Spectator competition winners: ‘A PM’s lot is not a happy one’

The latest challenge was to supply a poem that takes as its first line W.S. Gilbert’s ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one’ but replaces ‘policeman’ with another trade or profession. Although this line doesn’t come until line eight in Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘Policeman’s Song’, it was the opening I prescribed and so it was with a heavy heart that I had to disqualify some excellent entries that veered off piste (Judith McClure; Hilary Cooper; Charles Clive-Ponsonby-Fane; Carolyn Beckingham; Bill Greenwell). A competition-setter’s lot is not a happy one, then, but it does have its consolations and I was entertained — and informed — by your parade of teachers, lawyers, coroners, morticians and hitmen. Paul Evans, Paul Carpenter and Nigel Stuart shone but the bonus fiver belongs to David Silverman while the rest pocket £25.

David Silverman An Archbishop’s lot is not a happy one: When you think you’ve got the Devil on the run, You get War and Plague and Famine And the people worship Mammon And you find that flipping mitre weighs a ton.

Then your Canterbury duty’s to be done: To defend those Ten Commandments, one by one.