Goveller’s Travels

Tuesday 6th October

The gargantuan Tories of Brobdingnag pulled the throne room apart looking for sixteen thousand lost test results. I enquired if this was why Matt Hancock’s head was stuck in a Nutribullet, but was informed by Restraining Order Raab that

his NHS badge became tangled separately while looking for the wedding ring he takes off to lie. King Boris, as learned as any in the quoting of arbitrary Latin phrases, spoke “Habeas crapus, guys, even by our Titanic levels of ineptitude, this is a spaffshow for all

time! Carpe Lorry Park!”, to which they banged tables and incanted a hushed spell over and over: “Mellor-Redwood-Grayling-Shapps”. This had the magical effect of producing from a bin fire, the most esteemed bungler in all of Brobdingnag, a hundred-foot high @didoharding!

I conceived she might be a piece of cock-up-work contrived by some ingenious artist, but after lighting her Regal Kingsize with a positive test and trace taper, the crapparition spake thusly: “Assembled Tories, I have great news:

They have the internet on computers now. And I think the test results might be on one”. The gigantic gasping Tories, being both illiterate and computer illiterate, suggested that owing to my diminutive stature, I be tasked with entering the government Commodore 64 to locate the

missing results by hand and upon this imagination they inserted me into a disc drive and I entered a microchipped metropolis. Managed by Serco it was a reassuring shambles, overflowing with discarded manifesto pledges, indiscriminately harvested data about

voter’s breakfast choices, misallocated A-Level results, and more uncollated testing data than you could shake an untendered PPE contract at. It was staffed by speechless insects called mute ants, with the bodies of woodlice, the face of Gavin Williamson and

the Serco logo embossed on their armour. They lived in colonies call algorithms and after putting several questions to them and receiving no rational answers, I realised they were, like their face-sake, defective in all things. But seeing that they nibbled on useless data

to survive, and wishing to spend as little time inside a first generation micro-computer as sub-humanly possible, I fed them five thousand pages of Dom Cummings’s blog and demanded they write the following message on the screen:

“Attention massive Tories. Just blame it on an Excel Superspreadersheet, unleash Michael Gove on the TV studios, and move seamlessly to the next catastrophe”.

With many thanks to @MrJunkerBarlow for retrieving today's image from the nation's last remaining Commodore 64s.