Author’s note: The Tories were becoming completely invisible and ineffectual, ground under by the New Labour PR bulldozer and the charisma black hole of Iain Duncan Smith. We were trying to satirise them and this was my first attempt which was roundly rejected by Tom for being “unoriginal and dull”. I rather liked it – especially the Matthew Parris gag. Also note, this was around the time IDS started having voice problems and famously croaked through various speeches – an affliction of other Tory leaders, too.
Bemused Conservative Party officials today confirmed that after several days of becoming increasingly difficult to see by the media, their leader, Iain Duncan Smith, had now completely disappeared.
“He seemed to be getting a bit blurred at first” commented press spokesman Nick Wood “But nobody really took any notice of that as, well, no one really took any notice of him in the first place. Then things started to get really bad when he turned up to a press conference and not only did no one stop talking, which is usual, but no one from the press noticed him at all. When this disembodied voice suddenly started droning on about ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ it gave everyone a nasty turn – especially Max Hastings from the Standard who had drifted off to sleep after a couple of clarets over lunch”.
The visual disappearance of Mr Duncan Smith was then followed by the loss of his voice. “At first we could keep track of him by following his voice around the room and seeing who started dropping off to sleep.” continued Mr Wood “But then his voice just seemed to get thinner, as if he’d been breathing helium, and disappeared in a loud squeak last Thursday just as he was explaining his views on interest rates to a snoring Michael Ancram.”
The sudden invisibility of Mr. Duncan Smith could not have come at a worse time for the party. Mr. Duncan Smith was on the eve of launching his new policy for the Tories: ‘Conservatives – we’re just like the Government – only more so’. “It’s a huge leap forward for Conservative party thinking” he had commented at the time “We have finally given up any pretence of having any ideas of our own and just want to prove to the electorate that we’re desperate to get back in power”. New policies were said to include “We love public services”, “There’s room for queers in the Conservatives” and “Europe? Never heard of it”
Tory party HQ has now embarked on a series of desperate measures to ensure that Mr Duncan Smith will not be missed. A party insider explained, “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 Matthew Parris 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, Mr Hague showed a worrying tendency to own a personality, which made the difference between the two easy to spot on close examination.
Media representatives were more sanguine however. Lord Wakeham of the Press Complaints Commission, replying to an enquiry from the Brains Trust about the disappearance of Ian Duncan Smith from the media, responded “I’m sorry? Who?”
Sex and Drugs and Growing Old 