The Right Honourable Jacqui Smith MP Drowns


It’s not every day I read about someone in the news and the next thing they up and die in the most bizarre fashion!


The Right Honourable Jacqui Smith MP, Home Secretary (what the British in typical obscurantist fashion call their minister for justice) died tragically this evening in a pet shop in London.
The politician was born 3 November 1962 in Malvern, Worcestershire, and worked as an economics teacher until she became the Member for Parliament for some place called Redditch in 1997. A New Labour drone, she wept in sackcloth and ashes at Tony Blair’s last appearance in the House of Commons (while the rest of the world, with the possible exception of the people who were going to have to put up with him in the Middle East, felt like they’d just dropped two tabs of E).
Oh, the ups and downs of Jacqui’s life! A happier occasion followed, when on 28 June 2007 she became Home Secretary. Since taking office she has become known for, eh, a completely meaningless proposal to hold “terrorist suspects” or those “linked to terrorism” for forty-two days without charge, which sounds like getting tough with terrorism or some police state nonsense like that, but in fact it would have no effect on the likelihood of finding something with which to charge a “suspect” at all. It is unlikely to become law.
Another “idea” she has supported is the scheme for ID cards in the UK, a way of spending billions of British taxpayers’ money so that the government can have a database containing details on all its property. Did I say property? I meant citizens. Or should that be subjects of the Crown?
On 6 March 2008, the very last day of her life, she was shitting like a prize bull with the loosest bowels in the universe about this very subject, lecturing the long-suffering public about the ID card, straight-facedly claiming that “If anything, I think it will actually make it easier to retain your privacy.” We all know that if that was what she truly desired for the great unwashed, she would instead have announced the deletion of as many existing government databases as possible, instead of adding another one for “only” one billion pounds cheaper than the previous estimate of 24,857,892 trillion.
The ID card controversy proved to be her undoing a few hours later, when she drowned in a fishtank.
She went to a pet shop in Hackney and stuck her head into the tank to get a closer look at two goldfish. She had been taken with the idea that the fingerprint information of every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom, along with their national insurance numbers, could be stored on two computers that would be constructed in the form of two electronic goldfish, that would then be kept in a fishtank in the foyer of the Home Office in London. Thus disguised, no-one would ever steal them. She was hoping to learn the lessons of the past, in a kind of Mandelson-esque manner. The two computer disks stolen last November from a sandwich in the canteen of Her Custom’s Majesty & Excise, containing the personal details of 25 million people, have now been sold on ebay and those 25 million Britons now belong, body and soul, to a secretive terrorist network known as al-Blather.
Instead of doing the obvious, i.e. not creating the database to begin with, Jacqui felt it was more “proactive” (and indeed, patriotic) to look into the possibilities of fish-tech. Wouldn’t it be foolproof? Unfortunately, as she had her head under the water gurning at the real fish, whose “design” she hoped to copy, a snake escaped from its tank nearby, and slithered between her feet. On this sneaky snake she slipped, and in this way she became up-ended. Unfortunately for her, this was during afternoon feeding time, when all the animals squawk and hiss for their food, so staff did not hear the politician’s legs ineffectively swishing in the air like blunt scissors.
The British government reaction has been to pretend that the Right Honourable Jacqui Smith R.I.P. is still alive. “Jacqui Smith is Home Secretary; the head of the Home Office” screams the Home Office website, in spirited defiance of reality. Who says the stiff upper lip is dead?
Reg Smiles, owner of the pet shop, made this astute observation to our reporter: “Cor blimey, guv’nor, Jacqui’s a dead posh way to spell Jackie, innit?” as he scurried about his shop floor trying to get hold of the snake that got loose, “gor’bless ’em”.
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Note to all Blather.net writers from the editor: you must refer to the late Jacqui Smith as dead from now on, no matter what she does in the news.

barry
Barry Kavanagh writes fiction, and has made music, formerly with Dacianos.

Contact him here.

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