my first act would be to declare the third Tuesday of every month Silly Hat Tuesday. A little indulgence in sequinned berets, pork-pie hats or top hats with rabbits poking out the top would contribute in some small way to a more tolerant, light-hearted society.
I’d make the
Daily Express print “Remember, We Donated £300k to Ukip” in size 36 font across their masthead, and Mail Online would automatically redirect to the superior credibility of
Grumpy Cat memes.
I’d move me and the missus and kids and obligatory corgis to a nice little house round the corner and, with a bit of a furniture reshuffle and a recruitment drive, turn my embarrassingly large former home into a primary and secondary school (needless to say, not a bloody private one), and a complex of council flats and independent shops.
All seats on public transport would carry those priority-seat stickers, at least until the fit and healthy general public gets the message that all seats can and should be offered to people who need them, not just the token one by the door.
Paper bags of food that the owner deems important enough to ride on its own seat on a busy train will be automatically whisked away by stewards and handed out to the homeless. Your lunch is important to us and will be handled shortly, or something like that. Similarly, handbags and manbags sitting smugly on seats without their own tickets will be swept up and auctioned off, with monies raised being invested back into public transport. I’d build hostel accommodation for MPs who have to work late, saving them the trouble of finding and furnishing second homes and stumbling into taxis at the end of those long nights of debating. I’d close the Strangers’ Bar in the House of Commons and replace it with a union bar at the hostel, with no cocktails or champagne and last orders at 11pm, and a programme of tai chi and yoga classes in the morning.
I’d enshrine the
Incredible Edible movement as law, making it compulsory for councils to fill their public spaces with useful, edible things, like herb bushes, blackberries, and apple and fig trees, instead of ugly spiky bushes and endless wilting pansies.
I’d raise the minimum wage to a living one, and introduce a maximum wage into the bargain, to be applied across the board from footballers to CEOs. Any surplus money sloshing around the company or industry from the introduction of a maximum wage would be plunged into schools, free childcare,
Sure Start centres and children’s charities.
Homophobia and discrimination on grounds of sexuality would be acts of treason, given the queen would be a raging queer, and justice would be restorative: community service volunteering with Stonewall while listening to endless disco music and wearing a plaid jumpsuit, with a lifetime subscription to Diva and Attitude thrown in for good measure.
I’d make the national anthem a bit more rousing,
Something Inside So Strong by Labi Siffre, or anything by
Port Isaac’s Fisherman’s Friends. And for my last act, I’d pop David Cameron and Nigel Farage into the Tower and throw away the key. Leave things a little better than you found them, my dad always told me. And invite Stephen Fry for tea.
So anorexic 