Boris Johnson's guide to Hartleypool

HARTLEYPOOL is a smashing little seaside resort, a true jewel of the north-west. Here’s an unprompted article detailing what I love so ruddy much about it.

The culture

Naysayers on Wikipedia claim it is just ‘a port town in County Durham, England’. I say it’s so much more than that. Hartleypool is a veritable Athens of modern times, housing such beacons of cultural life as the Battery Museum and an art gallery, which I imagine is a great place for using Latin pick-up lines on posh women.

The people

My favourite thing about Hartleypool is, without a shadow of a doubt, the 93,000 people who live there for whom we’ve created 180,000 new jobs. They scorn the Islington elite. They’re not interested in handouts but real, sustained British investment in their British future, and their children’s British future, and their grandchildren’s children’s British future.

The monkey hanging

I simply adore Hartleypool’s xenophobia, to the extent of hanging a monkey because they thought it was a Frenchman spying for dastardly old Napoleon Bonaparte. A good example to us all. Rest assured I’m not at all unnerved by their football team’s monkey mascot H’Angus, who no doubt Labour would eliminate as a ‘racist hate crime’.

The illuminations

Hartleypool is, of course, most famous for its gorgeous light show every Christmas time. Like moths to a lambent flame, easily-delighted Northern folk trek hundreds of miles to visit the stunning seafront and take in the Vegas-like glamour, enjoying ballroom dancing in the famous tower and a tram ride off the end of the pier.

The monkey mayor

In 2002, the people of Hartleypool elected a monkey-man as mayor. And whether he was a man in a monkey suit, as people claim, or a time-traveller from an ape-ruled future as I believe, I respect any electorate that votes for a novelty candidate for mayor as a laugh, then re-elects them because why not. Such people are the backbone of Britain.

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Why I accept full responsibility for the total f**king shitshow I was handed, by Sir Keir Starmer

TOMORROW, Labour will lose a parliamentary seat they have held for 60 years. And, why f**k about, I will accept that it is all my fault. 

I won’t mention Brexit. I won’t say anything about governments historically performing well in national emergencies. I won’t mention my twat predecessor. I will take it on the chin.

If arguments are to be made that I’ve only been in office 13 months, we’ve spent most of it in f**king lockdown, and anyway Britain chuckles indulgently at everything the current occupant of Downing Street does like he’s a spoiled bloody child, they won’t be made by me.

Instead I will take responsibility. I will stand there as a Labour seat full of fishermen and steelworkers who’ve had their livelihoods destroyed falls to those who did it, and I will pretend their decision is rational.

‘Lessons to be learned,’ I will say, rather than ‘Lemmings voting for higher cliffs with sharper rocks at the bottom’ or the more simple, prosaic ‘for f**k’s sake’.

And certainly, when left-wing Twitter warriors jeer at me for failing to completely turn around a party that Jeremy Corbyn led to two defeats in two years, I won’t stoop to blaming him for making a national party into radioactive communists.

I will not hide. I will face forward and claim the entire f**king mess Britain and the Labour party are in is down to me. I will look you in the eye and spout that absolute, transparent bullshit.

Because apparently that’s what you like.