The numbers game: The happy news was announced in the nick of time today. Priti Patel, masquerading as usual as the Don’t Leave Your Home Secretary, was privileged to let The People know.
“Let me me completely and absolutely clear about this,” she dissembled. “The Prime Minister’s fiancée has popped out a sprog. This girl, boy, dog cat, whatever it is, is the Prime Minister’s eleventy twelfth child!”
She paused to simper and smirk at her adoring public.
“This is a momentous occasion!” she continued. “This is the first time in many hundredty thousandty years that a baby has come to Downing Street.”
She checked her notes. An imperious ruffle of papers, a haughty look. A measured intake of breath.
“The last child born to a sitting Prime Minister was Leo Blair,” she announced. “In the year twoty dozen and nineteenty several!”
The new arrival gives Johnson the perfect excuse to skive off Prime Minister’s Questions.
“This will only be the umpteen thousandty time he’s missed it,” Patel observed. “It’s a good job that there isn’t a crisis going on, which would have needed Boris’ firm, decisive leadership! The rest of us will hold the fort until his five years paternity leave are up.”
But Patel had one revelation left up her sleeve. She put on her least empathetic expression, and eyeballed her virtual audience dramatically.
“This birth means that there are now two little bastards in Number Ten!”
Shock. Outrage. Even the hard-bitten sycophants at the Daily Mail and the Telegraph drew breath sharply. Patel had finally used a number correctly. One by one the screens went blank, as headlines sprung up instantly on websites far and wide.
“That went well!” said Patel, stepping down. She turned to her fully PPE’d assistant. “Pat me on the back!” she demanded.
As Boris Johnson transitions from ‘Prime Minister’ to ‘Absent Father’, we wish Johnson junior well, and hope he does well for himself, despite his disadvantaged start.