A Stately Farewell

IN my teens, when I was employed as a labourer by a large building company, I once had to work on a Sussex farm and construct a line of concrete blocks along the front of a pigsty. I enjoyed the company of those snuffling porkers for a few weeks, I must say, especially the little piglets, but one day the farmer’s old horse died and I was asked to help drag him into one of the large outbuildings.

It was sad to witness the sheer lifelessness of such a magnificent beast and even with eight of us attempting to pull him into the barn it was an enormously difficult and arduous task. Eventually, we managed to hook him onto a small crane and, in turn, he was lifted onto the back of a small truck and driven away. No doubt he was taken to some dreaded glue factory, similar to that mentioned in Orwell’s Animal Farm.

When you stop to think about it, however, I’m sure the same method has been used to deal with some of the bloated corpses of Westminster’s more overweight politicians, such as lovable Liberal paedophile Sir Cyril Smith. As a result, I would like to propose that we apply this modus operandi to the shuffling heap of pink blubber that is Eric Pickles (pictured), one-time Chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel. This, after all, is a man who was considered ‘too fat’ to receive surgery from the National Health Service.

We could even do it the old Roman way by ensuring that he is still fully conscious, poking a few sturdy meat hooks through his wobbly torso, dragging him through the streets of old London and then throwing him into the River Thames like discarded rubbish. Just to keep everything nice and traditional, like.