Getting Figgy With It

Here's my latest satirical column for The Student. Bit silly but, as they say, the pun is mightier than the sword:


The humble fig-leaf, so often the foliage of choice for those seeking to mask their shame, was itself the source of embarrassment for MPs this week when it was revealed that £400,000 of pubic-sector money has been spent on twelve fig trees for the atrium of Portcullis House.

A Tory spokesperson denied suggestions that the trees were brought in to replenish the supply of fig-leaves that David Cameron has been using to cover his blatantly Thatcherite policies.

The spokesperson told Newsjack that the trouble began in December 2010 when a particularly persistent group of carol singers refused to be fobbed off with a soggy mince pie in return for the good tidings they had brought, and instead demanded they be fed figgy pudding.

“They quite literally wouldn’t go until they’d got some,” we were told. “The fig fanatics were camped outside for days. You could call them the infignados.”

The ‘pudding protests’ rapidly swept the country, with a street vendor in Derbyshire dousing himself in brandy and setting himself alight. “I always knew he was a bit of a fruitcake,” quipped a friend of the young man, “but I’ve never seen him raisin’ hell like that. It must’ve been a candid appeal for help.”

Eventually the government caved to popular pressure, bringing in the twelve trees in an attempt to calm the simmering tensions, and an emergency baking committee was formed to satisfy the protestors’ demands. David Cameron captured the mood of the nation perfectly, announcing a new plan for the ‘Fig Society’. A Tory spokesperson denied suggestions that this was simply a fig-leaf for the unpopular ‘Big Society’.

Inspired by the success of the pudding protests, demonstrators in Wall Street began to sing “now bring us some structural reform of the economic system and an end to neoliberal fundamentalism… and bring some out here,” but after a series of drawn-out General Assemblies agreed that a delivery of figgy pudding was a more achievable demand and had better scansion.

Now the government faces a dilemma – does it scrap the costly trees and risk civil disobedience on a mass scale, or maintain them and face the ire of the right-wing press?