voice to the anodyne anonymity of Mr. Duncan Smith’s tones. “There’s nothing there!” he sobbed “Nothing. No personality, no inflections, no nervous tics, not one fucking thing that anyone can use to impersonate him”
Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, similarly exasperated, concurred. “He just agrees with everything the Prime Minister does and sits down” they claimed. “He’s completely invisible otherwise. And as for the shadow-cabinet, there isn’t a personality amongst them. Whatever happened to Widdecombe, Clarke and Heseltine? We’d rather be asked to come up with some one-liners about Belgium than face this lot”
Alarmed Conservative Party officials, who were relying on satirists to get them back in the news, have started resorting to increasingly desperate measures to ensure his appearance on the late night comedy circuit. An initial attempt to get Mr. Duncan Smith to feign a heart attack during a speech in the House of Commons backfired when no one noticed – including his own front bench – as they had all fallen asleep beforehand.
A party insider explained how a subsequent attempt to woo the media by substituting Mr. Duncan Smith with a more interesting alternative had also backfired. “We got hold of a show-room dummy and put him in one of Iain’s suits. We then trained Anne Widdecombe’s parrot ‘Oswald’ to repeat a few of Tony Blair’s policy statements so he could sit in the dummy and act as the voice. Unfortunately, the press became suspicious as the dummy was a bit too animated and kept asking the front bench to give him a cracker.”
Another plan to get William Hague to stand in for Mr. Duncan Smith was hatched after confused party members saw them sharing the stage at the party conference and assumed that they were seeing double after the Darby and Joan Tea Dance and Pink Gin-a-thon the previous evening. However, at a secret trial in front of an invited audience of party members, Mr. Hague immediately disagreed with the Government’s policy on everything. Mr Duncan Smith, who was waiting in the wings, then shouted, “Steady on, that’s a bit off! I think the Government’s doing an excellent job!” An unseemly tussle then ensued on the stage and boggle eyed members had to be helped from the room muttering “It’s like something out of Star Trek. That’s definitely the last angostura bitters for me”
Mr. Duncan Smith has issued a press statement allegedly refuting claims that he has no personality, but no one can be bothered to read it.
Sex and Drugs and Growing Old 