Competition No 3783
Set by John O'Byrne, 26 May
Tony Blair was voted the Worst Briton in a Channel 4 poll. We asked for an excerpt from an interview with a No 10 adviser.
Report by Ms de Meaner
Ooh, but you lurved this one. Hon menshes to D A Prince, Keith Norman, Will Bellenger, Tanya Jones, Iain Colley ("46 per cent of those choosing Tony Blair voted ironically") and Nicholas Hodgson. The winners get £20. The overall winner is Sean Barrett, who also gets the vouchers.
"Good evening. Tonight the PM's special adviser is in the studio. Sir Richard, welcome. I wonder if I could begin by asking you about the result of Channel 4's Worst Briton poll? It seems that Tony Blair is the biggest baddy of them all."
"Oh, you mean the overwhelming hip-hop vote."
"Excuse me?"
"It's the young, particularly young black people who respect the Prime Minister's stand on race and civil rights. The Tories' disregard for them made them cynical about politics, but now they're coming back. They see that, in their parlance, Tony Blair is cool, he's hip, he's the epitome of funk. Or, as they would express it in their non-standard street English, he's the baddest.
You follow what I'm getting at?"
"You're saying the PM is a cult hero for disaffected black kids?"
"And I think we should stand up and be proud of that. Bigots may sneer; we hold fast to our principles. In fact, to adapt Maya Angelou, Tony Blair is our first black prime minister. Let's be candid: only a racist could interpret the Channel 4 poll in a negative way."
Basil Ransome-Davies
"So, is this the end for Tony Blair?"
"This is the end of the downturn that we have been saying all along accompanies the end of the second honeymoon period and the beginning of the upwards trend that we have been saying all along would happen. It is heartening to have confirmation of this."
"Many people would say this is bad news for the PM."
"This shows the upturn to the end of indifferentism. Young people are passionately interested in politics, it's the end of the downturn of the low turnouts and that means the upturn for . . ."
(Interrupts) "But surely . . ."
"Look. Don't you know Shakespeare's King Lear? 'This is not the worst when we can say this is the worst'? I think that's good enough for anyone. And where is IDS in all this? Wiped off the map. And I don't see Charles Kennedy anywhere here. This result shows that the electorate, and young people in particular, have the PM firmly in the frame and don't forget many of them use the word 'worst' to mean . . ."
"And there, I think, we'd better leave it."
Josh Ekroy
"Tony Blair has been voted Worst Briton Ever - what do you have to say about yet more bad news for the government?"
"I wouldn't actually say this was bad news. This is actually the result we were hoping for. The poll confirms our worst suspicions about the Channel 4 regime. We have vague intelligence suggesting the poll was fixed. There are several thousand votes, all for Britons other than Tony Blair, which are unaccounted for."
"So what does the government intend to do about it?"
"Channel 4 has been given until noon tomorrow to account for the missing votes. Regrettably, if it does not comply, we will have to invade the station and install Peter Mandelson as a puppet controller."
"Isn't that a little extreme?"
"It's not just a question of polling fraud - we have non-specific intelligence linking Channel 4 to al-Qaeda and C4 clearly has no regard for human rights - V Graham Norton, Big Brother . . . I also have it on good authority that it could launch a biochemical warhead at any time. From a moral standpoint, I fail to see how we could justify not attacking."
Sean Barrett
"So. Another knockback for the Blair image and maybe for his political future. How will new Labour ride this one out?"
"Well, Jeremy, first of all I ought to point out that the Prime Minister has an enormously high profile. He's literally a household name. That's reflected in the brand recognition, hence in the voting. I mean, how many people remember Fred West these days? Evil, yes, but not hot news. You can't say that about Tony Blair."
"I really wasn't suggesting he'd tortured, raped and murdered anyone."
"Thank you for that retraction. Of course, the graph of public support is never even, but . . ."
"Oh, come on! We're looking at something more than a shallow wave of midterm unpopularity here."
"You can say that. But how many of those voting were high on drugs? In no fit state to make a sensible judgement? The media aren't so keen to ask questions like that, are they? It's not the story they want. But if you suppress inconvenient facts, you hide the true picture."
"Are you seriously telling me the Prime Minister got a thumbs-up?"
"There! You've put your finger on it, Jeremy."
G M Davis
No 3786 Set by Brendan O'Byrne
We'd like you to send us a very, very bad sex scene from a novel.
Max 50 words by 27 June (to appear in issue dated 7 July). E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk
