David Cameron's Squeaky-Clean Image 2005-2007

David Cameron's Squeaky Clean Image inhaled its last breath, exhaled very slowly, said "Wow!" and expired this weekend following his refusal to deny claims in a new biography that he smoked cannabis while he was a pupil at Eton 25 years ago.

"Dave"'s Squeaky Clean Image was born in 2005, the offspring of a coterie of Eton chums united by a desire to mark the end of the dark days of Michael Howard's leadership which had, strangely, drained the lifeblood out of the party. Their far-out plan to fill the vacuum in the centre ground of British politics left by Labour's spritely trot to the right under Tony Blair was initially dismissed as the kind of nonsense that could only have been dreamed up en route to the all-night garage for a couple of Twix bars and those "chocolate things with the nuts on them, you know the ones".

The Squeaky Clean Image was soon sullied during its leadership campaign when it refused to deny that it had taken class-A drugs at university, with fellow alumni insisting that it had had "a normal university experience" - saving money from its grant by buying almost-past-ther-sell-by-date goods in the supermarket in order to be able to afford a bag of grass for the weekend which would, inevitaby, turn out to be parsley.

Despite this setback the Squeaky Clean Image quickly established itself as a lively presence in British politics, cycling through the streets of West London in vibrant day-glo colours and campaigning for home-owners to erect green windmills on their roof so that we could "all look at the pretty colours turning in the wind, man".

But it was the Squeaky Clean Image's adoption of Old Labour policies - most recently the decision to fight the imposition of ID cards - that led critics to suspect that the smoke coming from Conservative Party HQ wasn't the result of Margaret Thatcher spinning rapidly in her grave, but was the natural by-product of the enormous bong the young Tory policy wonks fired up each morning for inspiration.

Despite Tory leaders' traditional association with powerful intoxicants - Winston Churchill lived on a champagne and whisky drip, Margaret Thatcher's "vitamin injections" kept her in a state of hawk-like readiness for 22 hours a day and Michael Howard never slept at night at all - the hot knives were out for DC's Squeaky Clean Image once news of his teenage reefer madness was splashed across the front pages of the Sunday newspapers. The Squeaky Clean Image called for the right to a past that is private, thus immediately promising a future that is far too public for comfort. Friends and colleagues rallied around but when Norman Tebbit told him to come clean - in that way only he, and certain black site interrogation operatives, can - David Cameron's Squeaky Clean Image sniffed its last.

David Cameron's Squeaky Clean Image will be cremated in an environmentally-friendly, and very High Anglican service, at St Withnail's Church of the Camberwell Carrot. There will be a public memorial service, group hug and rave at Glastonbury this summer. It is survived by David Cameron's Youthful Indiscretions and the increasingly irrational ramblings of Tony Blair.

But Not Forgotten: Week Ending 10 February 2007

• Ian Richardson 1934-2007 - RSC actor and star of House of Cards
• Anna Nicole Smith 1967-2007 - Playboy "Playmate" and controversial bride
• Frankie Laine 1913-2007 - Crooner
• Alan MacDiarmid 1927-2007 - Nobel prize-winning chemist
• Billy Henderson 1939-2007 - Detroit Spinner

Free Will c.450BC-2007AD

As A Dodo has no choice but to report the passing of Free Will, which - after many years of illness - has been ordered into eternity by a team of neuroscientists from Germany, London and Oxford.

Free Will was born in the philosophical schools of ancient Greece in about 450BC when, following Socrates's conclusion that "the good - being identical with the true - imposes itself irresistibly on the will as on the intellect when distinctly apprehended and that every man necessarily wills his greatest good, and his actions are merely means to this end", one of his students punched him in the face for being a dreadful old bore.

Free Will was an unpopular child – frequently getting into fights with philosophers who felt their decision to gang up on Free Will and attempt to beat it to a pulp were all preordained by bearded men on Mount Olympus given to chucking thunderbolts about and changing into swans and bulls to ravish young maidens. Later on it would grow up be an unpopular adult, frequently getting into fights with Logical, Biological and Theological determinists who thought their decision to gang up on Free Will was preordained by past events, the contents of their genes or a bearded man in the sky with a strange resemblance to Dr Rowan Williams.

After two millennia of hard knocks, and a succession of increasingly repressive British Home Secretaries, Free Will first began to complain of feeling unwell when millions of Britons felt compelled to vote New Labour into power in 1997, while in 2000 millions of Americans thought they were voting the Democrats into power but were told otherwise by Jeb Bush and Fox News. Free Will continued about its business but its health was repeatedly called into question after a rapid series of heavy blows including speed cameras, CCTV, biometric passports, DNA testing, ASBOs, 28-day detention without trial and the continuing success of the musicals of Andrew Lloyd-Webber.

The final blow for Free Will came when it was revealed that neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, with colleagues from University College London and Oxford University, had developed a new technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and predict their intentions before they act. On making the discovery they immediately informed Free Will, which promptly did as it was told and died.

Free Will has asked to be cremated in a secular service but will instead be held for 28 days before being buried at St John the Reid’s Church of Thoughtcrime. It is survived by the National Lottery.

The People's Game 1863-2007

The People's Game, twin brother of The Beautiful Game which died only last year suffering from congested bungs, passed away yesterday as Liverpool FC, one of the last English football clubs actually capable of winning a soccer trophy beyond the award for "Best Second XI Away Strip", was converted into a "franchise" under overseas ownership.

Immensely popular throughout England almost from the moment of its creation, The People's Game was a simple entertainment, capable of uniting men up and down the country as they stood, cap on head and scarf round neck, in the terraces of a Sunday afternoon and shouted spirited encouragement to the members of their local team - most of whom were born and brought up within hailing distance of their home ground - and even more spirited imprecations against the rapscallions on the opposing side and the frailties of the person of questionable parentage in referee's uniform.

It was in the early 1990s that The People's Game began, like so many an England game, to drift slowly towards inevitable defeat in the penalty shoot-out of life. It was at that time that The Game first began its involvement with the notorious Americo-Australian lothario, Rupert Murdoch. Like Wedekind's Lulu, The Beautiful Game soon found itself living a life of wild excess, throwing its money away on a parade of vacuous pretty boys and brutish thugs ... many of whom would go on to play for England. Its appetites beyond satiation, even by Mr Murdoch's vast piles of cash, The People's Game was forced to go in search of more and more and richer and richer suitors, be they ageing American multimillionaires or billionaire Russian oligarchs. By the early noughties The People's Game was even willing to sell off the most successful football club England had ever seen to anyone with a bit of cash to spare for a new stadium.

Yet even this was not the height of its infamy, for at the same time The People's Game was willing to offer almost anything (except, of course, a team capable of winning the World Cup) as it tried to extract the last penny from the pockets of its fans. With its ticket prices soaring and sports rights being sold for astronomical fees, The People's Game eventually put itself beyond the reach of those who loved it, thrusting itself instead into the hands of corporate sponsors whose perfect view of a match was out of the corner of an eye while doing a deal in the VIP restaurant and far-flung "fans" who were in less danger of visiting their team's stadium than Kettering FC are of winning the European cup.

The People's Game will be buried at the Church of St Lineker the Crisp-Seller. The Reverend Alan Hansen will read Psalm 4752 "The defence were woeful and no-one tracked back". Well-wishers are asked to send as much cash as possible.

160,000 Bootiful Turkeys 2006-2007

Newspaper editors and TV journalists were today churning out miles of newsprint and kilometres of videotape in memory of 160,000 Bootiful Bernard Matthews turkeys, which passed away this weekend following an outbreak of the H5-N1 bird flu virus.

The Bootiful Turkeys were born in 2006 of simple Suffolk stock. Coming from a humble background, they spent much of their infancy in dark and extremely cramped conditions, whose basic nature was offset only slightly by their trendy egg shape and the availability of hot-and-cold-running yolk 24 hours a day. Luckily a long line of agricultural ancestors, not to mention large doses of growth-promoting antibiotics in their mothers' feed, had fitted the Bootiful Turkeys for work. Soon they were breaking out of their old home and taking up work with local farmer Bernard Matthews who offered them all the pellets an automatic feeder can provide and the chance to mingle with thousands of their comrades in conditions only slightly darker and more cramped than those they had just left.

Over the following months the Bootiful Turkeys set to work eating, standing around, pecking each other's feathers off and occasionally collapsing under their own rapidly-increasing weight. All went well until early last week when several of the male turkeys claimed they had bird flu and all the hen turkeys insisted that the stags only had colds and were making a fuss about nothing. Within a day 71 of the allegedly hypochondriac birds had vindicated themselves by dropping dead, while many more were showing signs of illness. Thankfully the creatures had many visitors during these troubled times, most of them members of the farm's staff who tried to cheer their charges up by wandering blithely from turkey-shed to tukey-shed acting as if nothing was seriously wrong. Despite such efforts, within only two days a further thousand Bootiful Turkeys had wrapped themselves in the celestial Bacofoil. It was at this stage that officials from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) were brought in to calm the situation among the remaining Bootiful Turkeys by gassing every last one of them.

The 160,000 Bootiful Turkeys' funeral was held on Sunday. The funeral cortege, consisting of 20 "sealed, leak-proof lorries fully covered in tarpaulin", took the deceased to the quaint little church of St Bernard's Hotter-N-Heck Incinerama, where they were heated to gas mark five thousand while the choir sang hymn number 386 "All Things Bright and Bootiful". The ceremony ended with a 112-gun salute as Suffolk locals tried to plug anything they feared might pose a bird-flu risk - including 72 blue tits, 23 starlings, 44 crows, 78 ducks, a couple of swans, a global-warming-befuddled ladybird and one inbred agricultural labourer with webbed feet.

The 160,000 Bootiful Turkeys are survived by the H5-N1 virus, Turkey Twizzlers and Bernard Matthews' £300 million fortune.

But Not Forgotten: Week Ending 3 February 2007

• Adelaide Tambo 1929-2007 - Leading anti-apartheid campaigner
  
• Anna Cropper 1938-2007 - TV actor
• Sidney Sheldon 1917-2007 - Oscar-winning screenwriter and popular novelist
• Paul Channon (Lord Kelvedon) 1935-2007 - Guinnes heir and former Secretary of State for Transport
• David Wickins 1921-2007 - second-hand car dealer and mentor to Mark Thatcher

Loans for Peerages 2005-2007

Loans for Peerages – the modern, democratic method by which our unelected rulers are appointed to the House of Lords – was found dead this week shortly after Tony Blair was questioned for a second time by the Metropolitan Police. Sources indicate that foul play is suspected.

Loans for Peerages was born just before the general election in 2005, the child of Labour’s desperate need to prop up its ailing finances and an antiquated system of appointing anyone with a spare million to the unelected upper chamber of the Palace of Westminster.

It proved to be a popular baby: within days of its birth it was attracting unprecedented media attention as it crawled, literally, from boardroom to boardroom soliciting “loans” at a rate of interest not seen in your High Street building society since your manager got high on genuine Albanian champagne-style fizz at the last Christmas party and opened the vaults saying, “Take whatever you want.” Within only two years, however, it was causing controversy, with Scotland Yard detectives forced to step in after complaints that it had committed offences under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act of 1925 when some lenders alleged that they hadn’t received their ermine-collared free gifts.

The death of Loans for Peerages was first, mistakenly, reported last year, following claims that it had been fatally wounded following the arrest of Labour’s chief fundraiser, Lord Levy, and the questioning under caution ofMPs and officials from Labour and other parties. The reports turned out to be false when it was revealed early in 2007 that, far from being dead, Loans for Peerages had merely been swept under the nearest available piece of carpet.

Loans for Peerages' resurrection was to prove brief. Its death knell was sounded by the arrest of Mr Blair's "gatekeeper" Ruth Turner, and the re-arrest of Lord Levy on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, not forgetting a further police interview with Tony Blair himself, who is believed to have explained that he saw nothing of Loans for Peerages at all as he was tying his shoelaces at the time.

Loans for Peerages was buried by the highest bidder at the Church of Deal or No Deal. Following a brief sermon by the Reverend David Lloyd George, the collection trough was passed, a deeply emotional eulogy was read by several very rich men who mourned their chances of ever becoming peers by the back door, and a choir of businessmen sang hymn number 427 "What a Friend We Have in Tony".

Loans for Peerages is survived by a discredited government, a quasi-mediaeval system of patronage and the imminent findings of Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates’s inquiry.