Don’t look now: following hot on the heels of news that MPs’ spines are kept in a Westminster vault, comes the discovery of the MPs themselves. They have been locked away in the cells in Barnard Castle, where a close eye could be kept on them.
Lockdown means lockdown, and in such strange times both the population and the message must be tightly controlled. To facilitate this, all Conservative MPs lacking the initiative to think independently were asked to volunteer for social distancing. Stay home, stay safe, was the message.
An Englishman’s home is Barnard Castle, writes the soothsayer Nostracummings. Thus persuaded, the MPs willingly surrendered their freedom, and their Twitter accounts, and went into isolation.
In order that government could still take place, the isolated MPs were permitted to join in with Zoom conferences from their cells. Unfortunately, Barnard Castle is a bit of a WiFi blackspot. The cell phones refused to connect, so the imprisoned heroes were obliged to revert to pigeon post. It is entirely wrong to read anything into the Cummings family’s fondness for pigeon pie.
Barnard Castle is fast becoming a place of pilgrimage. It is here, on the Road to Durham, that the scales fell from Saint Dominic’s eyes. He was able to see the way forward clearly at last, which is fortunate because some trickster had pinched the sign pointing the way to London at junction 61 of the A1(M).
This miraculous conversion, to the Broad Church of Caring Conservatism, meant that Saint Dominic, following His instincts as a Father to His flock, undertook the dangerous missionary journey to The North. There He ensured that the subdued members were sufficiently underfed.
The noble Saint allegedly made this journey on five subsequent occasions, but kept this quiet so as not to boast about His charitable nature.
It’s time to move on. The canonisation of Saint Dominic, the Apostle of Herd Immunity, is the real story here.