1. Number boffins have shown that over 90% of interview time is devoted to the front of interviewees’ heads. You can improve your coverage by allocating 50% of interview time to the back of their heads instead.
2. Always strive to give a voice to the voiceless, a name to the nameless and a bottom to the bottomless. In the specific case of bottoms, always make sure to provide both buttocks equally. Otherwise the formerly-bottomless may end up leaning too far to the left or right when they sit.
3. Increase balance by carrying out all panel interviews on a large square board which is precariously balanced on a central column above a pit full of wet sharks. Mark one side of the board with gradations from authoritarian to libertarian, and the other with gradations from economic hard-left to economic hard-right. Interviewees must stand on the position on the board corresponding to their political views. Unbalanced panels will be literally eaten alive, although you may run the risk of ending up with a large number of newly-converted centrists who are hugging each other and crying.
4. Why not increase coverage across the veracity spectrum by having one interviewee who always lies and one who always tells the truth? You may ask one question. This will allow more time for advertising.
5. Never forget to devote equal screen time to the existential horror point of view, perhaps by getting a representative from the void to come on screen and howl for a few minutes.
Those who have seen it all and generally twice; those who are fearless and steadfast and dead; those who once tried to organise a pissup in a brewery but decided in the end that it was not ethically justifiable to prioritise one brewery over another; those who only want the love of everyone forever and ever; those who are in love with facts; those whose grasp of the facts extends only to facts that agree with their worldview; those who are oddly forgetful; those who will believe anything that gets them elected; those who know one large thing only; those who went into politics out of a vague sense that it is what people like them do; those who dance around questions; those who absolutely agree with you no matter what it is you believe; those who are perpetually nudged away from disaster by a cadre of fretful underlings; those who plunge into disaster with a gleeful laugh and emerge from it somehow covered in mucky glory; those who know how the sausages are made; those who like how the sausages are made; those who are pioneering a new form of sausagemaking in which sausages poot fully-formed from the rear of a magnificent unicorn.
Q1. What do you believe is the main problem affecting the country today?
A1. The economy
A2. Jobs
A3. Crime
A4. Kids these days
A5. Health
A6. The cost of Marmite
Q2. What do you believe the cause of this problem is? (Note: we agree. Absolutely. You are so right. Thank goodness we can at last frankly and fairly talk about the thing you think is the cause of the problem!)
A1. Immigrants
A2. Badgers
A3. The French
A4. Poor people, but only the bad sort of poor people of course
A5. So-called experts
A6. The sneering liberal metropolitan elite
Q3. What solution to this problem will make you vote for us in 2020?
A1. Building a great big fuck-off wall in the sea and instructing geographers that we are now part of the North American continent
A2. Issuing blue passports to the tiny percentage of the population who can afford to go abroad
A3. Naming and shaming
A4. Send them back to where they came from, unless they had the temerity to be born next door in which case send them somewhere else
A5. Something involving detention centres but only in a very polite and British way support our troops look here’s a big flag
A6. Let’s get something nice for the Queen, like a yacht or a gilded cupcake or Easter Island
1. The Department for Cockups (DfC)
2. The Ministry for Folding Cats (MfFC)
3. The Department of Sitting Around In Chairs Looking Important (DoSAICLI)
4. The Department of Being Sincerely But Ineffectually Concerned about Things (DoBSBICaT)
5. The Department that has Big Impressive Corridors But No-one is Quite Sure What it Does (DthBICBNiQSWiD)
6. The Department for Carefully Gathering all the Scientific Evidence and then Ignoring It (DfCGatSEatII)
7. The Department of Hey Look it’s a Dancing Pony Pay No Attention to What’s Going On Behind You (DoHLiaDPPNAtWGOBY)
8. The Department for Doing Things Tomorrow (DfFTT)
1. Po from Teletubbies. I feel this choice would improve Prime Minister’s questions immeasurably. PMQs could start with a rousing round of ‘Eh-oh!’ and proceed thereafter as a game of peek-a-boo with the Shadow Cabinet (by that time likely consisting of Jeremy Corbyn plus fifteen-odd glove puppets). Political engagement among future generations would skyrocket.
2. A small round of camembert. The unity candidate, with a strong hope of patching up relations with France. Why pay a 150,000 pound salary when you could pay one pound twenty at Sainsbury’s for a Prime Minister who is not actively trying to trash the economy?
3. The giant pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini). If we are going to have someone who squirms out of tough decisions, let’s at least get an expert squirmer. Plus probably a lot of signing stuff is going to be needed in the next few years, which will be faster with eight arms. The giant octopus’s cthulhoid appearance may also strike terror into the hearts of Britain’s negotiating partners which, on balance, is probably better than derision.
4. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). Bear with me here. Machiavelli’s main qualification for the post is that he is dead. OK, there may be some minor diplomatic issues involved with going to Italy and digging him up. But on the plus side, we would have a Prime Minister with global name recognition who is nevertheless, at present, completely unable to lie, backstab, make incompetent power grabs or stir up popular prejudice for personal gain. And after 500-ish years dead, he’s probably not even smelly anymore.
Upon the occasion of Brexit:
1. The UK economy will be officially replaced by a giant toilet, which we will be forced to lease from Brussels at extortionate rates since the Treasury will no longer have enough petty cash to purchase outsize bathroom goods. Following the Emergency Budget of July 2016, all residents will be required to ceremonially flush half of their life savings. The Toilet will be conveniently located in Rotherham, near the M1, and all flushed notes will be mulched and donated to newly destitute farmers.
2. The rest of the world will line up to point and laugh at Britain, before all going to a fabulous party to which Britain is not invited. The next day, they will all make facebook posts about how amazing it was and how all the best countries were there. Meanwhile, Scotland will have altered its relationship status to ‘It’s complicated’.
3. Workers’ rights and environmental legislation will be replaced by a series of bills obliging companies to fire employees if it would be funny, women to spend at least three hours per day in a kitchen, and all residents to do at least one large shit per year into a idyllic rural brook. A tax rebate may be obtained if you are able to shit on the head of a kingfisher. A brown flag scheme will be set up to inform swimmers of beaches where the raw sewage is uncontaminated by needles and condoms.
4. Houses will cost approximately 50p. No-one will be able to afford one because disposable incomes of more than 40p will be a thing of the past apart from for the super-rich, who will have got a bit bored of buying houses by then.
5. The NHS will collapse, turning thousands of patients on trolleys out onto the streets with their livers and suchlike hanging out. After listening to their desperate pleas for healthcare for an appropriately sombre period of time, a group of concerned Tory donors will set up an extremely lucrative private replacement to which the ill can contribute the remaining half of their life savings or, at a pinch, the promise of indentured servitude for the rest of their lives.
Upon the occasion of Bremain:
1. Seventy million Turks will descend upon the country with party bags to skin the entire population of Britain. Safely ensconced in British skins, the Turks will take over the country, leaving the original population the choice of going about without a skin on or using a discarded Turkish one and being deported to Turkey for the rest of their lives.
2. A committee of twelve faceless bureaucrats will arrive from Brussels and undemocratically confiscate the Queen. She will be put on display in a small museum in Bruges. It will cost extra to enter if you are British.
3. All billboards will be forced to carry large posters of Adolf Hitler looking at Britain and smirking a little bit, as if he is in on an amazing joke that you haven’t got yet.
4. Britain will be forced to accept an infinite number of suspicious-looking twenty-foot tall wooden asylum-seekers with large ‘DANGER: BOMBS IN TRANSIT’ tattoos on their faces. They will erect an inflatable mosque where Buckingham palace once stood.
5. The NHS will collapse, turning thousands of patients on trolleys out onto the streets with their livers and suchlike hanging out. After listening to their desperate pleas for healthcare for an appropriately sombre period of time, a group of concerned Tory donors will set up an extremely lucrative private replacement to which the ill can contribute the remaining half of their life savings or, at a pinch, the promise of indentured servitude for the rest of their lives.
9077 Systems of Government
-9077.1 Government by random people
–9077.11 Those whose parents also did the governing
—9077.111 Somehow the populace are on board with this
–9077.12 Those who have been appointed by some mystical authority
–9077.13 Those who just sort of wandered in and started governing
-9077.2 Government by whoever is best at shooting people
-9077.3 Government by people who were actually voted for
–9077.31 People who were voted for once and have managed to turn this into a perpetual mandate
–9077.32 People who were voted for under a one party official, ten thousand votes system
–9077.33 People who were voted for entirely legitimately on the basis of policies aimed at making the next electoral term awesome at the expense of the entire rest of the future
–9077.34 People who were voted for entirely legitimately on the basis of policies aimed at making life awesome for the small number of people who bothered or were able to vote, at the expense of everyone else
–9077.35 Governments genuinely interested in optimising welfare
—9077.351 Engaged in perpetual arguments about the definition of optimising and the components of welfare
-9077.4 Government by perpetual crisis
–9077.41 In which democracy will totally be resumed as soon as the crisis is over
–9077.42 In which democracy is still in place, but who would trust a country in crisis to those other people?
–9077.43 In which the timing and winner of elections is largely governed by who has been impeached most recently
-9077.5 Government by those who did a revolution
–9077.51 In which democracy will totally be resumed after we’ve finished renaming streets, airports and cocktails after the date, heroes and symbols of the revolution
-9077.6 Government by those who have the most stuff
–9077.61 Additionally optimised towards making sure that more stuff goes to people who already have a lot of stuff
-9077.7 Evanescent government by the beautiful and doomed
-9077.8 Government by cats