When the laughing had to stop

It has been Sue Townsend’s misfortune to live on into a time of events more fantastic and of public figures wackier than any of her own comic creations. Her method, like that of the authors of The Diary of a Nobody, was to take a credulous nerd, strip him of any sense of the ridiculous, then to loose him on the real world and his own diary. But she, being angrier, always ran more risks than the Grossmith brothers.

Unlike them she touched on politics and living people, yet managed deftly to move in and out of her two worlds, the one of reality, the other of fantasy, until now. Her undoing has been New Labour in the full flood of its absurdity. For what writer of comic fiction could ever hope to come up with this, taken out of its newspaper context and set down on page 139 briefly and baldly as in a mediaeval chronicle?

Monday December 9th. A scandal has broken out concerning Mrs Blair, the prime minister’s wife. She has allowed a convicted fraudster called Peter Foster to negotiate on her behalf to buy two riverside apartments in Bristol, costing in total over half a million pounds.Foster is wanted by the Australian police for selling false slimming pills. On September 1st he was told by immigration officials at Luton Airport that he would be deported within two days on the grounds that he was not ‘conducive to the public good’. Mr Foster is the lover of Cherie Blair’s guru and aromatherapist, Carole Caplin.