Of Michael Gove, Game of Thrones, and the week's best spoof posts
I implied earlier this week that many people were comparing Michael Gove's behaviour with a particularly heinous act of treachery from the "Song of Ice and Fire" novels and the TV series taken from it and named after the first book, "A Game of thrones." I said we all thought he had done a "Red Wedding" on Boris Johnson.
One of my friends from the University of Bristol, John Winterson Richards, replied on Facebook with the comment "You do wrong to compare Gove to Walder Frey, he is so obviously Petyr Baelish."
He does have a point, since reading that comment I have been unable to expunge from my brain the visual image of Michael Gove holding a knife to David Cameron's throat and the imagined sound of him saying in his precise Scottish accent "Sorry Dave, but I did warn you not to trust me."
However, I stand by my view that Gove's actions have turned out less like Walder Frey's btetrayal at the Red Wedding or any of those by Baelish, but more like a Kamikazi pilot, who destroyed both Boris Johnson's campaign for the leadership and his own reputation in one suicidal attack.
There have of course been a wealth of amusing parodies this week. one of the best was the linkage of the Chilcot Report and the Brexit vote by the NewsThump website here. An extract reads:
"The Chilcot report has reminded Britain not to rush into anything based on dodgy intelligence and without a backup plan, but about two weeks too late.
The report, which looked into the causes and effects of the Iraq war, concluded that while nobody actually lied, they did ignore warnings of serious aftereffects if there wasn’t a proper plan in advance, which seems a little ironic right now for some reason.
Chilcot specifically highlighted that jumping with both feet without adequate preparation had turned out, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been an extremely flawed thing to do.
One volume also criticised the intelligence on which the decision to go to war was based, saying that dodgy dossiers are bad, but at least no-one put the spurious claims on the side of a bus."
Meanwhile the Daily Mash reports here that
"JEREMY Corbyn has backed Andrea Leadsom to be Tory leader on the grounds that unelectable radicals should stick together.
The Labour leader believes that a straight choice between two fringe politicians catapulted into frontline politics by extremists is exactly what Britain deserves"
Another News Thump story reports that the House of Commons cafeteria has run out of knives and says that
"Catering workers are currently scouring the Houses of Parliament looking for MPs bodies from which they can retrieve their cutlery.
The cooling remains of dozens of Members of Parliament are currently draped over furniture, lying spreadeagled in corridors and slumped in neglected corners of the building, and hundreds of knives need to be retrieved before dinner time."
The Evening Harold reports that Britain faces another divisive referendum, on whether to hang or shoot Tony Blair.
"Leaders of the ‘hang’ campaign insist it is the best option, and point out that a firing squad might all miss Mr Blair with the catastrophic result that he’s still alive. The ‘shoot’ campaign say this is ‘Project Fear’, and voters should ignore such blatant scaremongering."
Finally and perhaps most appropriately of all, with so many things happening in the real world which ought to have been in a satirical spoof post rather than reality, the News Thump site complains that
Satirists can't type fast enough to keep up with all the nonsense going on in the world.
Indeed, despite it being on a satirical website, I'm not 100% certain this one IS a spoof ...
One of my friends from the University of Bristol, John Winterson Richards, replied on Facebook with the comment "You do wrong to compare Gove to Walder Frey, he is so obviously Petyr Baelish."
He does have a point, since reading that comment I have been unable to expunge from my brain the visual image of Michael Gove holding a knife to David Cameron's throat and the imagined sound of him saying in his precise Scottish accent "Sorry Dave, but I did warn you not to trust me."
However, I stand by my view that Gove's actions have turned out less like Walder Frey's btetrayal at the Red Wedding or any of those by Baelish, but more like a Kamikazi pilot, who destroyed both Boris Johnson's campaign for the leadership and his own reputation in one suicidal attack.
There have of course been a wealth of amusing parodies this week. one of the best was the linkage of the Chilcot Report and the Brexit vote by the NewsThump website here. An extract reads:
"The Chilcot report has reminded Britain not to rush into anything based on dodgy intelligence and without a backup plan, but about two weeks too late.
The report, which looked into the causes and effects of the Iraq war, concluded that while nobody actually lied, they did ignore warnings of serious aftereffects if there wasn’t a proper plan in advance, which seems a little ironic right now for some reason.
Chilcot specifically highlighted that jumping with both feet without adequate preparation had turned out, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been an extremely flawed thing to do.
One volume also criticised the intelligence on which the decision to go to war was based, saying that dodgy dossiers are bad, but at least no-one put the spurious claims on the side of a bus."
Meanwhile the Daily Mash reports here that
"JEREMY Corbyn has backed Andrea Leadsom to be Tory leader on the grounds that unelectable radicals should stick together.
The Labour leader believes that a straight choice between two fringe politicians catapulted into frontline politics by extremists is exactly what Britain deserves"
Another News Thump story reports that the House of Commons cafeteria has run out of knives and says that
"Catering workers are currently scouring the Houses of Parliament looking for MPs bodies from which they can retrieve their cutlery.
The cooling remains of dozens of Members of Parliament are currently draped over furniture, lying spreadeagled in corridors and slumped in neglected corners of the building, and hundreds of knives need to be retrieved before dinner time."
The Evening Harold reports that Britain faces another divisive referendum, on whether to hang or shoot Tony Blair.
"Leaders of the ‘hang’ campaign insist it is the best option, and point out that a firing squad might all miss Mr Blair with the catastrophic result that he’s still alive. The ‘shoot’ campaign say this is ‘Project Fear’, and voters should ignore such blatant scaremongering."
Finally and perhaps most appropriately of all, with so many things happening in the real world which ought to have been in a satirical spoof post rather than reality, the News Thump site complains that
Satirists can't type fast enough to keep up with all the nonsense going on in the world.
Indeed, despite it being on a satirical website, I'm not 100% certain this one IS a spoof ...
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