In which Citizen Cuddis goes all intellectual and starts using fancy words.
It’s the political equivalent of Doormat’s last theorem and I can exclusively reveal that I have cracked it. Big style. I have only went and discovered the answer to the perplexing question: How is it possible for Theresa May to have dropped more clangers in her career than Bernard Manning addressing an audience of feminist radicals? Learning to be that incompetent would take one person at least 145 years.
This conclusion proved to be the lightbulb moment that led me to formulate the Skippy Conjecture which is to be officially published, following peer review, in the People’s Friend, September, 2017 edition*.
Simply put, the Skippy Conjecture postulates that Theresa May isn’t one person.
The ‘Skippy’ Conjecture
Many people recall, with warmth and affection, the TV antics of Skippy the bush kangaroo. I was devastated to learn on my 27th birthday that Skippy wasn’t one kangaroo but many, each trained to carry out a highly specific task. One was trained to riffle shuffle a deck of cards for example, another to fill in a PPI claim. A third could dance Gangnam style, do jazz hands and play keepie-up with a clootie dumpling for hours. A fourth played left wing for Melbourne based Rooty Hill Rangers, season 1972-73.
This made for some pretty spectacular stunts. During an episode entitled ‘The Old Abandoned Mine’ Skippy covers for a female concert pianist who falls over a fly tipped chest freezer and plunges arse over tit down a ventilation shaft. Skippy saves the day by hopping to the Sydney Opera House to play Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor until the emergency services winch the unfortunate pianist out of the hole and rush her to the venue in time for her to wrestle the Steinway away from Skippy so she could play the last 36 bars.
How many kangaroos were there exactly? Twenty or thirty, though nobody really knew from day to day because the hoors kept running away. Let’s face it, if you were a bush kangaroo, which would you rather do? Leap around in the sunshine all day in unfettered abandon or learn how to juggle with hard boiled eggs?
Shaun the Sheep
The Skippy Conjecture suggests that, just as with Skippy, there are actually 20 or 30 Theresa Mays, each incompetent in a highly specific way. The cloning technology has been available since Shaun the Sheep (Cudd, don’t you mean Dolly the sheep? Ed).
The Skippy Conjecture explains everything. Theresa May, re-incarnated as a small cadre of dodgy doppelgängers has been doing the country down for over a year now. To provide you with something to muse over while her manifesto promises continue to unravel faster than a hame-knitted ganzie clooked on a random nail, here are 8 examples of Theresa May’s political incompetence nigh on perfect in form and content.
1. The snappy election
Mustering more cockiness than Gyles Brandreth in a new sweater, Treeza convinced herself at the last general election that a landslide was in the bag. All she had to do was avoid speaking to anyone, including her cabinet, and especially the media until the Red Arrows’ celebratory flypast over Downing Street. Unfortunately this proved to be a fantasy ranking alongside the notion that the moon is made of green cheese.
2. Being an elective mute
In refusing to take part in any media debates prior to the election, Mrs May saw herself as a Mata Hari shrouded in political mystique. In fact the public saw her as a troglodytic bampot and mentally assigned her 50 weirdo points. The brief encounter on the One Show, during which she and her hubby quite literally talked rubbish, was as much exposure as she, and the public could stomach.
3. The ‘empty’ factory ploy
Her main reason for becoming an elective mute — or so she told the media — was that she preferred to get out on the streets and talk to real people. Yeah, right.
The nadir of her incompetence surely must have been the stage-managed factory visit when she had the media locked up in the cellar and all the real people, i.e. the workforce, incarcerated in the attic. With the chances of a class action for false imprisonment mounting by the minute, she was interviewed in the canteen by Colonel Ruth Harrison who has a Masters in sycophancy and very nearly fawned herself unconscious.
4. Proposing the dementia tax
Probably the most damaging event since Pudding Lane went up in smoke in 1666. The sub-branch of the just-about-managing known as the can’t-see-how-we-can-carry-on-much-longer must have been so chuffed with this turkey.
But the full unthinking ignorance of the Dementia Tax proposal is best seen within the context of Treeza’s other promise — that she would give carers the legal right to take a year off work (unpaid, naturally) to care for their oldies in their time of need. This Dementia Tax — Year’s-leave-of-absence combo guarantees a free care at the expense of the carer and a post-mortem raid on the dead person’s estate to fund the cost of care.
For many carers this will foster an emotional trajectory from barely-making-it as a 24/7 carer through to not-making-it-at-all, followed by homelessness and depression (which you won’t be treated for because of the chronic underfunding of mental health services. Remember, you only get this with a Conservative government.
5. Repeal of the fox hunting bill
Another low. When 85% of the country don’t want a return to this barbarity, putting this bill in the manifesto took near-sightedness to Mr Magoo proportions.
6. Sloganeering
‘Brexit means Brexit’. ‘Strong and stable’. Rhetoric emptier than a dance hall hosting a Kamikaze pilots’ reunion ball clogged the airwaves for weeks. Cheesiest of all was the ‘coalition of chaos’, which sounded like an unholy alliance of orcs, hobgoblins and Liberal Democrats cobbled together in Mordor on a wet Thursday night.
7. Get the bastard!
The bastard in question being Jeremy Corbyn. The PM’s ad hominem attacks on Jeremy managed to cast him as the love child of Boadicea and Beelzebub. A man simultaneously simpatico with Maoists, communists, followers of Hezbollah and Hamas, the IRA and the editorial staff of The Watchtower.
8. Putting her personality front and centre
A faux pas of monumental proportions. Especially when you have all the endearing qualities of Mrs Danvers, the bat shit housekeeper from Hitchcock’s ‘Rebecca’ who had more loose screws than a flat pack chest of drawers.
Note: It took 358 years to solve Doormat’s last theorem. It took me an afternoon to come up with the Skippy Conjecture. I’ll not say no to a Pulitzer Prize if it comes my way.
*We think he made this bit up. Newsnet has no syndication arrangement with the People’s Friend, despite their many requests**
**We made that bit up. Ed
