A Holloway editor reads the week’s political satire from NewsThump and the Daily Mash and wonders who is left to laugh at in Westminster
Friday, 23 October 2026. Holloway. The Lord Nelson pub on Holloway Road, a pint of bitter I am pretending is for research, 6.00pm.
Reading The Competition With A Pint
Every Friday I sit in the corner of a pub on the Holloway Road and read the other British humour sites. My wife calls this checking on the opposition. I call it professional development. The barman calls me Professor, and has done since I corrected his spelling of the word pint on a chalkboard in 2019. He has never forgiven me. He has also never misspelled it since. That is what education looks like in North London.
This week NewsThump had a beauty about how Reform vowed to expel anyone careless enough to say the quiet part out loud while being filmed, after an undercover investigation caught candidates and councillors saying things they should not have said near a camera. The disciplinary policy is, in effect, check who is recording before you say anything. As political ethics go, it is efficient.
Every Party Has This Policy
I would like to be even-handed, as I always try to be, so let me say plainly that every political party in Britain operates some version of this rule. The only real difference between them is the speed at which the expulsion arrives. Labour takes a fortnight and an inquiry. The Conservatives take a weekend and a statement about learning lessons. The Liberal Democrats take a month because they have to consult the membership, who are on holiday in the Dordogne.
My old department at the university had the same policy for faculty meetings. You could say anything you liked about the Dean, provided you said it in the car park, in a low voice, after checking the Dean’s car had left. The one time a colleague forgot to check, he was transferred to the satellite campus in a town I will not name, where he teaches medieval history to people who would rather be learning to fix boilers.
Searching Britain For The Last Believers
Over at the Daily Mash, the political piece of the week reported that the press is scouring Britain for the remaining Brexiters, after the government suggested closer ties with Europe and the expected uproar failed to show up. Reporters are combing the country for between three and fifteen people who are still angry about it.
I can save them the petrol. There is one at the end of the bar right now. His name is Derek, he has a Union Jack on his phone case, and he has told me every Friday since 2017 that Brussels wants to straighten his bananas. I bought him a pint tonight and asked whether he still felt as strongly. He looked into the pint for a long moment and said he was tired, Professor, he was just very tired. That is the most honest political statement I have heard all year.
The Exhaustion Vote
This, I think, is the real story of British politics in 2026, and the humour sites have caught it better than the broadsheets. Nobody has changed their mind. They have simply run out of energy to keep shouting about it. The great dividing lines of the last decade are still there, but the people on either side have sat down on them, like commuters on the floor of a delayed train, and started sharing crisps.
It shows up in our own pieces too. The dinner party report found men who can talk about football for six hours and about contemporary art for three minutes. Swap contemporary art for constitutional reform and you have the British electorate. Six hours on whether a referee was blind. Three minutes on proportional representation, followed by a request for more crisps.
What Satire Is For, Briefly
Derek asked me, around the third pint, why I bother making jokes about politicians when they do not read them. I told him what I tell my students. The joke is not for the politician. The joke is for the person standing next to you at the bar, so that you both know you are not mad. When something absurd happens and nobody laughs, it starts to look normal. When somebody laughs, it stays absurd. That is the whole service. It is cheaper than the NHS and the waiting list is shorter.
He considered this, then asked whether I could do a joke about Brussels and bananas. I said I could, but that it had been done, by him, every Friday since 2017. He laughed. That is the first time in seven years Derek has laughed at himself. I am counting it as a constitutional moment.
Note For The Home Page
For newcomers who arrive via a search engine and wonder what sort of site this is, the govna.uk home page describes its editor as a professor, satirist and unlicensed historian of bad decisions. My wife says the unlicensed part is the only bit that is strictly accurate. The barman says the professor part is debatable since I started drinking bitter. Derek says he does not trust any man who describes himself on a website. He has a point. He also has a phone case with a flag on it. We all contain contradictions. It is the British way.