By Chris Norris
Oh Ramsay MacDonald, be now of good cheer,
For I’ve tidings to bring if I may;
Worst of tidings for your Labour Party, I fear,
But for you it’s a brightening day.
Just mention your name and the faithful would sneer,
Speak of Judas, then hurriedly say
‘Let’s have no further talk of MacDonald here
Lest his wandering ghost come to stay!’.
For as Labour’s first PM you gave a false steer
That threw all our fine chances away,
Did your deal with the Tories and left the way clear
As those predators circled their prey.
So you shouldn’t complain if the judgment’s severe,
If they trample your feet of clay,
And if “doing a Ramsay”’s the favourite smear
For class traitors who’ve led us astray.
But I bring welcome news, soothing words to your ear,
Fit to keep those vexations at bay,
Since we’ve now a PM who’s crossed every frontier
Till there’s no trust the man won’t betray.
His name’s Sir Keir Starmer, though to couple the ‘Keir’
With the ‘Sir’ is at once to convey
How his namesake, Keir Hardie, would shudder to hear
What a role that successor would play.
For there’s many folk, Gazans not least, who’ve paid dear
For his sins and and now look to the day
When this arse-licking sycophant ends his career
With the heaviest reckoning to pay.
He’s consorted with tyrants, filled migrants with fear,
Made his boast “huddled masses can’t stay”,
And seen fit to join in when the tabloids sneer
At the small boats washed up from Calais.
Worst of all: he’s had fascist goon Trump reappear,
No cost spared, in the cash-strapped UK,
With a banquet whose monster bill nothing but sheer
Monster-flattery served to defray.
In the book of lost chances, let’s have some austere
Counterfactual bring thoughts of how they,
Tyrant-vassal, both died as some giant chandelier
Crashed to earth on that sumptuary array.
As to you, comrade Ramsay, let this be the year
When you felt the old charge ricochet,
And your one act of treachery came nowhere near
What’s contained in Sir Keir’s dossier.
And should you wish to bear back just one souvenir
With its stink of that future decay,
Then think Gaza, Trump, Starmer, state-banquet – and mere
Sense of scale pleads your ill-fame give way!
