Month: September 2019

On three years of A Limerick A Week

Yup, that’s three whole years without missing a single ALAW. Some have been good, some not so good and some, a few,  memorable, but as those who remember the TV show of yesteryear will remember, ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’!

There’s no highfalutin mystique
To the ‘artless-but-enticing’ technique
And occasionally sublime
Meter and rhyme
That brings you A Limerick A Week

Talking tripe… 

A couple of years ago the The Poke‘s website referenced the Eddie Mair interviews that skewered Boris Johnson (the UK’s Foreign Secretary at the time). As The Poke then commented, “Mair once called him ‘a nasty piece of work’. Now he’s an ill-informed one”. You can read here what I thought at the time.

And now it seems that David Cameron, the UK’s former Prime Minister, has also shared a few home truths about Johnson. Cameron has written both that “Boris Johnson is a liar who only backed the Leave campaign to help his career” and that he “didn’t believe in [Brexit]”.

So now we have one failed Prime Minister whose right-wing neoliberal policies fertilised the Brexit movement attacking another, a charlatan whose blind ambition has taken sophistry and dissembly about the European Union to a new peak. You couldn’t make it up, could you?

Johnson, whose previous utterance was that Brexit would be a ‘Titanic success’ (which, given the fate of the Titanic seems prescient in terms of the current unfolding disaster) has now styled himself as The Hulk.

I strongly suspect that Marvel Comics would argue that The Hulk would not have left by the back door, like Johnson did recently, to avoid protesters after meeting Scotland’s First Minister. Neither would The Hulk have cancelled a press conference this week when faced with a handful of middle-aged, middle-class expatriate protesters in Luxembourg. A coward and a sulk.

There once was a stereotype
Of a ‘chancer’ whose words were just hype
And whose selfish ambition
Has brought to fruition
The fact that his bullsh*t is tripe!

Need more time to find the rhyme… 

After leaving it late to produce last week’s ALAW, I had one prepared in good time this week for all but its ultimate line.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get a reasonable rhyme for it, so you get this instead…

A limerick writer once said
That writing them messed with his head
‘Cos time after time
He struggled for rhyme
And his verses went, sadly, unread

Lying down on the job… 

It’s been an unedifying week for political debate in the UK as Boris Johnson’s attempt to ape the populism of Donald Trump took centre stage. However, his supporting act of Jacob Rees-Mogg took it to a new low, with puerile insults aimed at those who disagreed with him, so much so that, seemingly, one member of his own political party considered him to be an able recruiting sergeant for the opposition. (True and, no doubt, that helped the opposition win the day).

Perhaps that was also due, in part, to his subsequent rather louche display of contempt for proceedings in the House of Common when he lay down across the green benches with, at times, a smug grin on his face whilst listening to a crucial debate on the issue of Brexit.

Quite rightly that brought fierce criticism from parliamentarians (of all sides) and the public alike. It also inspired this…

A politically right-wing upstart
Showed the world that he’s not all that smart,
‘Cos that posh demagogue, 
Alt-Jacob Rees-Mogg, 
Had to lie as his plan fell apart!