They Told Me I Was Going to Lose the Fight

Widespread ridicule has greeted Gordon Brown’s identification of himself with a controversial figure from the annals of great literature.

In an interview in yesterday’s New Statesman magazine, the Prime Minister was told that women identified him with a certain brooding, intense character.

“Yes, I’ve often seen myself as that great man of action, Captain Ahab,” mused the PM. “Here is a man who was totally committed to hanging on to the bitter end, regardless of the wavering support of his unfaithful crew. Some say Ahab was blindly obsessed with following the great white whale - whose very existence seemed to taunt him from afar, mocking him mercilessly - and was callously blind to the catastrophic consequences of his flawed leadership. But in my analysis, Ahab was in fact an inspired, visionary commander with the guts to see things through to the bitter end, come hell or high water. You can’t blame him for slavishly trailing in the wake of Tony Dick - especially after the terrible mauling he had received from that monstrous freak of nature in the past.”

Other Parliamentarians have lined up to say which fictional character they would rather compare the Prime Minister with.

“I say, he’s rather like that Yossarian chap in Catch-22, isn’t he?” chirped David Cameron. “Trapped in a war not of his making, at the mercy of ruthless, greedy commercial forces and with nobody listening to a word he says. I haven’t read the book, I’m afraid – too many pages – but I saw the film once.”

Nick Clegg suggested that the character of Miss Havisham in ‘Great Expectations’ might be appropriate, reposing in a once-great house that was falling to rack and ruin about her, obsessively trying to manipulate those around her out of spite for a slight she received in the past. “I know it’s a bit obscure,” said Mr Clegg, “But that’s the kind of guy I am, I’m a Liberal Democrat.”

Meanwhile, the people of Britain – well, the ones who could read, at least – grudgingly continued to act out the role of Winston Smith, the trapped Orwellian hero of ‘1984’.