Obituary

The sad death was announced today of the British Labour Party. Aged 108 there was increasing concern expressed recently about the seeming growing senility of this once proud organisation.

The Labour party was born in 1900, as a way for middle-class Romantics to expunge their guilt at being not of the working class by pretending that they really would like to live in a state at least nominally ruled by the workers. Of course, this was only a convenient fiction. What the people who invented the Labour party wanted was for themselves to rule on behalf of the working people, in order to bring to the workers what the sympathetic members of the middle-classes thought would be suitable for those workers.

‘Frankly,’ a spokesman said, ‘we’ve always had our doubts about its mental health. For a time it was claiming to be the saviour of the working classes, but that turned out not to be true. To be honest I don’t think it ever got over the way the working classes decided they’d be better off without socialism holding them down.’

The Labour party eventually realised that where it maintained or gained power it was through creating a vast welfare state structure inculcated with and steeped in its own mythology, which claimed to be mainly for the benefit of those at the lower ends of the social strata. Instead, however, in reality, its main concern was with solely maintaining and expanding itself in order to inveigle itself into every nook and cranny of society it could, legitimately or otherwise.

A political journalist who got to know the party well in its latter years added, ‘Once its romance with the working classes was over it tried many things on the rebound, women’s rights, nuclear disarmament, championing of minorities and so forth. But it was never really truly happy. That is until its handsome Prince Tony came along.’

‘Prince Tony promised the country that his New Shiny, Sparkly Labour Party would lead everyone to a land of milk and honey. But as usual with con-men it was all lies,’ said a bewildered party worker. ‘He lied to the country, and he lied to the party. He screwed us all and then he left us.’

Heartbroken, the Labour party, again on the rebound, took up with the first person as unlike Handsome Prince Tony as it could find. That too, though, turned out to be a disaster. ‘His jealousy is tearing the poor party apart,’ opined a close friend of the party when the whirlwind romance began. ‘He’s been madly in love with the party – or rather his romanticised ideal of the party - since he was a teenager. He’s just obsessed, and his obsession is going to destroy the party.’ How prescient those words seem now, when it is too late to save the party.

Although, it remains unclear just how the Labour party died, unconfirmed sources maintain that it seems to have stabbed itself in the back whilst the balance of what remained of its mind was disturbed. The person nominally left in charge of the party whilst it was in this state, Gordon Brown, claims he was out of the room when it happened and so it could not be his fault, or – indeed – have anything at all to do with him. In fact, Mr Brown has vowed to carry on doing whatever it is he thinks he is doing, claiming ‘it is what the Labour Party would have wanted.’

A former close companion of the Labour Party, one Tony Blair (once a fee had been agreed), said, whilst holding a raw onion up against his left eye, ‘It was truly the People’s party.’ *

 

*No, we don’t know what it means either.