Spectator competition winners: Liz Truss follows the Yellow Brick Road

In Competition No. 3333 you were invited to submit a short story that features Donald Trump or another politician of your choice in a well-known fictional landscape.

Joan Didion once observed that Ronald Reagan was the American politician to most fully embrace his own fictionality, making up stories in which he played the starring role. Didion put this down to ‘his tendency to see the presidency as a script waiting to be solved’. Needless to say, Reagan didn’t play a starring role in the entry; a medium-sized but impressive postbag was dominated by Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.

Competitors who shone included Sue Pickard, Nicholas Hodgson and Nigel Bennetton. The prize winners, printed below, earn £30.

As Christian plodded through the Slough of Despond he came upon a great multitude, all wearing red caps bearing the legend MAGA, so that he took them to be mages or wise men. ‘Witch-hunt’ they chanted, and ‘stop the steal’, which seemed admirable, especially the invocation of the seventh commandment. In discourse with two of them, whose names were Redneck and Thick-as-mince, he enquired why they chanted not against adultery or covetousness? They told him that these were not at all discouraged by their leader, who stood upon a platform, his face shining orange as the flames of hell, talking very loudly about himself. Christian learned that his name was Trump, and so he was greatly afraid that we were approaching the Last Trump and that he was insufficiently prepared. When they declared that Trump would soon be victorious, Christian turned sadly, and departed to seek again the Giant Despair.

Brian Murdoch

The Donald lay in the shadow, almost in darkness. She wondered what he was thinking. Was he in some kind of dream? That was it, he was in a dream. He and his loins, they were sleeping, they were in a kind of nothingness.