COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

FIRST EDITION

© Frankie Boyle 2013

Frankie Boyle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This book contains material previously published elsewhere, including in Frankie Boyle’s Sun columns

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013 cover design by Lynn McGowan cover photographs © Chris McAndrew/Camera Press (portrait); Shutterstock.com (skyline).

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Source ISBN: 9780007426836

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007426867

Version: 2019-01-02

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 Royals

2 Politics

3 Transport

4 War on Terror

5 Europe

6 Sport

7 TV

8 Animals

9 Economy

10 Celebs

11 Press

12 Science

13 Crime

14 Education and Kids, Yo!

15 Health

16 Internet

17 Relationships

18 Scotland

19 Religion

Endgame

Also By Frankie Boyle

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

There are many reasons why an author chooses to write a book. Perhaps, like me, they’re being paid a lot of money to write it. Or perhaps . . . nope, that’s all I can think of. The good people at HarperCollins did gently hint that I should make this book more commercial, so I had to ask myself about the nature of what’s popular in our culture. What do people really want? What would we hope to be offered by a book if we were being completely honest? Which is why I started writing the book you now hold in your hands. A crime porno.

The appeal for me was simple. How hard can it be to write a thousand words of porn every day? I probably text a thousand words of porn a day. The real problem was not only writing porn and letting the whole thing descend into a kaleidoscope of mouths and limbs and cocks and mouths and cocks. Cocks. And tits.

Hence crime. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like a little vicarious contact with crime: from teenagers killing prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto as a bit of light-hearted escapism from their actual sex lives, to the talcum-powder market foaming their knickers at Daily Mail headlines. The appeal is complex but, for whatever reason, it excites us to hear about some cunt getting killed.

My teenage sexual awakening happened long before the internet. I used to hang out at my local library and scour thrillers for sex. I’d skim the sort of doorstoppers you’d find on your uncle’s bookshelf for words like ‘grasped’ and ‘thrust’. Occasionally looking up to stare slack mouthed at real women trying to borrow books, I rejected the opportunity for precocious learning and memorised reams of disjointed encounters between guilt-ridden adulterers, mercenaries and whores, and even the desperate couplings of a Southern slave plantation. Perhaps this has affected my adult life. I’ve spent this speeding disinterestedly through the bits central to the narrative, desperately looking forward to the occasional sexual episodes, which I haven’t fully understood.

So part of me imagines this book hitting the Scottish library system, and some wee Wifi-less schoolboy in Penicuik having his aching balls blown off by this filthy lightning bolt of premeditated degradation. Or some guy getting his teenage daughter it as a present, because he remembers me from Mock of the Week. Merry Christmas, love!

This will be the burning bible of teenage Britain; a suppressed memory; a limping man in a wooden mask announcing with a shriek that he is the only guest of your surprise birthday party; an uncomfortable evening at the launch of a Muslim breakfast cereal; walking into a bar where a pub quiz host’s questions about your private life are met with general laughter and the harsh metallic bleat of a deer; a sore arse; your dog returning home with a swear word shaved into its side. This book will replicate almost exactly the experience of being a guy who gets raped just after getting the all-clear from prostate cancer and, as the rapist says how tight he is, he realises the cancer’s back; it will be a jeering portal into a new dimension of Desperate Iniquity.

Well, I suppose, to be entirely accurate, I sent HarperCollins the outline of a crime porno and they told me to fuck off. Instead, they asked me to produce what you hold in your hands. I was asked to deliver a humorous topical Christmas book, the sort of thing that raises a wry eyebrow at the news. A Jeremy Clarkson-style slab of bouncy opinion that, with the right cover, might sell well in train stations.

However, they did say that the introduction wasn’t too important and I could maybe let loose a little there. Most people skip the introduction, and half the people who get a book in a train station never read the fucking thing. So for the rest of the introduction I want you to imagine that you’re reading a crime novel. A crime novel in which many of the leads the investigator pursues seem to end in almost pointlessly graphic sex scenes.

• • •

The taxi pulls up by a little boxy end of terrace. After this, it’s all just countryside; after the street lamp on the corner, there’s nothing. I pay the cabbie and get out with her. She turns round as if suddenly aware of the impropriety, silhouetted with her deelie-boppers in the dusk, more like a stag at bay than a hen returning from her own hen night. There’s a long, awkward pause.

I find myself thinking that seduction is just being able to think of something to say at a moment like this. Something that isn’t a terrifying indication of how badly you want to fuck. I can’t think of anything.

I grip her firmly by the back of the neck and her mouth opens slowly under mine. She pulls my bottom lip gently between her teeth, then breaks off and walks abruptly up to the door.

‘Night, night!’ she laughs, way too loud, and I wonder if she might be drunk after all. I’ve followed her step for step and when she twists to say goodbye to me at the door I’m actually right behind her, kissing down hard on the back of her neck, her shoulder.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she chides, turning in my arms to push her mouth into my chest at the open top button of my shirt. I’m holding her by her hip under her jacket and I push my fingers up inside her T-shirt to her bra, her nipple stiffening under my hand. She runs her hand down my chest till she reaches my belt, then, thank fuck, down to where my hard-on is straining through my trousers.

‘I can’t. My fiancé’s inside . . .’

Oh, fuck.

‘He’ll be waiting up for me,’ she declares in a stage whisper, looking off towards the road with a flicker of annoyance crossing her face.

Part of me knows that the moment has passed but then a wee voice in me thinks that if it had passed she’d be gone. I kiss her hard on the lips and I can see the surprise in her eyes as I lift her up with a soft thump against the door, her head bumping gently against the little square of dimpled glass at the top, and I start pushing her skirt up. I keep expecting her to tell me to stop but it doesn’t come, and I just keep pushing. She’s running her tongue along my top lip as my fingers reach the top of her knickers, I tug at her tights, and everything just slides over her little bum surprisingly easily.

A light comes on in the house. Not the hall but back in there somewhere. I’m expecting ‘We shouldn’t be doing this . . .’ at any moment, but I’ve got my cock out now and as I push up against her I suddenly have her full attention again. I’ve got my hand on my cock and I’m trying to guide it in, she’s looking out to the road anxiously, which is odd when we can hear her fiancé moving about inside, but she’s slippery to the touch, and just by pushing up from my legs I’m suddenly in her and she’s biting into my shoulder as her deelie boppers start to rattle gently against the door.

I’m slipping it in and out of her, up through the bustle of her skirt, going as slowly as I can bear. The cold on the outstroke makes me aware of how wet my dick is getting between her legs. Suddenly the light goes on in her hall and I can hear someone shouting, indistinctly, like they’re way back at the far end. Maybe her fiancé thinks she’s just pissed and trying to find her keys, or . . . fuck it, who cares, I’m sick of worrying about other people. I can hear him in there, like he’s moving towards the door, maybe just trying to work out what’s going on. He says something, he’s quite close now, but he sounds drunk and I can’t make it out, and I’m fucking busy here, to be honest.

The shouting gets louder, he sounds drunk or something, an unhappy blah blah blah. She looks back anxiously and then wraps her legs round me really tight, suddenly moving up higher. I’m just holding her now and she’s lost it, pumping her hips like a fucking jockey or something. I hear footsteps coming down the hall but it’s too late because she’s coming hard all over my dick, a gasp of warm breath steams up my glasses and her unmistakable loud moan breaks the silence of the night. This gets me right there and, as I start to shoot, I force open the letterbox awkwardly with my fingers and blast a load into their hallway.

There we are. That degeneracy should have seen everybody off. It’s just you and me now; nobody else will have managed to get to the end of that bit. I don’t think I’ve ever read it all the way through myself. Listen, while nobody’s looking I’m going to try to explain all of human relations as quickly as possible. I imagine that you’re quite young and idealistic – persevering with that porno and thinking that I’d a point to make. Well, if you could do something about what I’m about to say to you later in life, change the world, sort everything out, much appreciated. The question, obviously, is why I chose to include the sex scene. That, I think, is for the reader to work out, and then tell me.

We’ve a bit of a hangover from earlier times. People think of themselves as a ‘self’, a conscious being. In our modern market-driven society the ‘self’ is no longer the ego. It’s our brand identity. Most of what we do is not to serve our ego, our own idea of ourselves, but actually to serve our status, other people’s idea of ourselves.

We’re the first completely market-oriented generation in history and it has destroyed our ability to be free and conscious. We’re not the people we pretend to be. If I invented a time machine, I’d like to think that my first trip would be to go back and kill Hitler. In reality, I’d use the first trip to kill Piers Morgan’s mother at the moment of his conception, and the second one to go back and check.

I remember even as a kid scouring those little brochures you’d get from Woolworths for my parents’ Christmas presents. Like you, I moved on to express myself through the charities I supported, the bands I was into, even the people I hung around with. Around me grew a society where people would turn up for the half hour of adverts before a film and never complain, where we tried to express our individuality through the purchase of mass-produced goods. Even my favourite comedian, Bill Hicks, was peddling that ‘individuality through smoking’ thing. That was just an angle thought up by ad men decades earlier. People started to speak of the ads being better than the TV shows, somehow believing against all the evidence that the TV shows were the principal content and the adverts incidental. Now we understand that everything is to be marketed, even art.

I read the comic-book writer Alan Moore describe art as ‘propaganda for a state of mind’. Who do we create propaganda for? Our equals? No, for the easily manipulated, for those we have contempt for. So to be an artist in the wholly marketed society is to have contempt for everyone. You propagandise for your state of mind to others – and it’s not even your state of mind. It’s the off-the-peg set of opinions you got from the part of the culture you tried to buy into, from a set of people who were propagandising to you. They’re not even your ideas. They weren’t even theirs.

Of course, this doesn’t make you happy, so you need to propagandise the chosen state of mind to yourself, through self-help literature, a term I use loosely here, to cover a whole bunch of stuff, including most religions and newspapers. What’s the drive of your little internal propaganda office? Well, it’s to sell the idea of you, to advance your status. By convincing people who you are too guarded to truly know about a bunch of ideas that you don’t fully believe. And in any case, in a world of seven billion people what’s your status, really? In truth, it doesn’t matter any more than the charge on an electron.

Orwell imagined a coercive totalitarian state but Aldous Huxley probably made a better prediction of our current reality. In Brave New World people are complicit in their own enslavement; they’re into it. I think we can go further. It’s not just that people are controlled by propaganda, or even that they enjoy being controlled. I think that people are now propaganda. People are no longer the things being controlled, they are the method of control, both of themselves and others. Of course, I’ve written this little serious passage here to advance my own status.

I’ve tried to structure this book as simply as possible since it’s supposed to have the energy and flow of a good stand-up show. Hopefully, everything is done here as I’d do it on stage – a dip for you to regroup in the middle, a closing peroration, and even this little bit where I just kind of tail off mid-sentence as I realise that I already have your money . . .

1
ROYALS

One of the great tricks the British royals have managed to pull off is to have convinced everybody of their own irrelevance. They behave much like any big company, downplaying their influence, externalising their expenses, meeting with dictators, watching themselves sexually savaging hypnotised victims in the mirrored Aviators of their bodyguards, reporting back to superiors in other dimensions who appear to them suddenly in famous paintings, bad news causing their enraged overlord’s face to seethe like a nest of startled snakes.

What’s called pageantry and tradition – public events that only serve to highlight the relative charm of North Korea and the buying up of any golden sheds/tennis rackets that got missed by Michael Jackson – is just misdirection. It’s the simple misdirection employed by a category of human being pitied by even the most denigrated monster of showbusiness, the stage magician. And that’s all the royal family are. Entertainers who’ve enjoyed the ultimate success by the most tried-and-tested route: aiming low.

Kate’s pregnancy really brought the nation together. It was no longer just me thinking about her vagina 24/7. And call me old fashioned, but I thought it was nice to see a pregnancy announced – for most women in this country you only know they’re with child because they’ve switched to menthol fags. Still, a lot of pressure for William. I suppose he’s just hoping that he can be as good a father as his nanny was.

The birth was announced by putting a notice on headed notepaper on a wooden easel at the gates of Buckingham Palace – it’s the royal equivalent of sticking a congratulations bed sheet on a roundabout. The law was changed because it was ‘a historical anomaly that prevents the eldest child of the monarch from becoming the head of state simply because of their gender’. Unlike the historical anomaly that makes someone the head of state simply because they are born into a particular family.

Kate was a patient at the exclusive King Edward VII’s Hospital. Aren’t the royals wonderful? Even at their roughest they refuse to be a burden on the NHS. Kate had to endure eleven hours of labour. Which is more than the combined total the rest of the family has managed in the last twenty years. Being named George, her son will join six out of the past ten kings, exhibiting the imagination you’d expect from a family who have to be trained how to wave. Why think of a name at all? You won’t get anything funkier than Prince.

Fifty armed police officers are to guard the new prince. Wow, in The Omen he only had that weird nanny with the Rottweiler. There were few volunteers. Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to employ decoys? He’s a baby – that’s pretty much the only time any lookalike has ever actually looked alike. The police will have to hand back their firearms once the baby boy becomes fully sentient, just in case a perceived slight leads him to lock their eyes with a haunting gaze, before causing them to vacantly push the barrel into their mouths and squeeze the trigger.

A Swedish magazine published eleven topless shots of the Duchess of Cambridge. It was the least erotic thing to have ever happened in Sweden. Why can’t she just sunbathe topless on the balcony of Lord Linley’s £15 million château in Provence like normal people? The British press will never publish pictures of Kate’s tits. Due to the lack of space left after printing ones of her sister’s arse.

The royal couple made a criminal complaint when the topless photos were published in a French magazine, and a French court prevented their further publication. The ban was soon extended to Italy and the rest of Europe, meaning the pictures were then only available to be seen on something called the internet. I sympathise with Kate feeling under constant surveillance. Thanks to my Catholic education I often can’t shake off the idea my dead relatives are watching me. To be honest, I only ever feel comfortable masturbating while wearing a sombrero.

Maybe we should be glad that other countries take such an interest in our royal family – even if it’s in this weirdly specialist porn way. Apparently, the Palace is so worried about Kate being papped that for the next few years she’s to be permanently blurred during daylight hours by being shaken at high frequency by ladies-in-waiting.

The Palace was furious at the paparazzi hounding her like Diana, as royal protocol dictates that they wait till Prince Philip gives the nod. Surely the quickest way to stop the demand for these pictures is for the royals to finally go nude. I know what you’re thinking. How about the etiquette of them breaking wind in public? Easy. Those dishwasher liquitabs with the dissolvable coating and detergent inside? Use them as suppositories and if it does happen it’ll just come out as bubbles. At the moment protocol forces Her Majesty to hold farts in for years, only letting them out when the RAF do a fly-past over the Palace.

The supply of bland, feigned outrage about things like this seems endless. Eamonn Holmes on This Morning accidentally broadcast a photograph of Kate in a bikini. The programme had to apologise, as obviously the image should have been obscured by a list of suspected paedophiles. In fact, This Morning should really have had to apologise for showing an unblurred image of Eamonn Holmes. Eamonn’s terrified the incident could prove yet another blow to his chance of a knighthood, a dream first dented in 2006 when the Queen accidentally pricked his casing with her sword and he whizzed about the room screeching like a punctured lilo.

In 2012 we had the disgraceful spectacle of the Diamond Jubilee. I’ve got to admit I was out on the streets cheering her on, although I’m not sure she fully appreciated my chant: ‘Sixty years since your dad died, do dah, do dah!’

Michael Gove suggested celebrating the Jubilee by building a royal yacht. To be honest, I was just going to get her bath bombs or a book token but it was typical of Gove to try to show me up. I hate him, the unctuous, wet-lipped, Dickensian freak. If you asked a football stadium full of people if they’d like to see him kicked to death by a minotaur wearing plimsoles – so it would last longer – you wouldn’t find a single person who wouldn’t masturbate while it was happening.

I suppose a boat would be immune from a below-the-waterline al-Qaeda attack, as it’s nearly impossible to get a watertight seal on your mask with a big, bushy beard. That’s why the kids in Atlantis never get Christmas presents . . . but they don’t cry about it. It’s under the sea, so crying would be pointless.

A barge is totally in keeping with the royal tradition as typified by Liz and Phil. Engineering and shipping – you can’t get much more German and Greek than those. And nothing says recession solidarity more than waving from a throne atop a golden barge. It looked like something Liberace would have rented if he’d taken a break on the Norfolk Broads. The whole thing was car-crash television, which made it strangely apt for a royal occasion.

Actually, I didn’t go to see the flotilla as I failed to find a pair of clear-plastic water-skis to add a ghostly ‘walk-on-water’ quality to my Princess Diana outfit. Still, congratulations, Ma’am, on sixty years of feigning interest in an assortment of bland hats while a sycophantic media faithfully recount your occasional nondescript remarks as witticisms. Hers is an inspirational story. The meteoric rise of a girl born simply the daughter of a humble king. And let’s not forget her role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a position that I’ve always thought must piss God off quite a bit. A little boy gave her some Werther’s Originals to pass on to Philip. I understand that he prefers to receive jelly babies, as when the bag’s destroyed by Special Branch in a controlled explosion there’s less chance of the corgis getting shrapnel wounds.

All the royals were there – Princess Anne, the Duke of York, the Duke of Hazzard, Prince Harry, the artist formerly known as Prince, Lord and Lady Gaga, the Duchess of Cambridge, Duchy Originals Sausages, Viscount Biscuit and Sir, would you please put your trousers back on, the other diners are getting upset? We had a street party with jelly and ice cream and games for all the local children. It wasn’t to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee – we were trying to flush out a paedophile.

Unemployed jobseekers were forced to sleep under London Bridge and work unpaid on the Jubilee river pageant. It wasn’t all bad as they did get to watch the world’s richest family sail by them in a golden barge. Sleeping under a bridge? That’s Victorian, medieval even . . . what place could it possibly have at a royal event?

In honour of the Jubilee, Madame Tussauds unveiled their new waxwork of Her Majesty. Apparently, to re-create the effects of aging they just moved the old one next to the radiator for a couple of hours. I’m definitely going to take a look. Especially after the success of my trip to see the Prince Philip last Christmas, when I managed to land a couple of darts right in his chest. The Queen’s waxwork has had its own special alarm ever since 2004, when the head was stolen and used to forge loads of big stamps.

God, the Queen must’ve been in a lot of photos – all the official ones, obviously, and she also loves to jump in the back of tourists’ pictures for a laugh. We’ve all got our favourite memories of the Queen – mine was when she played Superintendent Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. But she’s great for tourism. Mainly because the sort of people dumb enough to want to see her are also the ones dumb enough to pay £5 for a warm Tango and a mechanically recovered meat hotdog, and £45 to watch roller-skating cats banging out the hits of Bucks Fizz.

By way of a gift for her Jubilee, the Queen was given 169,000 square miles of Antarctica, which she accepted with her trademark gracious scowl. Barack Obama said that while many presidents and prime ministers had come and gone, the Queen had endured. Barack, that’s because you can vote for them, you prick.

Much is made of the Queen ‘not being able to answer back’. As if a multi-millionaire with access to harems of devoted apemen and to drugs that let her taste chamber music really aches to be involved in a Twitter spat. The royals actually wield a lot of power. The Queen demanded to know why hate cleric Abu Hamza couldn’t be deported. The police had been trying to arrest Abu Hamza for years but for some reason he just kept slipping out of the handcuffs.

I think it’s great that the Queen’s showing an interest in the sort of evil people who shouldn’t be in this country instead of having them over for lunch, like she did with Robert Mugabe, Mswati III, Idi Amin, Hamad Al-Khalifa and President Assad. The journo who revealed the Queen’s annoyance apologised for his breach of royal protocol, adding, ‘From now on any pillow talk stays in the bedroom . . . Oh, no, you’re not going to print that, are you?’

The royals have been unwell recently. The Duke of Kent had a mild stroke. He said he wanted to be back at work as soon as possible. It must have been more serious than we first thought, otherwise he would have remembered that he’s never worked a day in his fucking life.

Meanwhile, Prince Philip was told he can no longer hunt as it may dislodge his heart, presumably knocking it into a place where it can receive its long-dead messages of love. There’s a small metal tube that is holding his heart together. That would be a spectacular death, though, as he rips his own heart out to desperately load it into his shotgun.

I wonder if he got the NHS treatment we all get? I can’t help thinking there’s a twenty-year-old rugby player coming to in a field somewhere, his chest stitched like a 1950s football, barely able to get to his knees with his new nonagenarian heart.

I’m being unfair – the royals do pretend to do their bit for the community. Prince Andrew abseiled down the Shard for charity. He didn’t raise as much money as everyone had hoped, as he made it down alive. He had to quit as Trade Envoy due to his links with a convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. A member of the royal family shouldn’t be making us look stupid overseas. That’s clearly the job of the SAS, the MOD and Jordan. The Sun referred to Epstein as the ‘Paedophile Billionaire’, which reminds me of the old children’s rhyme: ‘The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand friends. Not one of them what you might consider babysitting material.’ Perhaps all paedophiles should be forced to have celebrity friends. It’d be an end to them being able to loiter anonymously around school gates. ‘Get in the car, kids, quick! I don’t like the look of that man playing conkers with Bono!’

Fergie took £15,000 pounds from Epstein. How many people would turn down fifteen grand, no strings attached, because it came from a child abuser? I mean, many people give more than that every year to clothing companies who tie six-year-olds to sewing machines. Fergie said, ‘I would throw myself under a bus for Andrew.’ He’d be very touched, if he knew what a bus was.

• • •

Prince Harry fought in Afghanistan. They kept that pretty quiet, didn’t they? It’s good that he went. If you want a flag waver for democracy it makes sense to send a prince. I say hats off to him. It’s about time we had a few more positive role models for downtrodden ginger people. It might finally inspire them to turn their back on witchcraft.

Harry admitted that he’s killed people, which should put an end to the question of whether he’s really a member of the royal family. Saying that he’s killed members of the Taliban hasn’t made him a target; it’s made all the gingers in the army who aren’t surrounded by personal bodyguards twenty-four hours a day targets. It shows how sensible he’s been, though. Nobody can get near you with a bomb belt if they have to be naked to get into your hotel room.

Prince Harry underwent hostage training in preparation for Afghanistan. It can’t be easy having a royal hostage. You’re supposed to cut off bits that serve no useful purpose and post them back. Where would you start? I hope he never gets killed on active duty. I hate to think of someone saying they need to inform his next of kin, then all the generals just looking awkwardly at the floor.

Harry was in the US to attend the Warrior Games. If he wanted to watch injured servicemen fight among themselves he should just nip down to any soup kitchen in the UK and throw a slice of bread on the ground. I’ve a fascination with watching disabled people play sports that has developed naturally from years attending Scottish Premier League football matches.

Cheryl Cole revealed she had a dream about marrying Harry. Something that in real life would surely end in a car crash bigger than her solo career. Cheryl doesn’t seem like she’d fit in with the royals, but who knows, maybe the Queen also has a barbed-wire thigh tattoo. In most of my dreams I’m a princess as well – although I then unfurl into a half-horse, half-Gok Wan centaur who plays just behind the front two for Spurs, so I don’t know what to think.

2
POLITICS

I suppose my political overview is that this five-thousand-year experiment to see what would happen if we let the cunts make all the decisions is going really badly. Anyone who doubts that power corrupts should have a think about what arseholes tall people are.

A key thing in the politics of Britain is the idea of consensus opinion. You see it in comedy where people say such and such a thing shouldn’t be joked about but will joke about it themselves in private. They mean you can’t say it in public because it would outrage consensus opinion. They’ll maintain this even after you do it in a theatre to a few thousand people and nobody gives a shit. Even people in the theatre will laugh and think, ‘You can’t say that in public.’ By which they mean the press will get a hold of it and jump on a stool shrieking and holding their little skirts. So public opinion really is almost synonymous with media opinion, and the dangers of that are pretty obvious.

For a comedian – someone whose job it is to deal with taboos and language – consensus is the idea that you shouldn’t talk about the world as you see it but instead about some socially agreed version. But it shouldn’t be a very hard decision. If you live in one of history’s rare pockets of free speech it’s kind of your duty to use it. Basically, the choice is between drawing freehand and colouring between the lines.

‘Consensus’ is something that most people have to make allowances for, yet, contrary to the word’s literal meaning, most of us have very little say in what it is. The symbolic importance of public opinion is only allowed so long as people themselves are utterly marginalised. What’s your real ability to influence the idea of what public opinion is on an issue? Tweet to two hundred followers, write a letter to the Sun, apply to be in the audience on Question Time? Who gets to decide what the public are saying they’re outraged by or interested in? Well, Rupert Murdoch; corporate think tanks; the BBC. The public’s idea of what the public thinks is almost entirely controlled by vested interests. Interests usually completely contrary to the public interest.

What is party politics in Britain? I mean, what is it? It’s like support groups for a series of hysterical personality disorders that have embezzled other people’s money to hold a competition to find the world’s most boring sentence on board a crashing Zeppelin. Yes, anyone can vote. A fact that warms my heart each election day as I watch people yanking at the polling station door despite the obvious ‘Push’ sign.

People are outraged over plans to increase MPs’ wages. Well, if they’re not allowed to fiddle their expenses anymore then what are they supposed to do? Buy their own Kit Kats? MPs’ current salaries are only £66,396 a year and when you take off how much of that goes towards housing, transport and general living costs, that only leaves them with £66,396 a year. We should remember that MPs do a very difficult job, and they do it very badly.

• • •

The Tories’ role is essentially to make you eat their arseholes and simultaneously sneer at you for not knowing what kind of wine goes best with arsehole. As a Scot, whenever I hear George Osborne speak I instinctively start gathering up my belongings, expecting there’ll be a knock on the door from the local sheriff telling me that this area is to become grazing land for sheep and that we’re to be cleared off by dawn. And when I see Theresa May – wearing those weird clothes of hers – demanding the abolition of human rights I keep thinking I’ve stumbled upon a Star Trek I’ve never seen before (instead of the new version). I only keep watching in the hope that Kirk will come on from the side and punch her in the head. Meanwhile, in the audience Spock screams, ‘MOTHER!’

Osborne’s still insisting he never took cocaine as a student, claiming the only time he snorted at Oxford was when told stories of the troubles of the poor. Osborne on cocaine? Well, there’s the answer to ‘Whatever gave this tit the idea he could run the economy?’ The man is so rich I can’t imagine he’d use a rolled-up twenty. Maybe the deeds to Hertfordshire.

Cocaine makes you arrogant. If I were Osborne I wouldn’t deny my cocaine past, I’d use it as a great excuse to cover for my array of God-given personality defects. I actually think it should be mandatory for the Chancellor to take cocaine, particularly before making the Budget speech. Instead of fiscal plans and growth forecasts he’d spend three hours pitching a screenplay he’s writing about a dog who’s been given his master’s brain.

At the GQ awards Osborne joked that no teenagers reading GQ wanked over his picture. I think you’re wrong there, George. I think the ones in Pakistan holding machine guns might do. If his current public image is the face that, after careful consideration, Osborne chooses to present to the world, then in reality he must be like a rogue android of Uday Hussain. He behaves as if Ted Bundy – experimenting with meditation – had found his mind conquered by a powerful telepathic crocodile. An amazing person, who, even when regularly advised not to sneer in public, just can’t bring himself not to. The other plausible explanation is that his PR team is headed up by the time-travelling Sherriff of Nottingham. Perhaps the Chancellor’s red box is actually made from Robin Hood’s skin.

Osborne also announced that benefit payments are to be linked to the ability to speak English. So that’s everyone on the dole in Glasgow fucked. Immigrants will lose benefits if they fail to improve their English at the same time as the government has been cutting language courses. It’s got to the stage where immigrants are being taught English from the words spray-painted across their doors. Immigrants will only keep benefits if they take English lessons up to the standard of a nine-year-old. That’s apparently the level necessary to understand barked instruction but with insufficient vocabulary to make it through a tribunal.

Foreign sex workers are being given free English lessons to help them understand the filthy things they’re being asked to do. It’s like a modern Eliza Doolittle: ‘Why, I’ll wager I could take a common streetwalker and turn her into a high-class prostitute!’ It makes you proud to be British that we’re willing to give immigrants a leg-up, as long as they’re long legs attached to sexy bodies that offer inexpensive blowjobs.

The Tories also unveiled the new citizenship test and I’d like to see everyone take it. A question such as ‘Which admiral has a monument in Trafalgar Square?’ would give most X Factor contestants a stroke and enable us to deport the entire cast of TOWIE. At the top of each test would be the most pertinent question of all – ‘Why the fuck would you want to come here?’ They’re also placing tougher restrictions on benefits to immigrants. We don’t want our tax money spent on foreigners; we want it spent on going to the Middle East to pointlessly shoot foreigners.

Of course, what the Tories really think is ‘Why don’t we save time, stop all judicial decisions, the offering of evidence, defence arguments; just deport anyone who doesn’t know that Starburst used to be called Opal Fruits.’ The flaw in the idea that we need to educate immigrants about British history is that a lot of them have a better grasp of it than us, particularly of the bit where the British blew up their granny.

Immigrants often have to do totally different jobs from the ones they trained for in their own country. For instance, the bloke who took my appendix out told me he was a cleaner back in Poland. The guide to the test costs thirteen quid – save your money immigrants. If you want to be British then get pregnant when you’re twelve and state that your greatest ambition is to see Rylan in a shopping centre.

The Tories are like some deranged sex killer who breaks down and tries to confess his crimes at a murder mystery weekend only to have people laugh and applaud at what they assume is his wonderful acting. At every Tory Conference the party outlines its priorities: building a Deathstar; killing Harry Potter; and creating a doorway into our dimension so the Many-Angled Ones can harvest our souls to the accompaniment of several previously unreleased Fleetwood Mac albums.

Boris Johnson usually gives a keynote speech that sounds like a Labrador having a ketamine-induced psychotic episode. And all the Tories speak of the Lib Dems like a celebrity speaks about the heavily sedated sibling they’ve sprung from hospital long enough to make up the numbers on Family Fortunes.

It’s been said that Boris Johnson doesn’t have the skills to become prime minister. He doesn’t seem to have the skills to get dressed, but it happens. Sort of. Many Tories want Boris to lead them into the next election. I wouldn’t trust Boris to lead me into a revolving door.

That said, Boris has done surprisingly well for a man who resembles a bouncy castle with Alzheimer’s. On Mumsnet he described himself as a chocolate digestive: consistent and reliable. And also because rugby players regularly masturbated on him at Eton. If British politics were a film, Boris would be a character they’d put in just to sell toys. A teenager from Lancashire had Boris tattooed on his thigh. He might as well just have had two eyes tattooed on his arse.

It’s amazing that these people can be so self-conscious without ever noticing how dreadful they are. Louise Mensch had a facelift. Hopefully, moving her mouth closer to her brain has helped but I feel terribly let down. I’d always thought she didn’t move her mouth properly because she’d had a stroke. Who cares if she had a facelift? It’s like people talking about whether Hitler dyed his moustache. She’s an anti-abortion feminist, placing her on the list of great feminists somewhere between Peter Sutcliffe and Henry VIII.

The Tories have done a brilliant job while in power. The UK has suffered the worst fall in living standards since the Second World War. I’d add an ‘apparently’ to that as I’m not convinced downgrading from Sainsbury’s to Asda quite compares with picking dead relatives out of the rubble. Cameron says it’s time for Britain to show the world what it’s made of. Though I’m not sure exactly what you can knock together out of debt and diabetes. He wants Britons to wrap themselves up in the flag – if you’re living abroad I’d first quickly check it’s not on fire. It was Oscar Wilde who once wrote that ‘patriotism is the virtue of the vicious’, but I suspect only as it was hard to find a publisher back then who’d print the word ‘cunt’.

Still, at least the government’s got its priorities right. Removing the 50p top-earner tax rate. It’s just logic. Give the rich more money and they can ensure that troublesome youths are kept busy as gardeners, cooks and grouse-beaters.

The stories these automatonic politicians release to humanise themselves are always dispiriting. Cameron claims he’s completed every level of Angry Birds. Critics say Mrs Thatcher didn’t waste her time playing video games. A pity. Maybe if Atari had pulled their finger out with their tennis-game graphics the crab-nibbled eye sockets of hundreds of teenage Argentine conscripts wouldn’t now be staring mournfully through the barnacle-encrusted portholes of the General Belgrano.

David Cameron says he no longer cares about being popular. Well, that’s handy. Cameron doesn’t mind being unpopular because steering through the agenda of big business is more important to him than his political career and, like Blair, business will reward him amply when he goes. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died and thousands of Venezuelans came out to mourn his death; if David Cameron died the biggest outpouring would be against the news over-running when we wanted to watch The One Show. If Cameron died tomorrow so few people would turn up you’d be able to cater the funeral with a packet of Monster Munch.

• • •

I was shocked to hear of the death of Lady Thatcher. They say the good die young, so I’d just assumed she was immortal. But we must look at the positives. By all accounts, everyone now has a little more leg room around that big oval table at SPECTRE HQ. Sadly, many of her friends weren’t able to attend the funeral as they’ve been hanged at war crime tribunals. She was cremated. That’s what happens when you leave nobody in Britain who actually knows how to dig any more. The funeral brought central London to a standstill. The last time she managed that was the poll tax riots. I was all for a lavish, publically funded cremation. Right up until she died.

It’s never a tragedy when a Tory dies. The tragedy is that they never truly lived. I’m not sure that Margaret Thatcher got many women into politics, in the same way that Myra Hindley didn’t get a lot of women into hiking. All that Thatcher achieved was to ensure that people living in garbage camps a hundred years from now are going to think that Hitler was a woman.

A friend said of her that in retirement ‘the nice side of her came out’, something that only took eighty-five years and three strokes. It was speculated that Thatcher left an estate valued at £66 million in her will. It appears that she made her money by investing in a plastic-surgery company just before the Falklands War. She actually survived two attempts on her life. One being the Brighton bomb, the other when her assailant, after wrestling her onto an altar, stabbed the Daggers of Megiddo into her chest in the incorrect sequence.

Thatcher was desperate to end the days of governments bailing out lame-duck businesses, determined that they should stand on their own two feet. Hence the big switch from manufacturing to banking. Nick Clegg said, ‘She drew lines we are navigating today’, mainly as we weave our way home round the various companies digging up our gas pipes.

Several MPs mentioned Thatcher’s beguiling sexuality. They say she had the ankles of a twenty-year-old – they were paperweights given as a gift by her chum General Pinochet. She did always come across as a very cold woman – I can’t help feeling sorry for poor old Denis. Going down on her must have been like licking a lamp-post in winter.

Many of Thatcher’s friends were quite emotional at the funeral. I think I saw a tear forming in the burning eye of Sauron, and when it was time for the cremation Simon Weston threw himself on, for old times’ sake. The political guest list was a damning indictment of the inefficiency of the IRA. The only thing John Major ever did of note was having sex with Edwina Currie and not getting his head ripped off like a male praying mantis. I was surprised to see Sarah Ferguson there; I’d have thought she’d have sold her ticket on eBay. Fergie had a great time, though. She could finally sit in a room full of dictators without worrying if any of them worked for the News of the World.

Osborne cried. The world thinks George Osborne is a sensitive soul. Coincidentally, the man who sold him his new contact lenses has turned up dead in a forest. I think the stress of lying to us about having no money made him finally crack when the man in the silver cape stepped into the gold box. Osborne can apparently produce tears at will, just by picturing his policies’ effects on the weakest in society . . . safe in the knowledge no one watching could differentiate between tears of sadness, and ones of joy. Of course, the saddest part of the funeral is when the curtain shuts around the body. I just have to be grateful that I found Amanda Thatcher’s hotel window in the first place.

Seeing Cameron and Clegg united despite their warring parties reminds me of Romeo and Juliet – in that I hope this ends with them both killing themselves. The deputy prime minister now holds weekly radio phone-ins. So there you go – an answer to the question, ‘Could any radio DJ be less popular right now than Dave Lee Travis?’ It’s not all bad though – as part of this job swap the Secretary of State for Business is now Tim Westwood. I can see this sneaking into other aspects of Clegg’s life – when Cameron was reading a speech the other day Clegg punctuated it by shouting out ‘Shabba’.

Clegg wants to create more construction opportunities to give young Brits jobs. I wonder how many media graduates it takes to make a docusoap about the qualified builders that will have to be brought in from Poland? He also wants to raise the speed limit to 80 mph – so that his motorcade can pass through any British city without being destroyed by angry locals.

The Lib Dems are now so extinct they’ll exist only as a memory on I Hate the Noughties, being recalled animatedly but slightly inaccurately by Russell Kane in a segment even shorter than the one about me. Most people hate all three major parties. You’d do as well to put your X straight on to the polling booth and have the country run by a collection of portable balsa-wood cubicles.

A poll revealed the Lib Dems face becoming a political irrelevance right across the UK, not just in coalition meetings. As far as the coalition goes the Lib Dems now have leverage directly comparable to trying to open a five-litre tin of emulsion with a lolly stick.

It came as no surprise that MPs voted to keep the Lords – they were never going to get rid of a second house. Nick Clegg’s worried without Lords reform he’ll achieve nothing in this parliament. Of course you will Nick. At the very least you’ll have destroyed your party.

As for Ed Miliband he has emerged as a leader more faceless than a highly buffed marble statue of a baby’s arse, whose idea of passion is undoing the top button of his pyjamas. It’s strange that he’s so forgettable because he’s got a face so weird it could make a police horse cry. I’d like to make different jokes about Miliband but we know so little about him it would literally be easier to put together a five-page Match.com profile for coastal fog.

At least no one can accuse Labour of a lack of policies or vision. I certainly felt the spirit of Nye Bevan sweep the party conference when Ed Balls rallied his troops with his proposal to part-fund a temporary reduction in stamp duty with money he hopes to raise by selling off the 4G phone network. 4G is going to be a boost for business. Salesmen tend to be way more focused in meetings if they have the technology needed to crack one off in a lay-by beforehand. Miliband has revealed he’s afraid his young sons can access violent porn on his smartphone. To prevent this from happening do what I do – before giving the phone to the kids make sure you’ve deleted the contents of the history page.

I was surprised to learn Ed Miliband went to the same primary school as Boris Johnson. I’d naturally assumed both were failed prototypes for a Geppetto-like toymaker before he successfully made a real boy. Miliband’s parents fled Nazi Germany. But let’s not forget Cameron’s forebears were some of the first to describe Hitler as a monster – after he drank claret with the fish course when over for dinner.

Ed says he wants to make us ‘One Nation’. Sadly that nation is Greece. We are united in one nation, one nation that thinks ‘Not Ed . . . Anyone but Ed.’ Sixty-three per cent of Labour supporters say he’s not fit to be in Number 10. But he needn’t worry; that never seems to have been particularly important.

Predictably, at the party conference the delegates stood for the leader’s ovation with the weary disinterest and emotional disconnect of a nine-year-old Catholic boy unbuttoning his shorts for choir practice. Yet he shouldn’t feel too smug. It’s a fine line between a standing ovation and everyone just wanting to be first out of the room.

• • •

At a luxury five-star golfing resort in Northern Ireland the G8 leaders discussed plans to tackle world poverty, in much the way as you’d try to solve the AIDS crisis in a brothel. Syria was high on the G8 agenda. As far as arming the rebels goes, I think it’s a good idea. As it must be some help militarily if our troops know exactly what’s being used against them in eighteen months’ time. We can arm the Syrian rebels just like we armed Afghanistan, with an agreement to pop back after twenty years to show them our new range of weaponry tastefully displayed in the roof of the local primary school.

The US claimed they would only arm moderate rebel groups, although it’s possible these groups are only behaving moderately because they don’t have weapons. How do you arm moderate rebels? With some strong coffee and the email address of the Guardian editor?

Frosty relations with Vladimir Putin and the Russians led to a slight alteration to the cutlery layout – at dinner it went fish knife, steak knife, Geiger counter. Putin wanted to show off his rippling physique in the lough next door. Surely time to deploy a rolled-up sock. I always do this when swimming – as you tend to get the pool to yourself if people think you’ve shat yourself. Cameron issued Putin with the ultimatum that unless he helps oust President Assad he will be forced to do nothing.

Cameron was called weak for not condemning Putin’s re-election. In fairness, Cameron criticising dodgy election results would be like Richard Hammond calling someone a bead-wearing prick. Labour has criticised Cameron for being ‘weak’, and that means something coming from a party led by a man with the strength of a stick of month-old celery. Putin wept during his victory speech, a combination of raw emotion and tear gas wafting over from where the police were battering his delighted electorate.

Putin’s had some work done around his eyes. I’m told he got all the laughter lines from repeatedly watching footage of the Chechen capital Grozny being indiscriminately bombed to rubble. I confess I’ve had the bags removed from under my eyes. Not for appearance; my pet mouse was just desperate for a leather armchair. This sort of thing does have its place. Friends of mine have a little boy and, without wishing to sound cruel, he had a massive nose. They got him plastic surgery and you barely even notice it now. You’re too busy staring at his double-D tits.

Cameron travelled round India on his ‘Sorry about that’ tour. Dave went to promote trade, and to order a new chequebook after running out of patience listening to Beethoven while on hold for ninety minutes. At the start of his trip Cameron was struck by the visible poverty. And told the driver to take a more scenic route to Heathrow next time. Dave laid a wreath at the site of a massacre of three hundred protestors by British troops in 1919. And as a further mark of respect he waited a full hour before embarking on his sales pitch for the UK arms industry. Nick was left running the country. Though by now even he knows it’s the equivalent of sticking a Fisher-Price steering wheel in the back seat in front of a toddler.

India is like an old couple that has won the lottery and Cameron just happened to ‘pop by’ with the head of HSBC to see if there’s any gardening he can help them with or if they need anything from the shops. While in India, David wore a bandana, went barefoot and made a chapatti. So, that should make up for years of colonial rule and the Amritsar massacre.

Cameron’s going to divert money from the foreign aid budget to defence, by cleverly rebranding missions as ‘conflict prevention’. Fair enough. After all, the more people that die in military activity, the less there are left to need aid. But the charities aren’t happy. There must be some kind of compromise. Surely it’s not beyond us to invent a gun that fires rice.

Then Cameron and Prince Harry appeared together in the US. They were promoting the UK, although they missed the chance to use the slogan, ‘Never a better time to visit . . . as right now we’re not there.’ They toured New York on a double-decker bus, allegedly the first time since last year’s trip to Vegas Harry had heard someone shout, ‘Room for one more on top!’ Presumably, the idea of sending over a prince and a millionaire Etonian to try to persuade US businesses to invest in the UK was to make them think they can slash labour costs as we’ve still got feudalism. The Prime Minister announced Britain has clinched a deal with a US drugs giant to become a global test site for medicines. A global test site for medicines? That sounds pretty sinister. We could unwittingly become a nation of compliant drones, medicated to be distracted by shiny irrelevance while our rulers do as they please. When did they start?

3
TRANSPORT

I read an article in the Guardian recently about universities being corrupted by accepting money from fossil-fuel com-panies. I agree, but what about the Guardian accepting advertising money from those companies, or the ones that make cars or sell flights? Or what about the fact that it’s printed on a tree?* Those things are so far off the agenda that you’d look crazy just for bringing them up. But that’s because the press set their own agenda and their inherent contradictions obviously aren’t on it. If I were to justify myself in the way the Guardian does – I’ll do adverts for all kinds of companies but make up for it by talking about how harmful their products are in my comedy show! – I’d be considered at best a hypocrite, and perhaps even some kind of a lunatic. It’s worth remembering that much as we say we like to see orthodoxies challenged, we usually mean other people’s orthodoxies.

I don’t fly anywhere, or drive, and the whole fixed-grin, let’s-pretend-it’s-not-happening approach to global warming has given my adult life the sinister air of mid-period Hitchcock. It’s a big reason I’ve never really felt I fit in with other comedians. It’s hard to buy into anyone’s carefully presented self-image when they take long-haul flights to international festivals every year. All these kooky shows about not being able to relate to your dad performed by people as indifferent to the fate of the Earth as a Dr Who villain.

It’s bizarre in an age in which we are increasingly connected that we willingly choke our planet by taking unnecessary journeys. Flights and trains are packed with business arseholes going to meet people they could Skype, who spend the whole journey calling, texting, emailing home. The ultimate aspiration is to be ‘jet set’, jumping on planes to be away from our families, with headphones on to be away from ourselves.

How much bleaker do things need to get for these guys? Extreme weather events are becoming more powerful and more frequent. Most experts believe these are due to man-made global warming, although the prevailing opinion in the US is that it’s God showing his anger at the lies spread by climate scientists. I’m sure we were all shocked by the Oklahoma tornado. Winds gusted up to 295 mph. To give that a bit of context it’s the same wind speed that sees 90 per cent of Scots reluctantly leave a beach.

Britain is to face wet summers for the next ten years. I don’t care as I’ve just invested heavily in umbrellas and sticks of rock that have baked in anti-depressants. When you cut through the stick of rock it says ‘Buy an umbrella you miserable cunt.’ It’s going to be wetter than Michael Gove’s bottom lip after a melon-eating contest. Actually, the government is forcing insurance companies to cover anyone at risk of flooding – which, if the Bible reports of Sodom are anything to go by, seems to be the entire cast of Coronation Street.

And Britain’s winters could soon be colder because of increased Arctic melting. If the Arctic thaws it could reopen the Northwest Passage, till now just the title of a particularly bleak Preston-based erotic film. A bit of snow in Britain is great. As long as you don’t want to go anywhere, come back from anywhere, leave the house or survive. The AA has warned people to take a special snow kit with them in their vehicles in winter – it comprises two bits of coal, a carrot and a scarf to make their car into a snowman.

I do my bit during the winter months, leaving out a cake I make from old bacon fat and seeds. Though a lot of the homeless are too proud to eat it. Hang it from your letterbox, then when they curl up for a post-meal nap they make a perfect draught excluder. Actually, I’ve been doing my bit for the homeless with my soup runs but to be honest I’ve never seen people so ungrateful for a bowl of gazpacho. If you’re a pensioner worried about the cold weather, do the same as my neighbour and block out draughts by leaving your mail in the letterbox.

We seem to have problems with snow every year now – isn’t it about time they started making paths out of salt? People moan when trains and flights are cancelled because of snow. It’s like what they really want is pilots to come on the radio and say, ‘Hi, it’s probably too dangerous to take off, but fuck it, let’s give it a go. Who’s with me?’

Which reminds me, I’m supposed to be talking about transport. Rail fares are up by 11 per cent but I’m not going to slag the rail companies off. Some of these new services have great views from the top deck. How do these executives come up with that figure? My best guess is that they spend most of their days on their own trains, going nowhere, staring at the tracks heading off in to the distance. Subconsciously those track lines get processed as 11 per cent. So if we want cheaper train fares in future you know what to do: if you ever find yourself travelling next to a rail executive, pluck his eyes out with your plastic M&S spoon.

Rail bosses denied they’ve consistently missed performance targets, pointing out they’ve met the most important one, to get 100 per cent of price rises arriving on time.

Some people haven’t been affected by the rise in rail fares. Justin Lee Collins, for example, won’t have to travel to work ever again. I tried travelling free by hiding in the toilet. But it was too much faff squeezing behind that panel. And by the time we’d got anywhere I was hoarse from blowing people’s hands dry.

Commuters have reacted furiously to the price rises. Many of them let their eyes glaze over as they pretend to read the Metro, lost in hypothesising the ‘maximum damage for minimum bullet’ route from their office to the roof, before emitting quiet sighs of relief as they picture being picked off by a marksman in a police helicopter.

But there’s an easy way round it. Head to a collectors’ fair and buy some Victorian tickets for the relevant line, then just by growing a huge moustache, popping on a top hat and dusting yourself in flour, pass yourself off as a ghost. Just be sure to remember to go, ‘A Kit Kat, whooooooh, and a bag of Mini-oooooooo-Cheddars . . . eddars . . . eddars . . .’ when the trolley arrives.

The completion of the high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham could be delayed until after 2027. Meaning the announcement of delays is well ahead of schedule. We can be damn proud that we’re able to announce delays to projects before they’ve even started. It’s lucky it’s a high-speed link or it would be delayed until 2079.

The high-speed rail initiative will reduce journey times to Birmingham at a cost of £32 billion. For that sort of cash I imagine they’re going to achieve this by building a replica London somewhere around Wigan. I’m certain that any form of transport that can get you out of Birmingham at 225 mph will be welcomed by everyone. Passengers will now be able to say, ‘How much? But it’s just a coffee and a Snickers!’ at previously unimaginable speeds.

Most of the track will be hidden, although I suspect a train going past at nearly 230 mph might just alert you as to where it is. There’s going to be over twenty miles of tunnels – so at least there’ll be somewhere for Cameron to hide when rebels decide to hunt him down like Gaddafi. The government would have more support spending £32 billion burying Birmingham under a tunnel and leaving the train on display. With the way the recession is going it’ll end up just being a Megabus whose driver has a weight in his right shoe. The completion date for the new train route is 2033. They set that date because that’s when the last remaining commuter starts working from home.

• • •

Hellishly enough, they’re privatising the roads. Let’s hope it goes as well as rail privatisation, so that in ten years’ time we’ll struggle to even get a seat in our own cars. More tollbooths will ensure traffic runs smoothly by having everyone standing completely still, waiting for a tourist to find £2.30 in change.

We already have roads only the wealthy can use. I mean, have you seen the price of petrol? Cameron called for us to show the ambition of the Victorians – so we should aspire to enslave half the world, masturbate at the memory of seeing a woman’s elbow and die from mumps. The coalition wants to privatise the roads, NHS, schools, pretty much all services the state currently provides – soon the only way to get around will be to cut a hole in your pocket and leave a trail of 50p coins wherever you go.

I was stunned by rumours of price rigging by Shell and BP. It’s totally shaken my belief in the benevolence of faceless multinational corporations. I just hope it’s not true, as I can’t stand the idea of being phoned twice a day by some prick asking me whether I’ve been mis-sold any premium unleaded. The government’s right to have a go at oil companies for sneakily adding a few pence to petrol. That’s their job. I decided to try living without petrol but it’s hard. It took me over an hour just to push the car to the top of our street. Cameron says the oil companies will face the full force of the law. If he takes as hard a line as he did with the bankers they could risk having their fuel-selling division separated from the one that sells pasties.

To be fair, oil companies have been very careful about price fixing over the last ten years; they only put up petrol prices when the price of oil rose and when it fell. Let’s remember that forecourt petrol sales in the UK have actually fallen by 20 per cent over the past five years – a sign of the damaging impact that peace in Northern Ireland has had on the economy. It’s estimated that the oil companies have ripped British motorists off by £300 billion. To put that into perspective, that’s enough to fill the petrol tanks of almost a dozen cars. Despite BP being responsible for the Deepwater Horizon accident, the worst oil spill in US history, their profits have more than tripled this year. This seems reasonable; maybe there’s just more of a market for dead pelicans than anyone knew.

Skint Britons are switching to mobility scooters to get round the high cost of motoring. Worries they’ll block the pavements have led to immediate complaints from cycling groups. They may only be designed to go at 6 mph, but I got one up to 30 on the downhill. Only for a moment, though, then the caravan jack-knifed. OK, mobility scooters may not be that quick, but dey certainly get all dat sweet Day Centre pussy cumin to da TV Room winda, kna-wha-am-sayin, bro? If the price of petrol goes any higher, people might be forced to walk to the shops.

Lots of new road building has been announced. The most expensive road project will be the A14 between Huntingdon and Cambridge. Is this a priority? People are losing benefits but students at an elite university can soon visit a poisoned monkey and be back home in time to smash up a tea room. It will take three years for these roads to be re-built; think of all the things that could happen in three years – in three years that girl who ran off with her maths teacher will be on her seventh Nuts cover after having been voted out of Celebrity Big Brother for not being able to add up the shopping budget, but at least when she finally throws herself in front of traffic on the A1 it will be nice and smooth.

They always announce the cuts first, then the spending the next day – like a violent husband waking up the morn-ing after and trying to make it up to you by buying you a road. No one has a job, so where are they going to on these roads? I suppose no matter how penniless people get they will still want to live as far away from their in-laws as possible. It appears that there are ten potholes for every mile of road in Britain. That’s pretty dangerous – I’d recommend putting your Scotch into a beaker with a stopper before setting off.

More 20 mph speed limits are to be rolled out. Good, it’s safer. Although journeys might take a little longer, we can just use the extended driving times as a chance to catch up on texts and emails. It’ll mean more speed cameras but if you get flashed just do what I do. Rig up a magnetron from an old microwave to your car battery and fire it at the big yellow box to fog the film . . . even if it doesn’t work, this lump now growing on my head means I look nothing like the photo they’ll have of me at the DVLA.

You’ll be fined if you use your mobile while driving, even if you’re playing Mario Kart on your iPhone to practise your driving skills. Eighty drivers were sent police warnings after using mobiles to snap an accident on the M1 while driving. That’s wrong. Far better to pull over, then change into your US cop costume, sneak up to the wreckage and stride purposefully from the flames like a T-1000. There’s also to be a £90 fine for smoking at the wheel. They won’t get me; I’ve just had my giant briar pipe electroplated as there’s nothing in the rules about driving while playing the sax.

Recent research shows that one in eight drivers can’t see properly in the dark. There’s a simple solution – people with glasses should only be allowed to drive solar-powered cars. I sometimes drive when I’ve forgotten my glasses. It’s not dangerous, as I’d know if I were about to hit someone by the panic in the sat nav’s voice.

And speaking of dangerous driving, George Michael fell out of a car door on a busy motorway! Great to see him taking a break from singing to get back to what he does best. Poor George. He now has no choice but to do another world tour as it’s the only way he can fund his next insurance premium. The police investigating the accident were looking for an explanation, then they saw George and went, ‘Ah, right.’ He’s set to be the first person to be banned from travelling in the passenger seat of a car.

In much the same way as travellers favour a St Christopher, Middle Eastern truck bombers now clutch an effigy of George before driving at US embassies. I guess there was only so long George could look at the white line in the middle of the road whizzing past without wanting to hop out and attempt to snort it. There’s been a suggestion that George tried to commit suicide. I don’t believe it. After all, if he really wanted to hurt himself he’d have tried to park. It will be difficult to charge George with any kind of offence, as although he was caught on a speed camera going over the limit he has the unusual loophole defence that he wasn’t in a car at the time.

George’s car needed work after the incident, requiring a new honky-honky horn and a bit more custard in the radiator. He was rushed to hospital, regaining consciousness just long enough on his trolley to plough it into an A&E vending machine.

*Hopefully, you’re reading this on a Kindle or similar so it’ll seem a lot less hypocritical of me.

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