In Competition No. 2462 you were given the lines, ‘A man so various that he seemed to be/ Not one prime minister but twenty-three ...’ (a rejig of Dryden’s famous couplet) and asked to continue.
Dryden’s Zimri, the various man who ‘in the course of one revolving moon/ Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon’, is a caricature of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, who killed in a duel the Earl of Shrewsbury, while the countess, Buckingham’s lover, watched, disguised as a page. The incident is commemorated at Cliveden, where it happened, by flowers arranged in the shape of crossed swords, with the date 1667.
The standard this week was exceptionally high, and judging accordingly difficult. Geoffrey Tapper summed things up nicely in his final couplet: ‘A man so various surely merits more:/ Not one prime minister but twenty-four.’ The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Ray Kelley.
His undependability is chronic:
In his true colours he’s chameleonic,
Taking his hue from his environment,
Ready to blend in, all too quickly blent.
With grey men in grey suits, he’s grey; when seen
With conservationists, a verdant green;
Blue with blue-collar workers, white with white,
Veering alternately from left to right.
Mark how he coos disarmingly in talks
With doves, how falconine his beak with hawks;
This credo now embracing, and now spurning,
The lad, unlike the lady, is for turning,
And does it automatically, like a vane.
Backwoodsy in the sticks, in towns urbane,
This part-time Ghibelline and part-time Guelph
Can’t be himself: he hasn’t got a self.
Ray KelleySucceeding Blair and Brown and Cameron
He strove as one resolved to hammer on
With changes to the law designed to please
A nation brought by others to its knees.
Obesity, the subject once of quips,
Was praised with the provision of free chips.
To spare the young from education’s yoke
State schooling was abolished at a stroke.
Free spirits for the old and short of breath
Ensured that most would drink themselves to death.
And prisons, none of which was deemed secure,
Were turned into casinos for the poor,
While royal palaces and their estates
Were commandeered for weekends with his mates.
Who could have guessed that Prescott, once the clown,
Would one day to rise to such august renown?
Alan MillardThe one that sent the Forces out to war,
Professing he was peaceful to the core;
The one on fire to spread the flames of learning
Who set the schools alight, then watched them burning.
Home, he declared, was where he loved to be,
Spending vacations by some foreign sea,
And travelling so much some people say
He’d meet himself coming the other way.
He gave high offices to those he trusted,
And looked the other way when they were busted.
He kindly lengthened with great subsidies
The queues of aged at the A and Es,
And claiming he was Labour to the core, he
Talked socialist but always acted Tory.
Paul GriffinThe socialist, for instance, who abhorred
All honours, but made every friend a lord;
The gung-ho soldier, full of Western venom,
Who played the peacenik, dressed in ancient denim;
The southerner whose seat was in the North;
The commoner schooled near the Firth of Forth;
A man who swore to govern by committee,
But gave opponents neither time nor pity;
The bit-part player skulking in the band-room,
But sole conductor and the grand panjandrum;
Far-sighted, so it seemed, on every topic,
Who nonetheless was hopelessly myopic;
The chap who praised the flat cap and the pigeon —
And yet the God who had His own religion.
Bill GreenwellAssorted Smarties — that’s the number, friends,
To which this cardboard cylinder extends.
But ascertaining the correct proportion
Of each new colour — that requires some caution.
Those who were hoping for a shower of Red
Are apt to find that Yellow rules instead;
Somehow the stronger colour disappears,
Provoking smiles in some, in others tears.
Weak Yellow’s apt to crack; and what shows through?
The colour that no sweet admits — it’s Blue!
Shake hard, and lo! What dominates the scene?
All-party Smarty, vote-insistent Green.
What’s left? Turn the container upside-down:
The crumbling remnants of rejected Brown.
Annie BrooksHe showed that he could do the younger Pitt
(Though freshness is no substitute for wit),
But when the hand of History touched his shoulder,
He went all statesmanlike and acted older.
From Mrs Thatcher he had picked up withering,
And from her predecessor, Wilson, dithering.
He was as numerate as Douglas-Home,
But never got the hang of Heathian gloom.
Dizzy and Gladstone both fell in his reach,
Often, indeed, within a single speech.
Pacific though he was as Chamberlain,
He could do Churchill if he saw some gain.
Even to Palmerston he could ascend,
But limped away like Eden at the end.
One thing, though, always seemed beyond his range:
He couldn’t do himself. Isn’t that strange?
Noel PettyNo. 2465: Patchwork quilt
You are invited to supply a poem (maximum 16 lines) in which each line belongs to a different well-known poem. Please specify the source of each of the lines. Entries to ‘Competition No. 2465’ by 12 October.