COMPETITION

No. 608: Come live with me

One does not usually associate hippies with the formal, but competitors are nevertheless invited to fill a lacuna in the communica- tions field by submitting a hippy's poem to his lady, to- be written either in sonnet form or in some other regular (and rhymed) verse structure of sixteen lines or less. Entries, marked `Competition No. 608', by June 19.

No. 605: The winners

Charles Seaton reports: The Labour party recently launched (and almost immediately abandoned) an advertising campaign to de- nigrate the Tories in a series of 'Yesterday's Men' posters. Competitors were asked to retaliate with some of the less appealing facets of Today's Men. Since most of us never actually saw the potted stories of 'Yesterday's Men' there were understandable variations in the length of individual 'bio- graphies'. It will be no surprise that You- know-who was the most popular (i.e. un- popular) figure. Here is what Ian Kelso thinks of him:

WHO HAS

The warmth and charm of a Gladstone, The sincerity and disinterestedness of a Disraeli, The vision of a Bonar Law, The modesty of a MacDonald, The tact of a Churchill, The prescience of a Baldwin.

The moral courage of a Chamberlain, The strength of an Eden, And, above all, The undevious integrity of a Lloyd George?

Just one guess. In fact, we're not even going to bother to supply the answer . . .

and here is part of T. Griffiths's: . . . He leapfrogged to power over Nye Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell and George Brown, and will fight to the last drop of a colleague's blood (ask Barbara Castle). Watch him shift according to events. See him leap over a principle with the agility of a flea-one hand on his heart, the other on the electorate's pulse.

They win three guineas each.

Though Harold drew most entries, the dirt was well spread around, and each of the following singletons wins a guinea: Jim. who has proved that crime does pay and is going on paying.

D. H . M. Cook

'Rig Jim' Callaghan .. . Of course, he's also known as 'Honest Jim'-come to think of it, wasn't there a character in Othello who was always being called 'honest'?

Molly Fitton Roy, the Welsh Rarebit, who loves the workers as long as he doesn't have to meet too many of them.

D. H. M. Cook

Michael Stewart-the best Foreign Secretary since George Brown.

George van Schaick

Martin Fagg on the Earl of Longford showed how to twist the knife in the wound. Unkind as he is, I feel he deserves the final three guineas: Frank Longford's an awfully nice, kind, charming chap-he'll tell you so himself and you couldn't have a fairer, more unbiased judgment than that. In fact, when he wrote his autobiography a few years back, he spent page after page recounting all the lovely compliments paid him by all his lovely friends-not bad going for a bloke who's also published a book on Humility.