Stay alert! On Twitter, Tom Tugendhat, The Conservative MP for Tonbridge and Malling, is talking. There! He is thanking the prime minister for his “very clear message”. Tom Tugendhat! On Twitter! Now! He is enjoying the sheer coral sea clarity of the prime minister’s Sunday statement, like sunlight shining through spring water in Waterford crystal! Tom Tugendhat! He says: “Thank you prime minister. That’s leadership!”
Stay alert! This former intelligence officer is the nephew of a real man called Baron Tugendhat. Baron Tugendhat is not a character from a 19th-century German children’s book about a baron with a weird hat, the end of which gets tugged. But what did Tom Tugendhat want? Why was he bothering us?
Stay alert! Peasants! Get back to work! Over the top, boys! Gas! Gas! For God’s sake, gas! Writing in the 2012 book Britannia Unchained, The secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, Dominic Skeletor Raab, said of British workers, they “prefer a lie-in to hard work”, “are among the worst idlers in the world”, and expect to see laziness rewarded. If British workers were also serial liars, then our workforce would have been made in the image of our prime minister. Ha! I’m here all week! Maybe all year! Try the fish! Don’t forget to tip your healthcare worker!
Stay alert! Here at home, my family nag me to mend the gate, fix the dimmer switch, hoe the avocado trench. But I am a lazy British worker for whom the pandemic is an excuse to skive off and home-school the year four syllabus. Precipitation, Shinto and Cnut. My family won’t relent, so I have presented them with a simple graph. It shows that at some point I would do the things they wanted me to do, but it was impossible for me to say when that would be, or whether the things would be done well enough to remain done, or whether they would then have to be done again later at an unspecified date. And that seemed to satisfy them. The twats!
Stay alert! On Sunday night the prime minister appeared on television and presented his own graph, explaining his immediately discredited and internationally ridiculed New Vision of Lockdown Britain ™ ®. My 12-year-old, whose strongest subject is not maths, laughed openly at the graph, and said she would not have handed it in at school as neither the X or the Y axis contained any actual information, so it had no meaning. We are being guided by a graph that a schoolgirl would be ashamed to submit. All the prime minister’s shoddy homework suggested was that if some time passed, eventually some things would happen. Some of them might involve stick men jumping about or riding bikes. And although a blue line is going downwards, there was at least twice as much shading-in in the area showing The Future as there was in the area showing The Past. This suggests Covid-19 deaths will triple to around 90,000. Beat that Belgium! But the tear-jerking stupidity of the prime minister’s death-inducing graph did not deter the usual suspects from coming out in its defence, not least of all Tom Tugendhat, his fellow Tory MP Alan Abortionmaqaquesymptom being unavailable due to self-isolation. Because for loyal Tom Tugendhat, the prime minister’s offensively stupid night soil bucket of obfuscation was “a very clear message from @Borisjohnson and a welcome explanation of the situation. By explaining the uncertainty and complexity @10Downingstreet is allowing us all to think through the situation.” Nonsense, Tugendhat, and youknowsit, clart!
Stay alert! Something about the strange collision of unrelated words that form Tom Tugendhat’s surname means that whenever Tom Tugendhat appears in my visionary satire-dreams it is as a territorial army lieutenant colonel forcibly pulling at an end, presumably his own, that has become trapped in a hat, or in an intelligence officer’s wig of disguise. It’s past midnight, and now Baron Tugendhat is in my drunken nightmares, working undercover for James Bond’s great-grandfather, attending a lavish ceremonial dinner at Neuschwanstein castle. The future of Anglo-Bavarian trade relations depends on Baron Tugendhat also tugging his end free of a hat, on this occasion a Tyrolean Alpine bonnet, common to the region, a vagina dentata of felt and chamois leather.
Stay alert! (Readers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own slogan.) You may meet one parent at a distance of two metres while the other parent waits in the car. Or you could employ them both at your small business and see them as much as you want. Stay alert! Don’t see your children. But if you are a teacher, see dozens of other people’s children in narrow corridors. Stay alert! Don’t drive. Unless you are driving to take exercise, in which case drive hundreds of miles. But don’t drive into Wales, for there be dragons. Like Schrödinger’s paradoxical cat, the prime minister’s New Vision of Lockdown Britain ™ ® is both stupid and stinks of cats’ piss, and now it has been shooed back out into the lane by Nicola Sturgeon.
Stay alert! Former environment secretary and Brexiter Owen Paterson will be rushing back to work, as his consultancy client Randox Laboratories has just been awarded the government’s £133m virus testing contract, unopposed. But Matt Handcock is unable to say whether other workers can refuse employers’ demands to return. Over the top! Gas, boys, gas! It’s the bonfire of rights Brexiters always dreamed of, delivered ahead of schedule by this coronavirus, a microscopic sleeper agent for the European Research Group.
Stay alert! Lazy British working-class workers. Die at your posts for Dominic Raab. Die in your warehouses for Jacob Rees-Mogg. Die in your care homes for Dominic Cumming. Middle-class workers. Work safely from home at your laptops. Text each other photographs of your Ocado deliveries, and dream of Center Parcs and Forest Holidays. Once I found it funny that the prime minister’s perfect storm of public desperation, manufactured xenophobia and ruthless dishonesty had seen this self-serving turd float to the toilet top. But now it’s just frightening. I worry for my children, my country, my avocado trench. Sort yourself out, wazzock. People are dying.
• This article was amended on 18 May 2020 to remove text inconsistent with the Observer’s style guidelines.
