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Saturday 6 September 2008

Follow the leader

Lucy Vickery presents the latest Competition

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In Competition No. 2540 you were invited to take a historical event and submit a newspaper leader on it in the style of either the Guardian, the Daily Mail or the Sun.
There are some richly comic examples of the art of red-top headline writing in John Perry’s and Neil Roberts’s Hold Ye Front Page, a Sun-style romp through two millennia of history which features some spectacular punning. Highlights include: ‘Nazi Piece of Work’; ‘The Joy of Six’ (Henry VIII); ‘Napoleon Blown Apart’; and ‘You Canute be Serious’. And as far as share of entry was concerned it was the Sun wot won it, outnumbering the Mail and Guardian by two to one submissions. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. Brian Murdoch pockets the extra fiver.

The Sun Says enough is enough!

Year on year we’ve had to put up with waves of immigrants. If it’s not Angles, it’s Saxons, and if it’s not Saxons, it’s Jutes.

And what will these Woden-worshippers do to the British way of life? They even want to impose their own language! And the wishy-washy liberals in some of the new-fangled monasteries are actually writing things down in Anglo-Saxon for them. Brythonic was good enough for the Druids and it should be good enough for them.

The old Romans weren’t too bad. At least they were decent plumbers.

But Britain is a small island. How many sheep and how much cabbage will this lot gobble up? The wishy-washies tell us it’s all just a ‘Folk Migration’. Well, Hengist and Horsa, the Sun has a simple message for you, and it is this: you can Folk Off!
Brian Murdoch

We’ve nothing against foreigners but when they come calling with spears and arrows, the Sun draws the line. It’s our silver and tin they want and our cattle and our wives and children. We’ve this message for Rome —– we’re not buying what you’re selling.

Festinate off! Caesar might be a big geezer in Gaul but we Brits are made of tougher stuff. Our lads were looking over the white cliffs of Dover to issue a defiant message to the Roman pansies disembarking from their posh ships. It’s our Deal! Manus off! Mess with us and you’ll go back to Rome with your togas in tatters. The Sun confidently predicts they won’t stay long. If our women don’t beat them, our weather will. And does anyone out there really believe we’ll start liking Italian food? Nulla via, as the bullies from abroad would say.
Frank McDonald

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