I introduced clerihews last week (post here) and was stunned by the response — you are great at this! Most in that thread were about philosophers, though there were a good number about other types of people. I’ll return to philosophers (one of my colleagues has been quietly supplying me with his own contributions so I’ll have to find a way to publicize them). This week’s challenge is to write clerihews about politicians — broadly conceived. Here are my efforts (including Montgomery, not strictly a politician I guess):
Edward Clerihew Bentley
did his satire gently.
Would he have kept to that precedent
with this President?
After the white van man picture Emily Thornberry
Said she was sorry, but she wasn’t very.
Now that Boris behaves like a gooseberry
Even white van man wants her as Foreign Secretary.
Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery
Eschewed entirely involvement in mummery.
Instead he devoted himself to Irish dance
Which he performed to his troops at every chance
When the loathsome Morrison asked Ernest Bevin,
After Labour’s great win,
To stand against Clement Attlee
Bevin said, “That’s just not me”.
Some people say of Julie Burchill
That she’s a distant relation of Winston Churchill
Unlikelier cousins there may not be
(Apart from Lady GaGa and Clement Attlee). [1]
[1] I wrote this one immediately after learning that not only is Angela Lansbury a red diaper baby and lifelong leftwinger, but also the granddaughter of George Lansbury (and daughter of communist Edgar), cousin to Oliver Postgate, and in some complicated way related to Malcolm Turnbull.
. Clerihews were invented by EC (Edward Clerihew) Bentley (author of 
, one of the greatest detective novels to be written by someone who wrote only one detective novel). [1] They have a strict format: they must be about a person who is reasonably well known, 4 lines, with an AA BB rhyming scheme. They also seem to observe other unstated criteria. They are not cruel, or didactic, and the person about whom they are written must have some sort of substance. Gavin Ewart points out in his introduction to The Collected that they could be used for biting satire but Bentley never does that and he (Ewart) is unaware of them ever being used so. They are gentle. The pay-off would ideally come as something of a surprise, but not be completely irrelevant: Surrealism and whimsy are permitted, indeed encouraged. The name of the subject usually (but not always) comes at the end of the first line, challenging the author to find a good, but non-obvious, rhyme (as you’ll see in a moment he rhymes Plato with potato which is only one part of the genius of my favourite clerihew). There are no rules about rhythm except, as far as I can tell, that if you write several, you should vary the meter. (All Bentley’s clerihews seem to have been illustrated by GK Chesterton: I can’t rival that!).