Steve Anglesey picks out the losers and losers from another week on Planet Brexit – where there are no winners.
Rosetta Tickner
This Brexiteer Twitter user was outraged by the news that McVitie’s are cutting the number of Digestives in a pack by seven after the falling pound made ingredients more expensive. ‘Aldi & Lidl do much cheaper & very nice digestives for anyone who’s fed up with anti Brexit propaganda,’ she wrote.
Please, no-one burst Rosetta’s bubble by telling her where Aldi and Lidl hail from…
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Jazzy Jake told a Conservative Home podcast: ‘A second referendum would be very dangerous territory… it would be seen as the characteristic European hatred of democracy, so if you vote the wrong way you get made to vote again until you vote the right way.’
It must have been a completely different man dressed as a Victorian Undertaker who told the Commons on October 24, 2011: ‘Indeed, we could have two referendums. As it happens, it might make more sense to have the second referendum after the renegotiation is completed.’
Richard Littlejohn
The Daily Mail columnist known to Viz readers as Richard Littlecock (‘Little cock, Big opinions!’) is back with a column lauding his old mucker Nigel Farage. Opening in style with a quote from dog-whistler of yore Enoch Powell, Richard writes of Farage: ‘When I was presenting a nightly show on Sky News, I was about the only broadcaster who would give him a regular platform. The mainstream media treated him as a pariah – at best a circus act, at worst a neo-Nazi.’ How, erm, wrong they all were!
Later, Littlejohn claims that the nicotine-stained man-frog is a ‘folk hero’ while ridiculing David Cameron for being ‘reduced to scraping a living on the international lecture circuit, essentially a political end-of-the-pier show’.
This ignores the fact that Farage has been on a literal end-of-the-pier tour, including a sparsely-attended appearance in Clacton-on-Sea last October, where he managed to sell fewer tickets than an Elvis impersonator the previous night. Little cock, Big opinions!
Liam Fox
Revealed by HuffPo’s Rachel Wearmouth to have spent £16.3m since 2016 on a PR campaign titled ‘Exporting Is GREAT’. It’s hoped the scheme will help to counteract claims that the British business community is ‘too lazy and too fat’ and ‘doesn’t want to export’, both of which have been claimed by Fox since 2016.
Roger Helmer
No longer an MEP for reasons of his own choosing and certainly nothing to do with an EU Parliament probe into his expenses, climate change denier Roger is now footloose and fancy-free. But how does he spend his time?
He tweeted: ‘Yesterday I asked several dinner companions how much CO2 they thought there was in the atmosphere. Guesses ranged from 20 to 40%. They were flabbergasted when I told them it was only 0.04%.’ What a swell party that must have been!
Tom Aldridge
This 88-year-old UKIP councillor in Taunton used a community meeting on anti-social behaviour to imply that drug abuse and violent crime would decrease if same-sex marriage was repealed.
Aldridge last came to the attention of this column in November 2017, when he picketed a speech by Remainer journalist and broadcaster Ian Dunt.
‘We have had a democratic vote and people just need to listen,’ said Tom, explaining why he didn’t want people listening to Ian Dunt’s democratic right to express himself.
Boris Johnson
Wants to give the NHS £100m a week having previously said he would give it £350m a week. Wants to build a 35km bridge across the Channel after spending £52m on failing to build a 366m bridge across the Thames. And the biggest laugh of all: Wants to be Prime Minister!
Neil Hamilton
Seeming to prepare the way for a leadership challenge to Henry Bolton, the disgraced former Tory MP turned Welsh UKIP leader said the party could learn from the ‘professional’ group of AMs he runs. Highlights of Neil’s spell in charge include seeing one AM defect to the Conservatives, forcing another to resign, refusing to accept his replacement as she wanted to pick her own staff and losing 11.6% of the party’s vote at the last general election, worse even than the 10.8% plunge UKIP took across the UK under Paul Nuttall.
Hamilton, who once posed naked and appeared in the Rocky Horror Show to escape bankruptcy after his failed libel action against the Guardian said of Bolton: ‘He’s made himself into a ludicrous figure by his own poor judgement.’ Hmmm.
Henry Bolton
Weakened by the resignations of 14 of his ‘top team’, the randy badger-strangler is still confident he can assemble a new ‘Kipper cabinet if given the go-ahead at next month’s EGM. Among the Bolton loyalists tipped for big things are names like Jo Marney, Marnie Jones, Mo Jarney, Jane Omry and Joan Smarmy, with sport to be handled by Mo Diame, transport by Reg Varney and Ireland by someone called O’Blarney. Reports that Bolton’s new Cabinet slogan is to be ‘by the few, not the many’ could not be confirmed at press time.
Tim Newark
Musing on the Bayeux Tapestry’s loan to Britain, this little-known author said it would provide ‘a timely reminder of what happened the last time we were overwhelmed by illegal immigrants’, called Paris ‘a beautiful city but it remains resolutely ‘French” and demanded that someone should ‘commission a 75-yard long embroidery recording the events of the Brexit campaign with a mail-clad Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson charging to victory, cutting down the Brussels bureaucrats.’
While we wait for thousands of ‘Kipper OAPs to get busy with the knitting needles, fans wanting more of these unique takes on politics are directed to Tim’s website, where there’s an article in which he ‘exposes the right-wing myth created around Hitler and the left-wing historians who have perpetuated it… So what makes me think Hitler is a left-winger? Well, the big clue is in the title of his party – National Socialist.’ QED!
So, what makes us think that Tim is a w**ker? Well, the big clue is in an anagram of his surname….