COMPETITION
No. 586: Readers' revenge
SPECTATOR readers who struggled ineffectu- ally over last week's Christmas quiz might care to exact their revenge by setting a fiendish brain-teaser themselves. To help them on their way we offer the usual prizes for the most erudite and obscure selection of questions the answers to which might one of the following:
`I wandered lonely as a cloud'; Shake- speare, Lindsay Anderson, Henry Ford, Little Miss Muffet and Moby Dick; Hull; Irr; Mercurius Oxoniensis.
No. 583: The winners
Trevor Grove reports: Mr Denis Healey has recently been nominated for a European award to the 'most humorous statesman of the year'. Competitors were invited to draft the opening passage for a suitable speech of acceptance for such an award for any states-
man, with the usual prizes for the most humorous and statesmanlike. A poor entry, accountable maybe to the Gm's being under seasonable strain, yielded a bare handful of speeches that fulfilled both requirements, though Vera Telfer (Mr Wilson) and W. D. Gilmour (Polonius) came very close to it. But it did mean that one was not able to make too fine a distinction between what was, strictly speaking, humorous, and what was merely comic—so three guineas to Tom Brewer and one of the Greek Colonels:
'I am very honour to be chosen as most humorest statesman. You are aware that my country is democratic cradle; also that wit truly is known as the Attic salt, so states- manship and wits are two old established customs the Greeks had words about. Cer- tainly some democratic usages like free speeches and elections from time to time have to be held in camera or abeyance, but that not means that we honour not to theie institutions in the breach as well as in the observation . . . And furthermore as soon as ends this uncertainty and disaffection from the right, so quickly shall Greece to hold the free elections with all to vote; and that shall be the day you will say and I will reply you've got to be choking.'
Three guineas to Margaret Cash's Ian Smith:
'Thank you for this honour. (Please smoke. Please.) I asked that this ceremony be held in Salisbury because my passport will get me practically nowhere. (Cigarettes are being distributed. Please smoke.) But it does give you a chance to see the real Rhodesia. Don't bother to visit Government House, though. Owing to a little over-production it's full of tobacco. You will notice the damned stuff—I beg your pardon—everywhere. Not that sanctions are hurting. After all, a sanc- tion is only a sanction but a good ciaarette is a smoke. (Why Aren't YOU Smoking, Sir?) Our security is excellent, if not our bronchial tubes. You will see policemen with their dogs, smoking, on every corner. The policemen, that is, not the dogs—though we're working on it. Incidentally, the men patriotically take some of their pay in tobacco. The dogs are still paid in meat— and you know whose.'
And three guineas to Martin Fagg, whose Cesare Borgia seems to combine both humour and (though admittedly cynical) statesmanship in precisely the requisite proportions:
'Signori: When you accorded me the so great, if ironical, honour of electing me Most Humorous Statesman of the Year, I realised that my speech of acceptance must, to be acceptable, prove the very last word in wit, taste and refinement. That it cannot in fact fail to be the ultimate in all these qualities that you will ever hear is assured by the circumstance that the wine—the Lacrima Lucreziae of which you have all so liberally partaken, but which I was precluded from indulging in myself by a slight digestive dis- order—was poisoned. Of the statesmanship of this device there can be no doubt, for how more effectively could any politician contrive to censor all future possible criti- cism? And that its humour is already begin- ning to strike you is evident from the number of you I see starting to slip off your chairs and roll around helplessly on the floor in the last extremities of what is presumably_ merriment
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