Category Archives: Whimsy

As the world saw YouTube footage of Jon Stewart declaring the House of Commons to be “awesome”on the Daily Show last week, we wore a guilty smile of pride in our archaic but entertaining system of government.Today, that smile has been transformed into an embarrassed facepalm.

You see, according to Commons rules, the use of footage from the house in satire would offend “the dignity of Parliament”, essentially banning the episode in the UK.In an alarming and hilarious rant on last night’s show, Stewart pointed out that not only was the segment praising the mother of all parliaments – but also that the show was broadcast in its entirety in such free speech havens as Chad, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen.

We suggest you watch the video now, before the Serjeant-at-arms spoils everyone’s fun.

This morning, it was revealed that Conservative Party officials hired private investigators to snoop on ordinary people featured in campaign material, gaining private information about their sex lives and political activities. Targets have said that they are “astonished” by the level of intrusion, and have told Scrapbook that they were completely unaware of its extent.

We’ll have more on this in the coming days — in the meantime, we thought we’d try our hand at some updated posters, courtesy of the ever-hilarious MyDavidCameron.com:

Make your own with the MyDavidCameron generator, then tweet them to us at @psbook.

James Wharton, Tory MP for Stockton South, seems to have a particularly unhealthy relationship with his constituents. As the Darlington and Stockton Times reports today, the 27-year-old MP has threatened legal action against a local grandmother who caricatured him in a satirical cartoon. After personally tearing down posters from a local park, Wharton wrote a threatening email to Yarm resident Carole Jones:

“I will … be taking advice on the libellous cartoons you have been distributing and you can expect to hear from my solicitors in due course. You have damaged my reputation by making untrue inferences and it is time you were taken up on your lies.”

Jones, a local campaigner, had posted a number of “Save our Park” posters on trees, protesting plans to convert an area of the park into a boules pitch. Her cartoon depicted a character called “W” as an evil genius planning to cover the park in concrete, and was handed out to around fifty residents in a local pub.

Despite being a fresh-faced member of the 2010 intake, Wharton has already managed to generate his fair share of bizarre stories. Three months after being elected, he was embroiled in a scandal after attempting to fast-track a grant application for a friend’s business. The friend, it emerged, had been served with a fixed penalty notice earlier in the year for displaying a four-foot stone penis sculpture outside his shop:

We eagerly await the Honourable Member for Stockton South’s next appearance in the papers.