Spectator competition winners: Samuel Pepys on Liz Truss

In Competition No. 3272, you were invited to imagine a well-known diarist, real or fictitious, commenting on contemporary events.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the debut of adolescent diarist Adrian Mole, and several competitors imagined what he would have made of these turbulent times. Here’s Janine Beacham: ‘I have tested positive for Covid, worse luck! All that hand-washing, social distancing and mask-wearing was for nothing. This is what comes of living in a cul-de-sac.’

Hats off to Sylvia Fairley’s Bridget Jones for her ability to find a silver lining: ‘Perpetua at her most obnoxious. Excellent news, mortgage on her millionaire home cancelled, thanks to fiscal catastrophe. Bought more chocolate. Feel fat and repulsive, but reprieve in sight. Cost of living crisis means unavoidable abstemiousness. Potential weight loss, solving personal unattractiveness crisis…’ And to Nick MacKinnon, channelling Chips Cannon, whose diaries Craig Brown described as being like a drunken round of consequences.

Mark Bellis and Alan Millard also stood out, but the best of the bunch, printed below, earn their authors £30 apiece.

Up betimes, here in the afterlife, and as a former Member of Parliament my shade is entitled to attend Cabinet-meetings, so to their new quarters in George Downing’s Street, where a divers assemblage sat about a table, to which approached a female person, inane of visage, but with a well-turned ankle, whom I took for a serving-wench, but who, it transpired, is First Lord of the Treasury. The Exchequer being much depleted, she proposed grinding the faces of the poor, the which was universally acclaimed, though there was much discourse on how this might best be concealed from the commonality and the publick prints. Another female person advocated curtailing the dole for the undeserving paupers whilst affording aid to the deserving moneyed classes.