Hello,and welcome to part 3 of The Daily Telegraph‘s ‘How to be a journalist’ course.

By this stage in the course you’re familiar with the rules of cricket and you should know how to uncritically publish a document sent to you by a senior Conservative.  Today we’ll be looking at constructing an article on human rights.

The situation regarding human rights is complicated and nuanced, so you’ll need to study the map reproduced below:

Areas outside the red boundaries suffer “human rights abuses’, where people are treated in an appalling fashion.

Areas inside the red boundaries are decent places, with trustworthy governments, where human rights cases are simply brought to vex the legally mandated rulers or score some points for the PC lobby.

You’ll now understand how tricky it can be to convey that depth of information in a 800 word article, so let’s look at how you’d do it.

Step 1 – The bait

To get the reader on your side from the off highlight a court case that they’ve probably got an opinion on.  It doesn’t matter if the case is connected to human rights, it doesn’t have to be particularly recent – so long as it was memorable – and it should be easy to summarise in the popular mind as “isn’t it ridiculous, eh”.  It could be bakers being forced to make a gay cake, prisoners demanding hard-core pornography or even somebody making a civil claim against a ‘fast-food’ restaurant for their coffee being too hot.

Step 2 – The rile

Your reader’s blood pressure is starting to rise, now it’s important to get them a bit madder, so that they won’t notice what’s going to happen next.  Give a summary of the most annoying parts of the case and verdict.  You’re not a court stenographer, so don’t feel that you need to go into all of the details, especially if they do anything to suggest that the judicial system isn’t broken.

Step 3 – The switch

Now that your reader is good and angry with the stupid courts you’ll want to divert that anger to human rights cases.  Even if the original case was nothing to do with human rights you can jump tracks with a simple, “in similar cases, involving human rights..,”, or “putting on in mind of human rights cases, such as…”.  If you’ve got absolutely nothing then why not build a straw man so big that Edward Woodward would crap himself and suggested that judges have been ’emboldened’ by the Human Rights Act.

[Aside – The Human Right Act is properly known as ‘Labour’s Human Rights Act’, ‘Blair’s Human Rights Act’ or the ‘Much derided Human Rights Act’.  Take care never to refer to its existence in neutral terms!]

Step 4 – The shuffle

Some readers can get the Human Rights Act muddled with the European Court of Human Rights, the Council of Europe, EU agreements on free movement, obligations under international law and a whole host of other things that sound like the work of Johnny Foreigner, so as a journalist it’s your job to muddy the waters as much as possible and mix all of these things together.  This will help the reader form the unbiased opinion that everything that separates modern Britain from a 1950’s postcard of cricket on the green is the fault of the HRA.

Step 5 – The solution

Fixing all of the problems of the world is beyond the scope of a single newspaper article, so it’s best to simply the solution down to “Vote Conservative”.  If, God forbid, there’s a Labour government then they are making the situation worse and should be voted out.  If, as currently, there’s a Conservative government with a small majority, or in a coalition, then they need to be given a wider mandate.  If there’s a Conservative government with a large majority then you’d be a fool to counsel against voting for them.

This solution leaves the reader with the warm feeling that their vote wasn’t just them selfishly grabbing an electoral bribe, but is actually helping fix something that’s wrong with the world.  They relax, leave it for the government to sort out with no more stupid questions for the electorate and have their simple brains fooled into thinking that your article is “brilliant”.

Example

We’d like to thank Baron Tebbit for the sample text for this module, which is a textbook example of how it should be done.

Coursework

Write your own article on the Human Rights Act and suggest a solution to the problems it causes (hint: Conservatism!).  For extra credit cite it as the reason for migrant camps in Calais.

Next time: In part 4 of the course we’ll show you how to explain that tax cuts for the wealthy are a natural consequence of nationwide austerity measures.

Inside every grown man each Balustrade Lanyard Day there’s the spirit of a 7 year old boy who’s been awake since 4am, too excited by the thought of their new LEGO™ set to sleep.

As we grow older, take wives and become fathers (and sometimes even stop believing that Lanyard sneaks into our houses, using his magic security pass, to leave us presents!) Balustrade Lanyard Day becomes more about having to trudge round heaving shops, trying to get this year’s ‘must have’ present, and an opportunity to have a few days off work and be properly drunk before 11am for a week.

We’ve asked Dr David Bannister, senior professor of advanced Baulstradelanyardology at the prestigious University of Accreditation Pending, to talk us through the cod-psychology behind the most common Balustradefest gifts and explain their deeper symbolism. So, wake up, sober up and find what your wife’s gift to this year means about the state of your relationship…

Conservative Party Membership

Membership of the Conservative party is the most traditional of BL Day gifts, and the staple of a thousand different stand-up routines, but is it as harmless as having your name auto-appended to letters to The Telegraph and getting a free calendar of the cabinet in their shreddies? Our Balustadelanyardologist, Dr David Bannister, has this to say, “This is an incredibly symbolic gift! Your partner is saying that you have become a boring, abusive, old twat and that she’s longing for you to return to your wild days.  Act now to save your marriage! Pack the kids off  to your mother’s for the day, strip to your lanyard and poke something through her balustrade!”

Remington Beard Trimmer

It’s impossible to imagine that there’s a man alive who hasn’t, at some point, woken on BL Day to discover that ‘Balustrade’ has left a Remington Beard Trimmer underneath the festive railings.In fact Balustrade Lanyard Day and Victor Kiam Tuesday together account for a staggering 97% of Remington’s sales!  Are the forecasts up for you, though, if this is what your wife has bought you?  “While every man enjoys a nearly trimmed beard,” says Dr Bannister, “this can be a warning sign.  Your wife is hinting that you’re not looking after yourself.  It’s not just an untidy beard; have you been skipping the gym?  Do you still make the effort to look attractive and dress sexily? Is it 10 or 12 years since you last had a meal that didn’t involve pork?  Take a good look at yourself in the mirror and try to see you as your wife sees you.  Why not start sneaking out to the gym without telling her where you’re going, and suddenly taking a huge interest in your appearance and personal grooming?  If you’re stuck in for the night get a girl from work to phone to give you an excuse to ‘go out for a drink’, but secretly go for a run.  When your wife meets the new you it will be goodbye to beard trimmers and hello to out-of-this-world sex.”

The Festive Lanyard

For a lot of men this is the most disappointing BL Day gift possible.  For weeks every joker in the office has had a festive lanyard round their necks, perhaps with balustrades printed on or one that plays ‘Rich man’ from Fiddler on the Roof. Come Monday though and all of these lanyards are going to be packed away for another year.  The chances are that you’ll wear your lanyard for one day and then stick it in a drawer and forget about it.  Not so fast, says Dr Bannister…“With the festive lanyard your wife is begging you to rediscover your sense of fun, and not just for BL Day! Recapture your youth with her and crawl out of the rut you’ve dug before it becomes your grave!  Try different restaurants, make new friends, have a go at new hobbies and sports and, in the bedroom, why not try urinating on each other?”

A new LEGO™ Set

She’s found out you’re sleeping with her sister and wants to make you feel guilty about it.

Literally anything else

You might think that if your wife buys you a different present that she’s creative, quirky, original or special – not so, says Dr Bannister. “If your wife doesn’t understand that Balustrade Lanyard day is a time to buy her hard-working husband a Conservative Party membership, a beard trimmer, a festive lanyard or a Lego set then she doesn’t really understand the whole thing, does she?  It’s time you asked yourself why you married her in the first place.  Make a resolution to spend the next year finding somebody new.  Why not go for her sister?  At least you’ll get a Lego set out of it.”

Tune in next time for tips on using up left-over Balustrade Lanyard day avocados. 

Article credits:

Thank you to Doctor David Bannister, who is currently available for all aspects of Balustradelantardology and also dog-sits.

LEGO is a registered trademark of some Danish company, I think.  It is used here entirely without their permission.

Balustrade Lanyard the LEGO set is the work of @MikeLaugharne who is unaware of this article or its contents.

As we face another 5 years of right-wing government, with the promise of £12bn of cuts to be levied on both working-age people still receiving state benefits and 4 of the 12 beds at the NHS hospital risking closure, it’s hard to even be entertained by The Happy, Happy, Buy, Buy, Buy Show on Sky Mandatory. Instead I find myself trying to work out where things went wrong for Labour in 2020.

I suppose that, like Nigel Farage’s ill-fated belief that he could return from the dead, the seed for Labour’s very public splat on the tarmac outside the Houses of Parliament was sown in the 2015 election. If you’re too young to remember that year, or if you’re one of the many millions of victims of Tim Farron’s memory-erasing experiments, Labour went in to the election blooming with optimism that they’d come a close enough 2nd to form a rag-tag left-of-centre government with the Lib Dems, the Greens, 5 ringers pretending to be Sinn Fein MPs and George Galloway on the promise of a crack at being education minister. Ah, how innocent their dreams seem now.

Their defeat at the hands of former Prime Minister (now chairman of HealthPay UK), David Cameron, led to the resignation of Labour leader Ed Miliband and an ill-fated leadership contest. For reasons that have largely been obscured by Farron’s neural rewriter and the Great UKIP Internet Purge of ’16 the main campaign battlegrounds were Labour agreeing to make the poor poorer, Labour accepting blame for things that weren’t really their fault, Labour accidentally printing right-wing slogans on mugs, then accidentally distributing them, then accidentally pretending they were party policy, bacon sandwich eating and the monolith from 2001: A space odyssey. 

None of this makes much sense now, but what we do know is that four candidates rose up to do battle for the Labour leadership; one who believed the party was too far right, one who believed the party was too far left and two who thought that was an excellent question and they were committed to delivering a full and satisfying answer when they were party leader.

What followed next we all remember too well…except those of us getting our water from one of the supplies that Farron got his hands on…the first border skirmishes, troops being withdrawn from France to lay siege to tartan-occupied Carlisle, Cameron and Osborne having to resign after their Weekend at Bernie’s shenanigans during the Queen’s speech, the forced abdication of Charles III by forces loyal to The Express and the great American implosion.

In all of that the missed vote on the Labour leadership was background noise, the drawing up of battle-lines relegated to page 7.  Before we knew it it was a period of civil war, rebel MPs, striking from a secret Islington base, had won their first victory against the evil Blairite empire and as 2015, became 2016 and then 2017 across the country red fought red and pink fought green. Ordinary hard-work families huddled in their homes, scared that not knowing the expected answer to, “What should the minimum wage be?” or “What’s your stance on immigration?” may earn them a vicious de-bearding or a beating with a condom full of low-fat yoghurt.  By the time Sunderland became Frankieboylistan in November 2018 nobody was really sure if the outed MP had been Real Labour, Red Labour, Nu Labour or Just Fucking Labour, although all sides denied responsibility when Tom Watson ran into the Bridges shopping centre wired up with 20lbs of Semtex.

In late 2019 when Labour’s spiritual king, Neil Kinnock, returned to these shores to take charge we really began to feel that things might work out OK.  The Labour parties buried their differences, and their thousands of dead, formed the Just Fucking Nu-Red-Labour alliance and gathered together to sing ‘We shall not be moved’ and play games of ‘Pin the eyebrows on Alistair Darling’.  Even though the BBC was gone all was not well for the right; the Leftie Wars had reduced immigration to almost nothing, half of all remaining NHS staff had been killed when the motorbike they were on crashed into a fox hunt, the chancellor had been turned down for a Capital One credit card, the average house price in London was up to 78% of GDP and Katie Hopkins kept shouting about how she was voting for Boris Johnson and wouldn’t shut up.  Now was the hour of the left!

Huddled here now, as the UKIP cyborgs, under the control of Sky-TVnet, sweep the area for lefties, liberals and poofs I think I can see where it all went wrong.  If only those who opposed the dehumanising right hadn’t been so keen to vilify each other (as well as the matador), if only there’d been less hatred between them and more willingness to understand those who leant to the left, or to the right, or to unspecified, if only they’d been willing to be friends with difference, but with mutual respect and the spirit to say that, whoever won that damn contest, that they’d fall in behind them and make their Labour party one that could have taken on the Tories in 2020.

But they didn’t and I have to go now, something is knocking at my door.

A new Twitterstorm exploded yesterday as it emerged that improbably maned alpha-male, Donald, had inexplicably not been shot and killed by his dentist.

The story broke with tweets reporting live sightings of Donald leading GOP polls in New Hampshire, with initial speculation that this was the fault of Republicans.  Within hours however Twitter had identified Donald’s dentist, Walter Pariah, as the party responsible for failing to shoot him right in the fucking face.

Dr Pariah’s surgery was closed yesterday with the blinds drawn and nobody answering the phones.  Its web-site and Facebook page were also taken down after hundreds of social media users, angered that their oxygen was still being used to keep Donald alive, bombarded them with angry messages.

Later in the day Dr Pariah released a short statement through his PR agency apologising for his abject failure to shoot Donald in the head and saying how deeply he now regretted that inaction, though this statement seems to have done little to dampen down the anger of millions who now feel that they may have to live through President Donald.

There was also a statement from the head of the Zimbabwean cunting authority, Notra Cistbut, explaining that his rangers were checking paperwork, but as far as he was aware Zimbabwe’s offer of asylum to anybody killing Donald was still in force.

NRA spokesperson, Wordwrangler Thundercunt, also made a statement, “The NRA reasserts its position that if dentists were required to carry concealed firearms then this terrible situation could have been avoided by Dr Pariah simply letting loose a couple of rounds into the back of Donald’s rug as he leant forward to spit out the pink mouth-wash.”

In the UK Labour party leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn was quick to speak out on the issue, “Although historically billionaires have been rare the past decade has seen a rapid increase in their numbers, which makes it important that we get them up against the wall and slaughter them like pigs as soon as possible.  Tragically if Donald had been shot in the fucking head it’s likely that another billionaire would have eaten his offspring, potentially ridding the world of his DNA forever.  That’s now unlikely to happen.”

A statement from fellow candidate Andy Burnham is expected as soon as he has a comprehensive poll telling him what people want to hear.

Donald himself made a brief statement, although he did not directly address Dr Pariah’s potential dooming of the world, “My very first act as president is going to be to get my face carved onto Mount Rushmore.  Ha, classic Trump!”

In other news, Shane MacGowan remains at large.

As a special treat today we’re joined by the MP for Leigh, football pundit look-a-like and forthcoming runner-up in the Labour leadership election, Andy Burnham, talking to us about his favourite films.

12 Angry Men (1957)

An absolute classic, this one.  Set almost entirely in a jury deliberation room after a murder trial.  Eleven of the jurors think the defendant killed his father and only juror number 8 thinks there is reasonable doubt to save the accused from the electric chair.  He realises that it will probably all be sorted out on appeal, so he abstains from voting.

On the Waterfront (1954)

Another classic.  Ex-boxer Terry Malloy has to decide whether to stand up against the thugs who rule his neighbourhood, even if it means losing friends and his job.  This is famous for Brando’s brilliant, “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am,” speech.  Brings a tear to my eye, that does.

The Matrix (1999)

Bit of sci-fi here.  Thomas ‘Neo’ Anderson is a normal working bloke who discovers that his world is just artificial reality, controlled by evil, heartless machines who exploit all of humanity for their own ends.  But there’s a lot of stuff in the world he likes, so he gets on with his job, keeps his head down and resolves to sort it out in the sequels. Brilliant.

That’s all we have time for this morning, but do join us next week when George Osborne will be here, telling us why his version of the 1927 silent classic Metropolis would be a bit different.

If you can rely on the Labour party for one thing it’s to make the worst of a good situation. David Cameron has gone to war on civil liberties and, worse, the BBC, Jeremy Hunt doesn’t seem to understand how the NHS works, Iain Duncan Smith is only one step removed from moustache twirling and tying women to railway tracks, Michael Gove has backed away from the Human Rights Act to focus on quietly undoing all of the changes Chris Grayling made at the Ministry of Justice, the government has run like a scared Vulpes vulpes from a fox-hunting amendment, the SNP are starting to face questions about how credible they are, the Liberal Democrats have elected Tim Nice-but-suspiciously-Christian to lead them and nobody has heard a peep from UKIP since mid-May.  This should truly be pay-day for the Labour party.

Instead they’ve got an interim leader who seems to think the final word in her job title, Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, is just there for show. They’ve got four contenders for leadership, one of whom appears to have signed up for the wrong party by mistake, two of which are made of pure bland and can’t speak without worrying that someone somewhere in the world who might have considered voting Labour will now change their mind, and one who is generally considered crazy for believing that Labour should be about something different to what the Conservatives are being about.

So crazy is the 4th candidate, Jeremy Corbyn, that his election campaign is mainly being run by The Daily Telegraph and party-swapping pit-bull journalist Louise Mensch.

Meanwhile, in a strange mirror-image of “I’m not a racist, but”, left-wingers rush to say that they are socialists, but Jeremy can’t be allowed to win because:

1. Left-wing Labour got wiped out in 1983
2. Miliband was left-wing and he got beaten by Cameron, just a couple of months ago. It was all on the telly and everything
3. If the Labour party aren’t elected then Tories will rule forever and [insert prophecies of doom]
4. Corbyn is such a divisive figures that if he gets the leadership then many may leave the party, forming a new right-of-left, but left-of-right party.  There used to be a party in that space, but they haven’t been heard of since their leader (another Jeremy!) tried to murder a dog in the 70s.

A lot of people are worried that although they are proper socialists they are perhaps the only one.  Labour talking-heads chatter about needing somebody electable to get into power and then implement the fairer society that we all want, without seeming to realise we can’t all want it that much if most of us aren’t willing to vote for it.  We need somebody who looks and speaks and acts like a Tory, otherwise we’ll have an eternity of being ruled by someone who really is a Tory!

Ever the problem-solver I’ve come up with 3 strategies to help Labour out:

The Jeremy C* strategy

Jeremy Corbyn may be dangerously unelectable, while being irresistible within the party, but there’s another Jeremy C who is incredibly popular and has recently become unemployed.  Yes, if Jeremy Clarkson were to be put forward as the new face of Labour the party could be assured of a landslide in 2020, especially if Labour promised to make whatever is left of the BBC re-employ him.  While some of Clarkson’s views may be at odds with mainstream Labour (for example, traditionally the party has been against shooing trade unionists in front of their families) it’s perhaps time for the restructuring that would be possible under a popular leader…especially if it means getting a taste of that lovely, lovely, government power.

The Ringer strategy

Picking a candidate who’s guaranteed electable is a tricky business, but as luck would have it there’s one person in the UK who we are 100% certain can get elected and, by happy coincidence, he’s announced that he’s giving up his job before 2020.  I refer, of course, to our current Prime Minister, Mr Cameron.  Some party stalwarts may question whether he’d be willing to move across the whatever it is they move across in Parliament – the thing that’s 2 sword lengths wide – but all it would need is a tiny step to the right for Labour.  And think what the party has to offer him – no Boris snapping at his heels, no IDS trying to harvest his kidneys while he’s asleep, nobody, it seems, who’s in any way electable or a threat to him being in power until he’s been dead for 10 years and he’d be the first person to be PM as the leader of two different parties since Sir Henry MadeUp, 5th Earl of Wikipedia.  Plus a couple of decade in power for Labour; that’s got to be worth something, even if it does mean having Cameron in change.

The Max Headroom strategy

A couple of years ago IBM demonstrated its Watson computer by winning the US game show Jeopardy!  We live in a world where computers can read and understand human language, and that means that the Labour party could be run by a virtual leader, an AI which can read the comments section of every UK news site, total and up- and down-votes at dozens of calculations per second and conjure sound-bites and policies certain to have maximum appeal.  No human-led party could possibly compete because under a sentient computer Labour could shift with public opinion on a whim without ever having to challenge the electorate to think of the longer term, or overcome selfishness in the pursuit of a better society or do anything that challenges their prejudices.  We could have the perfect Labour party; a one with no principle it won’t abandon, no loyalty to anyone and no links to its past…you won’t get that with Jeremy bloody Corbyn, will you?

Like a lot of people I’ve been getting worried about the budget coming this Wednesday. Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne have had a lot to say about helping hard-working families.  I’ve been chewing at my fingernails, worrying about just how hard the family has to work not to fall foul of these champions of the industrious.  They could, at a whim, introduce a ‘Tweeting from work’ tax, obliging me to pay an extra 10% of my income to HMRC because I dare to lift my nose from the grindstone.  On top of that they could pile a ‘Never miss a lunch-break’ tax…although my wife (a midwife) has probably missed enough statutory breaks to earn us a rebate on that one.  How about comfort tax to punish me for earning a crust by basically sitting still in an air-conditioned room with a computer, a limitless supply of coffee and carte blanche to listen to music, check the news and do as much mucking about in spreadsheets as I can take?  That lot has to be worth me paying 65% income tax, surely.

Those things though are difficult to tax, so what’s to stop them simply asking my employer how hard I work? How often do I put in a 12 hour day? Do I turn up 7 days a week? Have I ever done anything that could be classed as physically taxing? Do I hold down 2 or more jobs to keep my hard-working family in food? Do I have a callous on my hand, a blister on my finger or even a bead of sweat on my brow to prove that I’m hard-working?

You can see why I’m worried.

More worrying still a lot of things happen round my office that do seem like hard work, but I’m not the one doing them!  Our offices are cleaned, somebody scrubs the toilets, the foliage outside is pruned and tended. Those things sound like hard work.  It doesn’t stop at my office either, all around me people are doing hard work – bins are collected, shelves are stocked, roads are repaired, the heavy wheels of society are turned.  With all of these hard-working people to reward how are Cameron and Osborne going to be able to do any other than punish me for my soft, luxurious life-style?

I can find out live – I’m working from home on Wednesday (so hard!), so I can have the telly on showing the budget as Mr Osborne reads it out.  I can look into his piggy little eyes as he tells me a bare-faced lie and says that I’m hard-working!

Not just that I’m hard-working, but because I’m hard-working I deserve more.  It’s not enough that I’ve never had to use a food bank, or take a 2nd job, or claim housing benefit.  Simply being free of those things isn’t sufficient reward for how hard-working I am. No, I need to be spending more of my hard-earned income on myself and giving less to the state, especially if it’s just being given to those who aren’t hard-working (and evidence of their lack of hard work is that they need money from the state…except all pensioners, who have a “lifetime of hard work” behind them).

Those people who do have to deal with food banks, 2nd jobs and housing benefit can take comfort in being ‘aspirational’…if they just worked just a little harder then they could also be truly hard-working, like me. To be ‘aspirational’ is to be the living embodiment of Boxer from Orwell’s Animal Farm with, one suspects, much the same reward.

Ultimately the three problems that we’ll need to face on Thursday morning are:

1. People are naturally inclined to believe praise about themselves. If the Tories tell them often enough that they’re hard-working and deserve more then they’ll start to believe it and want more of; fuck the ‘aspirational’ and the underclass beneath them who can’t even aspire to aspiration.
2. If I stopped doing what I do it would take society quite a while to notice, but without the aspirational people who empty the bins, clean the toilets and stock the shelves our society wouldn’t survive a month.
3. That I’ve made a joke of being worried by this budget, but those who are already at the food bank, already working a 2nd job, already barely scraping by on state benefits have genuine reason to fear what Osborne’s going to say on Wednesday and, thinking about it, that’s not really that funny any more.

Hello, and welcome to Job or Boj, the exciting new reality game show from the BBC Channel 4 ITV Channel 5 Dave The Reality Channel GOD-TV Sky XL-TV where we ask two people to swap jobs for a day to see if they make it a JOB or a BOJ!

Today our contests are Susan, a 32 year old midwife from next door to our researcher, and Dave, a 41 year old Conservative Member of Parliament from some seat that’s marginal enough that he feels he needs to get his face on telly a bit more. They are going to be swapping jobs with each for a day, will they make a job of it or a boj of it (you get that ‘boj’=’bodge’, right? I wanted to call it ‘Career or Oh dear’, but the production team shouted me down. I like my idea better, but they’ve got a union and everything).

Anyway, here’s how the day went…

	Susan	Dave
7:30am	Susan has been booked to appear on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme. Her initial worries about being able to handle an interview subside when she finds out the government have kindly given her a list of things to say, irrespective of the questions asked.	Meanwhile, Dave has yet to make it into work, as the hospital he’s based at has too few parking spaces, staff are only allowed to use 4 of them and he needs an hour’s wage in change to pay for anywhere else.
8am	Breakfast meeting with somebody from the Chief Whip’s office to explain what the day will involve. Breakfast in London can be expensive, so Susan is delighted to discover she can claim the £52 it costs on expenses.	As he hadn’t showed up and as there’s a shortage of staff, Dave’s supervisor has been assigned 3 labouring women to care for and doesn’t have time to see him. The ward co-ordinator asks him to sit with a patient and pull the emergency buzzer if he needs help.
8:02am		Dave’s having a little cry in the corridor while some of the other staff answer the emergency buzzer.
9:10am	Susan has arrived at the House of Commons and is immediately struck by its amazing history. As it’s a quiet day there’s time for a tour of one of Britain’s most iconic landmarks.	At the hospital things are busier, as the midwives’ shift is under-staffed by 6 people who can’t be replaced with agency staff because of recent spending restrictions. In recognition of this the hospital has arranged for 8 inductions and 6 elective caesarian sections, plus the usual natural births and emergency cases. Dave’s supervisor has time to shout, “Man up or fuck off!” at him as she runs towards theatre alongside a trolley with her hands up a lady’s baby-trumpet.
10:30am	As it’s a Monday the House doesn’t convene until 11am, so Susan grabs another quick coffee at one of the bars.	The woman that Dave is sitting with has gone into labour and Dave’s “No, stick with the Conservatives!” joke hasn’t stopped her screaming and calling him a useless cunt. He pulls the emergency cord a little too hard and it comes off the wall.
10:32am	Susan decides to have a scone as well	The labouring woman’s partner is shouting, “Do something you useless cunt!” at Dave. Dave looks like he might be about to start crying again.
10:33am	Thanks to the £6m in subsidies that the food and drink outlets in the House receive Susan’s coffee and scone is surprisingly reasonably priced, but she expenses it anyway, just to be sure.	A midwife arrives in the room Dave’s in, attends to the labouring woman and calls Dave a useless cunt.
11am	The day’s business begins and Susan is feeling a little nervous, wondering if she’ll understand it all.	Dave is also feeling nervous as he tries his first hands-on examination
11:02am	Susan realises it’s all just a pantomime, where you just have to remember who to boo and who to cheer.	Dave realises his Rolex is never going to be the same again
12 noon
1:30pm	There’s an important debate in the House, with many complex points to be made on both sides and arguments that can be difficult to follow. Fortunately the government whip is there to explain to Susan that she has to vote ‘Yes’ at the end, irrespective of what she hears or believes	Dave is getting some quick training on how to look after 4 labouring women at once, resuscitate a baby that isn’t breathing, calculate drug doses in his head while somebody screams at him and deal with a father who is a schedule 1 offender, all while documenting everything he does, because he is professionally and legally responsible for this shit and deserves a proper panic attack every time a daytime TV ad asks, “Have you suffered a mis-managed birth?”
1:45pm		Dave has another little cry in the corridor.
6pm	Business in the House is concluded for the day and rather than having a long journey home Susan can make herself comfortable in Dave’s fully-expensed 2nd home in London	Things at the hospital are quiet enough for Dave to take his lunch-break. The canteen only charge him £3.50 for a sandwich which looks and tastes like it might be medical waste.
7:30pm	The Prime Minister himself calls to ask Susan how her day has gone. She has some tough questions to ask about why MPs are getting a 10% pay rise, but he explains that it was recommended by an independent body.	Dave is having a hard time explaining to his colleagues for the day why it was wrong of them to go on strike to get their 1% pay rise that was recommended by an independent body.
8pm	Susan watches the news and signs some letters that Dave’s wife (and paid secretary) has left out	Dave is the only person available to accompany a patient in a blue-lights dash to a hospital 35 miles away which allegedly has a free bed. His cries of “I don’t want to go!” can be plainly heard over the siren.

So, job or boj?

Susan: Hmmm, I found the day a bit boring, but it was easy enough and with all of the perks, a £74k salary and the opportunity to set myself up with lucrative private jobs if I was ever found to be incompetent, corrupt or unelectable I think it would be too good to turn down. JOB!

Dave: Unfortunately Dave hasn’t returned any of our calls since his day as a midwife.

That’s all for this week, join us next week when we’ll be finding Dave and forcing him to be a policeman for a day. Yeah, fuck you, Dave!

Hello voters,

As those of you who can read know there’s a been a lot in the press recently about my government scrapping the Human Rights Act and if you’re one of those lefties or somebody who’s read lefty literature, such as 1984, then that can sound scary. I’d like to take 10 minutes today explaining my plans to put you all at ease.

If you’d gone to a decent school then you’d know that in the 1930s a spot of trouble kicked off in Germany and a lot of people were treated in a fashion that even ATOS would find pretty shocking.  After that was all sorted out Winston Churchill wrote down some rules to prevent it from ever happening again.  To be fair he mainly cribbed these from the American Bill of Rights, but he did the spelling properly and had the sense to ditch the one about bearing arms, so it was a pretty solid document.  That document is the foundation of the European Court of Human Rights and it made the world a better place.

Back then Human Rights were applied sensibly, Dixon of Dock Green fashion, and if anybody with a touch of the tar-brush had tried to use them to avoid being deported to Bongo-bongo land (as our friends in UKIP might say) they’d have been told to sling their hook and have gotten a quick trip down the station steps and steerage passage on the next ship out of Dover.

Since then, however, things have gone badly wrong.

Things started to go wrong in 1998, when Tony Blair’s Labourish government introduced the Human Rights Act, with broad cross-party support that I’m not going to mention again.  This terrible, dangerous, popular act took dear Winston’s rules, which had been intended to calm down a lot of excitable foreigners, and adopted them into British law.  The ECHR, which was was designed to prevent terrible governments slowly chipping away at your rights, has now become so twisted that it’s stopping my government from slowly chipping away your human rights!  I think that we can all agree that this is a frightful situation.

To make things worse Winston’s laws are being ‘interpreted’ by judges, both at home and in Strasbourg, and they infrequently come to decisions that Theresa May doesn’t like.  Also, hand on heart, we’ve been a bit cavalier with writing things off as happening “because of human rights” when the real situation is more complicated, more embarrassing or just a bit too nuanced for a Daily Mail headline, so now they want us to fix it.

However, the truth is that there’s a compelling list of reasons for scrapping the HRA that don’t look like non sequiturs if you read them quickly:

• We’ll be getting rid of Labour’s Human Rights Act.
• In cases that the media have trivialised to absurdity evil judges are using human rights to make Christians bake gay cakes, or to jail women who have loud sex.
• And they’re unelected judges!  Having unelected people running the country makes our dear old Queen cry.
• Even terrorists, criminals, foreigners and people on benefits have human rights!
• Quite frankly we’ve got the Mail and Express readers wound up into such a frenzy that we have to do something!

And we’ll be replacing the HRA with a British Bill of Rights, that will guarantee good solid English values; the right to a proper cuppa, the right to have a good old moan about it on Twitter, the right to Songs of Praise on a Sunday, etc.  We’re just busy sorting a few of the details, so that it’s as comprehensive as the legal highs act.

Hopefully this chat will have reassured you that my plans are in your best interests, and will allow my government to both get on with ruling the country and, if needs be, to suddenly and drastically redefine what your best interests are.  If, however, you still have any questions then feel free to write them on a postcard, address it to ‘In retrospect voting based on who looked best with a bacon sandwich was a mistake’ and post it to early May.  I’ll be back in a few months to talk about how we’ll be cutting winter heating bills with a few public book-burning events.

Yours until next time (or until I leave my drink unattended when Boris is around),

Dave.

What is the Queen’s speech?

Since the English civil war (1968-1971) the monarchy has been answerable to parliament and the Queen’s speech is the annual occasion where she publicly announces all of the things that government are making her do, where they’re making her go and who they are making her meet.  Everyone claps at the end, but she knows there are snipers waiting to take her out if she deviates from the script.

Isn’t it just boring?

Unlike the King’s Speech (2010), the Queen’s speech has been snubbed by both the BAFTA awards and the Oscars, but it is a very important ceremonial occasion, and if we didn’t have ceremony we’d be as bad as the foreign.  The occasion is very much the Cannes of British politics (although the Prime Minister is not required to wear heels) with many people who you see droning away on the telly turning up to listen to an old lady say what she’s been told to say.  The speech did win a Razzie for Worst Sex Scene in 2001.

Is there a lot of ceremony involved?

Indeed.  The Queen will be accompanied by her Household Carvery, who traditionally lay on a 4 meat spread for the House of Commons at the Bar of the House.  The members of the commons are summoned to the bar by the traditional playing of Agadoo by Black Lace and are given the opportunity to see the House of Lords, which is where they’ll end up if they manage to avoid fucking up so badly that Operation Yewtree are involved.

The Queen is handed her speech, written on skin from the calf of the last Prime Minister, by a Chancellor. Since the trouble German Chancellor Adolf Hitler caused a British one is now used most of the time.

How is the speech written?

The writing of the speech is a 5 stage process:

1. The Prime Minister tells journalists things that they want to hear so that they write nice things about him.
2. He then works out which of these things will or will not appear in the speech, based on which ones journalists didn’t seem to like, if they were complete un-costed flights of fancy or if they’d be legally impossible and cause the United Kingdom to descend into another civil war.
3. The Prime Minister writes up the surviving items in his best handwriting, adding phrases such as ‘My government will’ and other things a 90 year old lady might say, such as, ‘This used to be all trees’, ‘I don’t like the new 5 pence pieces – they’re too small to see ones face properly’ and ‘You’re all just after my money.  Well I’m leaving it to a Corgi charity!’
4. Traditionally the PM slips in a clause about abolishing the monarchy and guillotining them all in Hyde Park on a bank holiday Monday, for the Queen to chuckle at before she begs for the lives of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
5. The Lord Chancellor, traditionally the Prime Minister’s cleverest friend – although recently it was Chris Grayling – checks the spelling and makes sure the PM has used capital letters, full-stops and language that puts him on the legal side of hate-crime charges.  If all is well he puts on his party frock and gets ready to hand the speech over.

Is that it?

No, after the speech comes the difficult part of actually doing all of the things that the government has announced it is going to do.  This is a long process of speaking to people who understand that the country isn’t run from the Newsnight studio, those with actual law degrees and a bunch of MPs who will all want their own political hobby-horse to be stroked in exchange for them voting the laws in.

This process could take many years, but in a year’s time there’ll be another Queen’s speech and another load of front pages to fill, and so the cycle continues…