Jacqui Smith and her guilty shoplifter's expression

Satire seems practically impossible in current conditions. The humorous critique usually works by taking the subject and exaggerating and distorting a little. Not too much, or it's no longer funny. It has to run slightly ahead of that subject but these days how can it even keep up?

The challenge for a good satirist is that reality is now its own satire, done badly. Politics and government play like a series of Armando Ianucci sketches, abandoned by the writer on grounds of implausibility. Popular culture and mass media appears to have been produced by a gigantic factory staffed by an army of clumsily cloned Chris Morrises who weren't really into it this morning but supposed they might as well, assisted by a branch plant of genetically modified Charlie Brookers, each of whom has recently suffered a mild stroke.

I've recounted unto tedium how waking to an aural background of Radio 4's morning news and current affairs programme distresses my subconscious into producing nightmares featuring the content. Like Goya's 'Sleep of Reason', but with cabinet ministers in place of the sinister compound winged beasts.

Woke at a less uncivilised hour the other day, to Mr Bragg and crew discussing Jonathan Swift's 'A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick'. Can't be bothered to post a link here, Google it baby!