Few hearts can have been left unbroken on Friday night, when footage emerged of President Donald Trump triumphantly celebrating the killing of Father Christmas by American military forces on Boxing Day.
My children were in floods of tears as we watched a clearly aroused Trump make the following televised statement, sitting beneath a sumptuously decorated Christmas tree at his Mar-a-Lago resort, his hands twitching rhythmically beneath a stars and stripes beach towel that covered his shaking lap.
“Father Christmas is dead. No US personnel were lost in the operation, while a large number of Christmas’s elves and reindeer were killed with him. He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming. The toy workshop had been cleared by this time, with elves either surrendering or being shot and killed. Eleven young elves were moved out of the workshop uninjured. The only ones remaining were Christmas in the tunnel, who had dragged three elves with him to certain death. He reached the end of the tunnel, as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his beard, killing himself and the three elves. His body was mutilated by the blast, but test results gave certain and positive identification.”
It was difficult to explain to the children why Trump had decided that Santa had to die, as it involved complex ideas concerning economic interventionism and the values of the free market. But apparently Trump had been pleading with “that Christmas guy” since he came to power in 2016, to abandon his traditional Christmas Eve practice of distributing free toys to all the children in the world.
According to Trump, the jobs of millions of hardworking Americans were at risk, and there was a serious reduction of toy-generated retail revenue in the American economy because Christmas was undercutting everyone with “his free toy bullshit”. “Mr Christmas,” Trump explained, “has ignored my ultimatums and so this Christmas, if he tries his free toys crap again, we are going to neutralise him permanently, and I hope we can count on the cooperation and technological support of our allies worldwide in tracking him to his Christmas lair.”
My children were even more upset to find out that Britain was the only country to answer Trump’s call. The chancellor, Sajid Javid, explained the government’s position to a sympathetic Laura Kuenssberg and a group of unconvinced children attending a pantomime in central London.
“Obviously, America is an important ally for us, and technically what Father Christmas has been doing every Christmas Eve for years now, with impunity, constitutes a socialist intervention in the market, artificially depressing the value of toymakers’ labour and the value of their goods in the marketplace by the introduction into the equation of free toys at no cost to the consumer, courtesy of some mythic philanthropist who, while naively trying to bring children joy in the short term, seems willingly blind to the long-term unintended consequences of his actions.”
Kuenssberg seemed delighted with Javid’s answer and gave him a Christmas kiss before explaining to the viewer at home: “These children here are crying, but sooner or later they were going to stop believing in Father Christmas anyway, so in a way the government has helped them to grow up. Thank you, chancellor.”
On the Today programme, Dominic Raab justified the government’s actions to a pointless Nick Robinson, explaining that though they had allowed the US to piggyback on to GCHQ systems to track Santa’s journey home after his final delivery, in the islands of American Samoa, British forces were not involved in the assault on his workshop that left Father Christmas and many of his workers and livestock dead.
Meanwhile, on Nick Ferrari’s LBC radio show, an evasive Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ Get-Brexit-Done Johnson would neither condone nor endorse the Santa attack.
“Whatever we had done, someone would have been offended these days,” Turds explained. Nick Ferrari then said he hoped the prime minister had had a good Christmas and wished him a happy new year, before playing a recording of Trump further elaborating on the Christmas-killing operation: “The reach of America is long. Father Christmas died in a vicious and violent way, running and crying. He died like a dog. He died like a coward. God bless the United States of America!”
For me, Christmas had already died. It died about 10 days earlier, two days after the election of Boris Johnson. It died just at the west end of Oxford Street, when a group of Muslim women went for a day out at Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland funfair, as they have every right so to do, irrespective of their belief in a nonexistent God.
Proving they had assimilated, the Muslim women had chosen to attend an event where all the ancient British yule traditions – eating takeaway Chinese food, zooming round and round on terrifying rides with German names, and drinking buckets of Coca-Cola – are celebrated. While the women were indulging in the festive act of taking a selfie, a group of men jumped into the frame and one shouted “fucking letterbox cunts” at them, an unsophisticated response to the complex debate surrounding the rights and wrongs of wearing the burqa.
Of course, it’s not possible to prove that the prime minister’s undoubted popularisation of the word “letterbox” as a way of insulting Muslim women is directly responsible for the tone of this incident, but it probably is obviously and, leading by example, Turds has certainly changed the rules on what sort of language is publicly acceptable.
Luckily, the Conservative party have dropped, or “broadened the scope of”, the independent inquiry into Islamophobia in the party that Boris Johnson promised in one of his rare election debate appearances, as its conclusions may have landed rather too close to home. God bless us one and all!
• Extra London dates of Stewart Lee’s latest live show, Snowflake/Tornado, have just been announced at the South Bank Centre in June and July, and it tours nationally from January
