Enter Baby Boris, or to give him his full name… | Stewart Lee

A beleaguered Britain bids a heartfelt hello to the perfect distraction from the handling of the coronavirus

Few British prime ministers have guarded their privacy as admirably as Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson.

We do not even know exactly how many children the prime minister has, for example, or by whom. Such gentlemanly discretion, in the social media age of self-promotional disclosure, is much to be admired, like a rose blooming in some discarded shit-pants. Indeed, despite the fact that, by his own admission, he is “literally bursting with spunk”, the prime minister manages his family affairs, and those of his totty, with almost monastic privacy, the Pope John XII of modern politics. Turds may have taken technology lessons from a pole dancer, or he may not have done. But he was not cynical enough to try and exploit this, and the exciting photo opportunities the encounters would doubtless have provided, perhaps of the PM hanging comically from the pole in some kind of harness and waving a flag, for self-publicity or political gain.

But advisers in Turds’s inner circle know that the birth of his baby could have been the ultimate dead cat on the table, perfect to distract from questions relating to the government’s handling of the coronavirus. After all, it does not now appear that the coronavirus will just go away if you simply ignore it like an annoying wasp at a picnic, as was originally thought. Britain now has the highest coronavirus death rate of any European country, and unpatriotic critics are already trying to connect this data, in some way, to the government’s response to the crisis, as if they were somehow related.

Misdirection abounds. The Daily Mail hate-funnel and cognitive dissonance practitioner Sarah Vine has already suggested that, in order to troll woke snowflakes and easily offended liberals, Turds’s child should be christened entirely with the names of writers found on the shelves of her, and her resentful orphan husband Michael Gove’s, assiduously curated Black Library of forbidden, obscene, amoral and decadent books.

But would Carrie Symonds have consented, even at the insistence of the government’s new dead-cat-deployer Ben Warner, to allow her firstborn, as Vine suggested, to be christened David-Irving Charles-Murray Douglas-Murray Ayn-Rand Richard-Allen Adolf-Hitler Marquis-de-Sade Lord-Horror Osama-Bin-Laden Bobby-Seale Bobby-Sands Michael-Gove Neil-Strauss John-Norman Graham-Kerr Nancy-Friday Abdul-Alhazred Gilles-de-Rais Nigel-Rees Enid-Blyton Sofie-Hagen S-Clay-Wilson Captain-Pissgums Ernest-Dowson Leopold-von-Sacher-Masoch Delia-Smith William-Johnson-Cory Aleister-Crowley Olympia-Press Etonensis Johnson?

Did Vine share photographs of her offensively non-alphabetised library of offence without thought, or as an outright act of provocation? Or was it as a cheery dog -whistle to supporters of the far right, who may be losing faith in the xenophobic certainties of Brexit now their lives have been saved by immigrant key workers? If only a few members of the notoriously antisemitic Labour party had shown the same initiative to share shots of their similarly controversial book collections, perhaps they would be doing better in the polls.

The birth of the prime minister’s child during the crisis serves in some way to normalise him. Parents all across the land ache for the life experiences already lost by their children under lockdown. On the first Monday of next month, under normal circumstances, we would have been in Gloucestershire as usual, watching people fall to almost certain injury down a near-vertical cliff in pursuit of a 9lb piece of cheese, with our children, Keira (9) and Starmer (13). But not this year.

Cheese has fallen down a Gloucestershire cliff every Whit Monday or so since before the birth of Christ. And before cows were domesticated, fungus-fuelled Cotswold shamans would merely stare at a space where they knew that a falling cheese, whatever that was, would one day be. But this spring bank holiday, the crowds will not make their unregulated pilgrimage across the hills to the quasi-illegal ritual. I hope some local hero rolls the cheese anyway, late at night by moonlight, so that the world keeps turning. Some semblance of cosmic order must be maintained in the face of this invisible enemy which you couldn’t really have seen coming even though everyone said it was and we really needed to get our shit together like fast man.

Pressure is on the PM to act decisively, or at least do something else significant, so no one notices that he didn’t. Though an uncommonly dignified Turds has made few public pronouncements on the recent birth of his newly born son, he has finally succumbed to political pressure to announce, that in the traditional Johnson family manner going back to the days of the Ottoman empire, his new baby will take four of his own personal names, while retaining all of his father’s.

And so a beleaguered Britain bids a heartfelt hello to Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Poo-Pants Johnson!

Contributor

Stewart Lee

The GuardianTramp

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