Jaspistos

Show me your leader

In Competition No. 2402 you were invited to supply an imaginary example of the traditionally facetious, learned and topical last editorial article in a quality newspaper.

‘Aesop could have written this morality fable. And the millionaires who are not going to win the lottery tonight can comfort themselves with Schadenfreude, and the parable that life itself is a lottery.’ Last Saturday’s Times ‘fourth leader’ showed the genre still going strong. Why is it that I associate the style with a male — a retired teacher or an unfrocked clergyman, say? My mind’s eye cannot see an elderly schoolmistress or a disgraced nun penning this sort of stuff. Perhaps that’s why this week presents the rare case of no woman among the winners. Printed below, they get £25 each, Noel Petty netting the bonus fiver.

The BBC in its passion for audience participation (and licence retention) has been bothering us again. This time we were to anoint the Nation’s Favourite Philosopher. The word favourite has a particular piquancy here, conjuring up carpet slippers, a fireside chair and a well-thumbed copy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But the winner is revealed to be that sedentary sage of the British Museum, Karl Marx. A number of theories are at large to account for this improbable result. Was this a last-ditch act of defiance by the Fourth International? Or perhaps an understandable confusion with his namesake, he of the burnt-cork moustache and long cigar? Or was it engineered by a secret cabal within Broadcasting House, long known as a nest of subversives? Our own theory is that the British public, confused by the Olympic award and the possibility of a winning cricket team, was simply lacking a lost cause.
Noel Petty

Drink to Me Only with Thine Iambics
We paraphrase Jonson in order to draw attention to a hitherto overlooked aspect of the debate over the recent relaxation of licensing hours.

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