Free Gridlock by Ben Elton

be bland is one of the great misnomers of modern political life – party unity. It has become a cornerstone of British political thinking that the single and greatest ideal for any political party to aspire to is that of unity. We got the idea from Stalin. No conference can look to a higher goal than to maintain throughout the week an impression of complete harmony and bland acceptance of the party line. A conference that forgets itself so far as to allow discussion and differences of opinions is deemed to have been marred by rows, open revolt and damaging splits. The ultimate conference delegate would be a person who has no face and ten sets of hands to clap with.
POLITICIANS' GAGS
    Anyway, Digby was nervously running over the rest of the speech he intended to give the following afternoon. There was, as has been said, no need for him to be nervous because he would probably have had to bugger a dog live on stage to fail to get an ovation. Even in that event, party loyalty would probably have held.
    'I thought it a considered and statesmanlike speech,' the delegates would say to the news crews, as they left the hall . . . 'Perhaps slightly overlong, I would probably have cut the bit where he buggered the dog.'
    Perhaps Digby was nervous because he intended to speak on his very favourite subject. A subject much beloved of all transport ministers: the subject of freedom . . .
    'I hardly think,' . . . the Minister muttered to himself, practising the toadyish sneer for which he was justly loathed by all right-thinking people, and adored by conference delegates . . .
    'I hardly think, thnn thnn,' he carried on muttering to himself, adding the little rhythmic nasal wheeze with which he habitually prefixed what he considered to be a humorous observation.
    'I hardly think, thnn thnn, that the British public will be prepared to exchange the personal freedom that their motor cars invest them with, for a, thnn thnn thnn, donkey and trap.'
    It was not, perhaps, a classic gag, in fact it was something in the nature of a turkey. A gag unlikely to qualify for entrance into even the meanest of Christmas crackers – the sort that contain a three-centimetre-high blue plastic Indian chief that won't stand up.
    Digby may have been aware that he was opening his speech with a gag that would be unlikely to find favour, even with the studio audience of a television sitcom – a demographic group that has been known to laugh at an unoccupied sofa. If he knew, he certainly didn't care, because the jokes in Digby's speeches always went well. The fact that most of these said gags would, under normal circumstances, be unlikely to raise a laugh from a pill-popping hyena was irrelevant. For Digby was politician and, as such, was not subject to the rigorous critical standards of humour by which the rest of us are judged.
    With one or two rare exceptions, the average politician would not recognize a decent joke if they encountered it wearing a red nose, while sidling towards a banana skin and reciting the Monty Python parrot sketch. As a purveyor of turgid, swamplike non-humour the average politician is second only to game-show hosts and headmasters. And yet strangely, like headmasters, they are never brought to book.
    The media collude in the fiction that those who hold over us the power of life, death and the new dog licence legislation are possessed of great wit. They describe a speech which contains three snide little put-downs against the opposition as 'peppered with wry humour'. They use the term 'memorable' to sum up phrases which everyone has already forgotten. The reason for the perpetration of this flattering deceit is quite simple. It is in order to prevent revolution. If people were ever to realize just how mediocre the minds of most of those who govern us are, come the next by-election, we'd all vote for the joke candidate with a silly name, top hat and yellow tights who stands at the back and grins when the count is read out.
MISTAKEN