We hope you enjoyed our little bit of April 1 fun – although from the comments it seems that some took it seriously. Anyone want to have a guess as to which member of the team came up with this? I got it wrong when I read it for the first time. I then asked the rest of the team and got a variety of answers – but with two main suspects. The author has, since I first wrote this, revealed themselves on Facebook – so if you’ve seen that, don’t spoil it.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem that the Government’s Brexit strategy was a slow-burning April Fool after all.
Here are some delights of the day that I’ve found. Feel free to add any others that tickled your fancy in the comments.
First up, I always knew that Neil Fawcett was a rascal, but how dare he seek to deprive us of the gently soothing rhythm of the risograph producing our leaflets.
Secondly, Mark Pack is very good at challenging our core assumptions. He suggests here that we may be about to campaign FOR potholes.
Iceland Foods are now doing frozen flowers, apparently:
And Aldi Scotland has health and safety in mind.
Islay is famous for its whiskies, so why might its haggis not attain international acclaim also?
And some that didn’t quite make the grade.
Too obvious, from the Guardian.
But new roles for Osborne are a bit of a theme that The Stage did a bit better.
And the Telegraph’s, about melting ice caps meaning polar bears had to take refuge in Scotland was just silly. You are supposed to start out with something vaguely plausible and get more and more ridiculous through the piece. It’s not very well crafted at all.
And one that wasn’t an April Fool
Someone shared this on Facebook – or at least a tabloid equivalent of the same story but it wasn’t an April Fool. David Laws, in his book Coalition, told about how Owen Paterson had suggested that pensioners be employed to do the work done by Rumanian and Bulgarian fruit pickers.
Enjoy the rest of your day.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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13 Comments
If we can’t blame it on the aliens after all, reckon they could be persuaded to take over for a while to restore some order?
I thought the other article
If we can’t blame it on the aliens after all, reckon they could be persuaded to take over for a while to restore some order?
I thought the other article was pretty plausible until it talked of running out of gin. Then it had to be fake news!
“we may be about to campaign FOR potholes. ” I have been reading “Sybil or the Two Nations”. Publisher Wordsworth Editions describes Benjamin Disraeli as a “satirist”. As a former member of the Gladstone Club I could not possibly disagree. He does have a happy ending. I do not know who has the film rights. She is looking for her father, to warn him about his impending arrest, which she has heard from an MP who has not paid his election expenses because his rich brother has not honoured his promises. The cab driver applies a flail to the horse, the cab goes into a pothole and a wheel comes off. Those who find that William Shakespeare is full of clichés will find the same in Disraeli, for instance “One is enough” was said by PM Winston Churchill to chief whip Edward Heath. Set after the “Great” Reform Act 1832 and subsequent general election, one character arranges peerages by researching ancient documents showing people who came over with William the Conqueror or disproving title deeds derived from Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.
My favourite is the “Poll” that claims our support in London has doubled in the last year. Lol.
Paul I am sure many a Pole would say our support has doubled , among Poles in London !
Now that I know what was meant by Two Nations, I will try to find out what some MPs mean by One Nation. It is obviously not about those who state they are nationalists because it starts with communication and an understanding of what others think and why, which might be useful to the current government in the EU negotiations. If top people, such as the PM, read The Times and Fink they will find an analysis which can be summed up as ‘Find out what the other side really want’ obvious really, but not common sense on government backbenches.
http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Burke/brkSWv4c1.html
There are April Fool jokes that are hard to top.
One such was the BBC Panorama item in 1957 on the Spaghetti Harvest. The first time I saw any of this was a clip shown yesterday. My uncle, who did see it when first transmitted and who had travelled in Italy, said that, although he knew it was rubbish, the fact that it was introduced and the voice-over was done by Richard Dimbleby left him momentarily uncertain.
The Guardian’s pinnacle was sometimes around 1970, when they included a 4 page supplement on a mythical Indian Ocean island country called San Serife. (Typographers immediately saw through it.)
My favourite, which is a spoof but not an April Fool, came from The Times journalists who were on strike and produced a spoof newspaper “Not Yet The Times”. I still have a copy somewhere.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/Not-Times-Vol-August-1979-Spoof-newspaper/B003WKU8CK
Not an April Fool spoof, but quite serious: the Party is taking up Facebook advertising. We tried it in a recent by-election, but I have no idea how anyone can tell how effective it is. So Neil Fawcett might be spoofing us, but his suggestion is not so far from the truth.
@Lawrence Cox I think Neil would be the first to say that Facebook advertising is in addition to ground campaigning, not a substitute for it.
Someone has said that students should be trained to fill the labour gap created by our expatriates and repatriating immigrants (though of course only at week-ends and out of term- time).
Why not plug the drain with old age pensioners? A few might be trained already.
‘to fill the labour gap’
Of course, that’s the end game of restricting immigration to the extent which the Tories say they want to.
I was born into a UK which had a crippling labour and resource shortage (World War II) the solutions adopted then were:
direction of labour – where you worked was decided by the government
using workers over retirement age
shut down of ‘non-essential’ activities by the government – which gave them more workers to re-deploy
having every refugee stay here, locking up those who were politically unreliable, and adding most of them to the workforce
conscripting PoWs into the workforce
importing lots of soldiers from overseas – U.S. and Commonwealth and Free Europeans
Not quite the utopia that some people imagine. Interesting also is what happened differently after the end of the war.
“I do not know who has the film rights” A film was made in the 1920s according to Douglas Hurd and Edward Young “Disraeli or The Two Lives”. They debunk a lot of myths (Spin) which happened after Disraeli’s death. Douglas Hurd has previously written a biography of Robert Peel and concludes that Disraeli’s many attacks on his own leader were not about policy (the corn laws) but about personal ambition, helping to create vacancy without being in a position to fill it himself.
As PM he accepted all the amendments from the Radicals to the bill for electoral Reform, but none from Gladstone.
2014 edition ISBN 978 0 7738 2832 8.
Excellent value at 20 pence from a sale at Kent County Council library.
“A Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy.”
“England does not love coalitions”
Even the footnotes are interesting. Douglas Hurd was working for Ted Heath in the 1970s and tried to encourage him to be a more entertaining dinner host, sending him a note saying that he must speak to both the influential ladies who sat beside him at the table. The note came back a few moments later . The PM said “I have”.
page 238. Hurd was Political Secretary to the PM 1970-1974 before becoming an MP.