Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog:
Political sketchwriting, like most humorous writing, is one of those things that looks easy, especially to people who would never be able to do it in a trillion years.
At any one time, though, there are only a couple of sketchwriters who are any good at all, and some of us find we move papers in order to read them. I realise now I must have been a very strange
teenager to turn to Frank Johnson first every morning, and now I am an even stranger man in middle age reading Simon Hoggart every morning.
Send Up The Clowns is a selection of his sketches since 2007, beginning with the long, agonising changeover from Blair to Brown: hard now to read about without a large glass of red
wine to hand.
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