Whether mercilessly skewering Boris Johnson or lampooning Brexit, the Guardian journalist’s collected columns demonstrate her wit at its sulphur-tongued best
At one point in this collection of her Guardian columns, Marina Hyde devises a little allegorical tableau in which Chris Grayling pummels “the pulped corpse of Satire” with a hammer. It was Grayling who as a minister bestowed a £13.8m ferry contract on a firm that had no ferries, then wangled £100,000 a year for himself as an occasional adviser to a ports company. True, the career of such a nincompoop defies parody, but have our incompetent rulers really become immune to ridicule? No, indeed they have not, for in the sulphur-tongued, sabre-toothed person of Hyde, satire bites back.
She is, quite simply, lethally funny. Over the six years covered in the book, she repeatedly annihilates Boris Johnson with epithets and aphorisms as her weapons, then kicks his cadaver back to life for further torment. She begins by pursuing him through a mythical underworld, reciting spells that cast him as a hapless figure from Narnia, Star Wars and Game of Thrones: by turns he is a “wildly miscast Aslan”, a “gelatinous Sith” and a “blobby Cersei Lannister”. She suspects him of trying to evade detection by metamorphosing into his dog, Dilyn, which starts to perform frottage on the lower legs of random passersby. Next, she slices Johnson down the middle and has him “play Henry V to his own Falstaff”, a patriotic leader who is a seedy libertine under the skin. Elsewhere, she sets him on a squishy plinth as “third prize in a competition to build Winston Churchill out of marshmallows”. At last she simply junks him, sneering that the affected disarray of his dress makes him look like “a fly-tipped sofa”.
