When the laughing had to stop

It has been Sue Townsend’s misfortune to live on into a time of events more fantastic and of public figures wackier than any of her own comic creations. Her method, like that of the authors of The Diary of a Nobody, was to take a credulous nerd, strip him of any sense of the ridiculous, then to loose him on the real world and his own diary. But she, being angrier, always ran more risks than the Grossmith brothers.

Unlike them she touched on politics and living people, yet managed deftly to move in and out of her two worlds, the one of reality, the other of fantasy, until now. Her undoing has been New Labour in the full flood of its absurdity. For what writer of comic fiction could ever hope to come up with this, taken out of its newspaper context and set down on page 139 briefly and baldly as in a mediaeval chronicle?

Monday December 9th.