Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: political manifestos inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll

‘Xi Jinping’s Manifesto incorporates and infinitely improves upon sympathetic elements in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings’. Credit: eye35.pix / Alamy Stock Photo 
issue 12 March 2022

In Competition No. 3239, you were invited to submit political manifestos inspired by literary heroes.

Sajid Javid loves Ayn Rand: twice a year, he reads the courtroom scene in The Fountainhead. Justin Trudeau is a Stephen King super-fan, Boris Johnson reckons Flashman is ‘the greatest’ and Macron is mad for Molière (he can recite chunks of the French dramatist’s plays from memory).

Honourable mentions, in what was a terrific entry, go to Frank McDonald, Bill Greenwell, Max Ross, Richard Spencer, Frank Upton and Nick MacKinnon (‘John McDonnell reclaiming The Tiger Who Came to Tea for the hard left’).

The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £30 each.

To begin at the beginning: you can hear the houses sleeping blind as moles – in time there will be no homeless; all will be soft-bedded in their muffled comfort: tradesmen and pensioners, school-teacher, postman, and the tidy wives.

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