Spectator competition winners: ‘Alex Salmond/has been grilled, gutted and gammoned…’: clerihews about contemporary politicians

Everyone loves a clerihew, its seems. The request for ones about contemporary politicians drew an enormous and excellent entry — from veterans and newbies alike — and even included a couple of limericks for good measure. For the avoidance of doubt, the clerihew is a comic four-line (AABB) poem characterised by metrical irregularity and awkward rhyme. Here’s an example from — who better? — the form’s inventor, E.C. Bentley:

Sir Humphry Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium.

Popular rhymes included ‘charmer’ and ‘Starmer’; ‘Boris’ and ‘Horace’; ‘Sturgeon’ and ‘burgeon’; ‘Corbyn’ and ‘absorbing’. Putin likes to ‘put the boot in’, apparently, and that David Davis is, by common consent, a ‘rara avis’. Dr Bob Turvey and Jerry Emery submitted strikingly similar clerihews — one about Donald Trump; the other Diane Abbott — whose third and fourth lines ran roughly as follows: ‘When he opens his mouth/ his brain goes south’.