In that late Victorian classic of English comic writing, Diary of a Nobody, the eponymous Nobody, Charles Pooter, comes out with what he considers “one of the best jokes I have ever made”. It is a pun on the names of his two ‘friends’ Cummings and Gowing, who always seem to be dropping round to his modest home The Laurels:
“Something funny as usual,” said Cummings.
“Yes,” I replied. “I think even you will say so this time. It’s concerning you both; for doesn’t it seem odd that Gowing’s always coming, and Cummings always going?”
Carrie, who had evidently quite forgotten about the bath, went into fits of laughter, and as for me, I fairly doubled up in my chair until it cracked beneath me.
Yes, Charles Pooter’s wife, like the current Prime Minister’s, was called Carrie, and clearly found him hilarious (some of the time anyway). Neither Cummings nor Gowing, however, saw the funny side of Pooter’s wordplay and both left in a huff.
How much of a huff our own latter day Cummings left in last week, clutching his cardboard box full (presumably) of purloined post-it notes and Brexit position-papers, we shall probably never know – unless he chooses to pen some kind of ‘explosive’ memoir about his time as the most powerful man in Britain.
Dom’s press conference in the Rose Garden in which he explained to a baffled nation in lockdown about how he had acted ‘on instinct’ to protect his family, and how he had decided to test his eyesight by driving to Barnard Castle and back, did much to provide some much-needed comedy at a very grim time – numbers of infections, and of covid deaths, were still high in May – and when he neither resigned nor (perish the thought) got the sack, it was nice to have one’s conviction that there was One Rule for Us, Another for Them so dramatically confirmed.
Whilst wiping away tears of jaundiced laughter, it was almost possible to wipe away some mingled tears of pity for Boris Johnson: imagine being so hopeless at one’s job that one HAS to have at one’s side a creature that resembles a cross between Gollum and the Mekon, Dan Dare’s huge-craniumed nemesis, a man with such contempt for the media and the free press that rather than answer a reporter’s questions preferred to make cryptic allusions to the cartoon superheroes PJ Masks.
Dom’s bulging brain was clearly indispensable as he whispered his ‘advice’ into the ear of his patron, only rowing back with great reluctance on the initial ‘Herd immunity’ strategy seized upon gratefully by Boris (because it would have meant he wouldn’t have had to do anything – always the most attractive option to this deeply lazy individual) when it was pointed out that the total covid death-toll could be in the hundreds of thousands.
With Cummings gone, who will tell Boris what to do now? I daresay there are plenty of bright young things who would be only too glad of the job – wonks and spads, dweebs and nerds, geeks and worms. Where are all the “weirdos and misfits” that Dom encouraged to apply to work in Downing Street, to sweep all away all those fusty civil servants and boring experts intent on trying to boringly administer the governance of their political masters?
At a time of national crisis, thousands of deaths and widespread economic meltdown, what could be more welcome than a new chief political boffin to bring a breath of fresh air to the Prime Minister’s playpen?
I wonder if Chris Grayling is available…?
Photo credit: Dustin Tramel