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Open a bottle at 12pm sharp: Boris Johnson's handover notes revealed

DESPITE being a chaotic nightmare while in office, Boris Johnson has taken steps to aid his successor. Here are his handover notes in full:

Open a bottle at 12pm sharp

This job is too stressful to get through sober. Crack open one of the many wine bottles I stockpiled during Christmas 2020 at midday to take the edge off all those pesky scandals and journalists shouting at you from right outside your home. The trick is to pace yourself so that you’re slightly pissed for your entire premiership.

Act stupid on purpose

Are you completely unqualified for this job because you have the intelligence of a flannel? Convince people that you are actually a Machiavellian genius by acting like a bumbling cretin on purpose. Pretty soon nobody will be able to tell where your faux stupidity ends and your genuine idiocy begins. You can ignore this one, Liz.

Remove the cameras from the briefing room

If it weren’t for the cameras in the briefing room recording Allegra Stratton I’d probably still be in a job. Spend your first day smashing them into little pieces to avoid a similar gaffe. This will undermine the point of a briefing room somewhat, but you can either have a pointless room that cost £2.6 million or a free press threatening your reign of terror. Your call.

Create a new scapegoat

The EU was a fantastic bogeyman while it lasted, but now we’ve left the country’s in need of a new one. Immigrants are a classic but don’t have the pull they once had, and no matter how hard we’ve tried the culture war isn’t really taking off. If in doubt just go after obese people or the French.

Don’t forget to feed Raab

There’s a pouch of Dreamies in the kitchen cupboard, behind the teabags. Sprinkle a handful of them into his bowl twice a day and he’ll be fine. We tried to train him to look after himself but it never stuck. Humour him by calling him the a ‘good little deputy prime minister’ every now and then and he won’t give you any trouble.

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'Actioning', and other bullshit office jargon you hate

WORK in an office? Surrounded by wankers desperate to make themselves sound important? Then you’ll be sick of these irritating terms:

‘Actioning’

At some stage in the last ten years, some bastard decided the word ‘doing’ was too straightforward and took it upon themselves to invent this pointless verb, and people like your boss love it because it makes them feel powerful. When he tells Dave in Operations to ‘action’ getting more paper from the photocopier, you will want to shoot him, and rightly so.

‘Touch base’

Has Kerry from Accounts ignored your emails even though you’ve contacted her multiple times? Apparently you can’t just say that, and instead need to laboriously explain that you and she have yet to ‘touch base on the issue’, even though the issue is her nicking your Fruit Corners from the fridge on a daily basis.

‘Add value’

When a manager suggests that you need to ‘add value’ to this latest pitch, what they mean is you need to ‘make it less shit’, but why say something insulting but useful when they could come out with some vague and annoying jargon? Maybe because when you don’t win the contract, they can ‘transition’ you to being unemployed without having to say ‘you’re fired’.

‘Reach out’

Having wormed its way in through celebrity pop culture, ‘reaching out’ is a phenomenon that has touched everyone from Beyoncé all the way down to Gavin in Sales. Apparently it’s now the proper terminology for when you call someone, send them an email, or even just walk up to them in the f**king corridor.

‘Taskforce’

‘Team’ just wasn’t cutting it, so now every little problem needs to be solved by an official taskforce. It may be just you and the Annette from reception taking the recycling out, but ‘Sustainability Taskforce’ certainly sounds less obviously shit on your CV.

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