Live from Santa’s Grotto

The poet Philip Larkin called Christmas ‘a slathering Niagara of nonsense’ and I know just what he means. However since this is the season of giving I’ll slip on my Santa suit and hand out a few presents to the neither great or particularly good; here they are then live from Santa’s grotto.

For Nick Clegg:

Some friends, the balmy days of summer when we all agreed with Nick are a fast fading memory. Failing that at least the cabinet could stop playing the game where they start every meeting by singing out in unison, ‘Who is the least important person in the room? It must be YOU!’ before pointing at the poor booby.

For Vince Cable:

A mirror so that he too can watch his remarkable transformation from Britain’s most trusted politician into Professor Yaffle’s angry older brother.

For Ed Milliband:

A personality, at the moment he could play a game of ‘Guess Who’ with himself and still lose.

For Ed Balls, Harriet Harman and Alan Johnson:

A brain, a heart and some courage; along with anything else that might stop them squabbling, plotting and messing around when they should be helping Dorothy; I mean Ed sorry, scamper along the yellow brick road to making Labour electable again.

For Eric Pickles:

A photograph of his feet, he probably hasn’t seen them for ages.

For David Milliband:

A promise that he can have the top bunk in perpetuity to make up for not winning the race to be leader of the Labour Party last autumn.

For the Liberal Democrat Party:

A life support machine; after the local elections next May they’re going to need one.

For the BBC:

The courage to stop hiding anything remotely intelligent away on BBC4, if we wanted to watch witless reality rubbish we’d switch over to ITV.

For the winners of Strictly, X Factor etc:

Blessed obscurity; blessed for the rest of us that is, really we’re all bored to distraction with your endless droning on about how you’re ‘living the dream.’

For the Met Office:

Enough common sense not to keep predicting BBQ summers and mild winters, it only encourages the weather, which by the way we all know is a vast conspiracy to mess us all about, to do its worst.

For the English and Australian cricket teams:

For England the Ashes; for the Aussies a big slice of humble pie, well we can all dream can’t we?

For Julian Assange:

A Plan B for when his halo slips and those angry men from the CIA turn up on the doorstep of his secret hideaway.

For Jemima Khan, John Pilger, Bianca Jagger et al:

Please see above.

For Stephen Fry, Sally Bercow and all the other celebrity Twitter addicts:

A lifetimes subscription to SHHH, a new social networking site that allows the famous but dull NOT to bore the rest of us with whatever happens to be on their tiny minds.

And finally for everyone who has read this blog over the past year:

All my very best wishes for a merry Christmas and a happy New Year; if we’re all in it together we might as well have a laugh about it.