It happened, yesterday, that a friend and I took to swapping poetic ditties, such was the slow pace of the banking and commercial worlds, it still being August and the terrors not yet back at their prep and public schools.
I started with a paraphrasing of Belloc's wonderful Lord Lundy:
The grandees of the Party bore
The shame till they could bear no more.
They rallied their collective powers,
Summoned Dave to Millbank Tower,
And bitterly addressed him thus—
“Sir! you have disappointed us!
We had imagined you to be
Prime Ministerial pedigree.
The stocks have crashed; the Press turned sceptic,
The Middle Class is apoplectic
So there it is! . . . Our language fails!
Go and run the Royal Mint in Wales!”
My correspondent, who I will call Felipe, responded thus:
There was a boy whose name was Davy,
His cheek was pink, his hair was wavy,
And unlike all the other boys,
He didn’t much care for games and toys,
But dwelt all day on his ambition,
To be a famous politician.
To Eton and Oxford, up he went,
The perfect launch for his ascent,
To the upper reaches of our polity,
And the friendship of the quality,
So with a little help from friends and dad,
He quickly made himself a SPAD.
But he must get a job, and it must take in
Experience in the art of spin
So for seven long years of toil unseen
He spun the web for Michael Green,
Which was somewhat infra dig, in truth
For a patrician and a gilded youth.
At length, at last, his climb resumed
When, as his friends had all assumed,
He was given a seat and duly sent
To sit in Her Majesty’s parliament.
‘Now to be leader’ he said and turned his eyes
To the summit, the peak, the glittering prize.
The battle was joined, his weapon was spin,
He used it to do his opponents in;
The fools had relied on the unvarnished truth
Dave on his tongue and his charm and his youth.
The blue rinses loved him as he told them he’d win,
And the elders themselves succumbed to his spin.
But at the election the House was hung,
Had Dave’s ambition missed the last rung?
No, never, he had one more trick:
A big open offer to someone called Nick.
They carved up the jobs and then, and then,
Dave could walk straight into old number ten.
He had the top job, now what would he do?
As it turned out he hadn’t a clue
I’ve got there he thought, what more do I know?
If I had some ideas you’d have heard them by now.
I know that I’m happily married to Sam
But I’ve never really known who I am.
I think this should now be an open competition. Do your best, idle readers, try to get that old muse working and amuse yourselves and the rest of us with poetic reflections of the state we're in. The prize, as usual, will be won by Nick Drew.
