Spectator competition winners: Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of a Tory MP

In Competition No. 3209, you were invited to provide Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of a Tory MP.

Inspiration for this challenge came from a parody of Jaques’s monologue from As You Like It by the writer and politician — and Shakespearean scholar — Horace Twiss (1787–1849). The closing lines of his ‘The Patriot’s Progress’

…Scene the last, That ends this comfortable history, Is a fat pension and a pompous peerage, With cash, with coronet — with all but conscience.

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Julie Burchill

The march of the trans mob is over

found a strong echo in this week’s entry, whose tone was mostly, if not unanimously, scathing. The winners earn £25 each and an honourable mention goes to Fiona Clark.

All infants age and err, and err did she When, as a chaplain’s daughter, chaste and pure, In golden wheat fields she succumbed to sin And, running through them, roused farmer’s wrath. This darling bud of May in schoolchild days Soon blossomed as a flower that bloomed aloft And did to Oxford’s dreaming spires ascend Where, as a lover, lured by learning’s lore, Then later, as a soldier of the Right And worthy justice for the fairer sex, She winged her way from work to Parliament Where, rising through the ranks of lesser men, She won the Premier’s crown and right to rule. But now this ageing, erstwhile dancing queen Did stumble on the stage towards decline And, as the curtain fell, so felled was she! Alan Millard

All the world’s a hi-vis photo op And all the MPs photo opportunists. They have their Brexits and their mistresses And one man in his time pays many tarts. Enter the baby, silver-spooned, fork-tongued, His other face towards his mother’s breast; And then the schoolboy: Floreat Etona! He’s eaten by ambition, flourishing On myths and Metamorphoses and plots. Then Magdalen, Balliol, King’s, Gonville and Caius? A double first in not answering questions, In Politics, Philandering, Evasion, And then the lover, then the husband, then the lover, All perfect prep for Parliament and power: Two-faced, two wives, sans truth, sans trust, sans sense, Sans moral compass — yea! — sans everything.