📚 Finished reading: Unhinged: A Parody by Ian Martin.
This is a short satirical book on the subject of Boris Johnson and the unfortunate years in which he was the Prime Minister of the UK.
It consists of two parts. The first is a re-telling, diary-style, of some of the major events of his time as PM. This includes the Covid-19 period of course. Half the page is taken up with a serious enough retelling of the events in question - the “discredited narrative”. The other half is the diary entry that fake Boris Johnson might have made - the “unhinged truth”.
An example dated May 2020:
Discredited Narrative: COVID-19 now accounts for more than a quarter of all deaths in England and Wales.
Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds are married. Johnson comes under pressure to sack his senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, who broke lockdown rules by driving to Durham to self-isolate and then driving to Barnard Castle to ‘test his eyesight’
A ‘fast lane’ for the procurement of government PPE contracts is set up, bypassing the usual tendering systems.
Unhinged Truth: Contrary to certain mischievous reports that I was ‘relaxed about care home deaths as, let’s face it, they’re basically waiting rooms for the inevitable anyway, I am extremely concerned about the deaths of elderly people, who, like the redoubtable Captain Tom, are capable of raising huge amounts of money. I’m now a married man, so any extra-curricular hanky-panky is definitely oft limits, you can take my word for that. Terrible fuss about Dom, let’s hope at least some of it is untrue. Great to see some old pals (Jimbo, Shaggers, Wonky, et al) rolling up their sleeves for Britain
The other half presents itself as a (fake) self-help book, pushing us improve our lives for the better by living the values of Boris Johnson - “be more Boris”.
The 4 big Boris ideas being pushed here are:
- If it ain’t fixed, break it.
- Think big, move on.
- Transgress to progress.
- Be yourself, repeat yourself.
Nothing mind-blowing to be seen, but it’s amusing enough in a wry smile kind of way. It feels like the sort of dip-in-dip-out book that people would put in their bathroom back in the now-unimaginable strange days of yesteryear when it was books rather than phones that people read whilst on the toilet.
