In Competition No. 2967 you were invited to submit an article written by the author of your choice under the headline ‘If I were Prime Minister’.
In a fascinating 1959 essay written for The Spectator under that headline, Ian Fleming proposed, among much else, a combination of ‘benevolent Stakhanovism’ in the workplace and the conversion of the Isle of Wight into ‘one vast pleasuredome … where the frustrated citizen of every class could give full rein to those basic instincts for sex and gambling which have been crushed through the ages’.
There were some equally arresting proposals in the entry courtesy of Bill Greenwell’s Nevil Shute, Hugh King, C.J. Gleed and Barry Baldwin’s Samuel Johnson, and G.M. Southgate’s Virginia Woolf, all of whom were extremely unlucky losers.
The winners earn £30 each. Top dog this week is W.J. Webster, who takes £35.
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