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Top trump game has secret joke

Curly is delighted and amused to have received a pack of Politicos “Top Trump” cards which have been handed out to participants by the Sky News team during the party conference season. Many thanks to the kind donor!

As with all card games you will find one or two jokers in the pack, and those from South Shields or South Tyneside who visited Manchester, Birmingham, or Bournemouth over the past few weeks may find a little surprise here.

The top 30 movers and shakers in Westminster were sorted and dealt by Adam Boulton (Sky News), Sir Michael White (The Guardian), Julia Hartley Brewer (The Sunday Express), George Passcoe-Watson (The Sun), Glen Oglaza and Jonathan Levy (Sky News), Sam Coates (The Times), and Fraser Nelson (The Spectator). They were chosen according to the amount of money grabbing pork barreling expenses making their way into the back pockets, Google hits, future prospects, value of memoirs, and vulnerability of seats.

The clever little joke in the pack is in the “time stamp” underneath the politician’s name, all the times begin at 20:00 hours, but are in fact meant to be read as years – the years in which the gathered journalists predict that the politicians will disappear from the front benches or front line politics.

So, they predict that South Shields MP and Foreign Secretary David Miliband will disappear off the radar in 2018, along with his brother Ed.

Gordon Brown was predicted to be gone this year (but the cards were printed before the upheavals of the last couple of weeks)

Other notables with a short shelf life include;

• 2009 – Alistair Darling and Douglas Alexander
• 2010 – Oliver Letwin, Nick Clegg, Jacqui Smith, and Ed Balls
• 2012 – Vince Cable,Jack Straw, and Harriet Harman

The Miliband brothers share a long shelf life with most of the current crop of Conservatives but the politicians who are predicted to last the longest on the front benches are James Purnell and Jeremy Hunt (2022).

I wonder if Iain Dale knew about this secret when he posted his piece a couple of weeks ago? If you have a pack of these cards you may wish to go through them once again and see if the journo’s predictions have any credence.

Local readers may care to take a guess at what year the member for Horsley Hill might be trumped. (I bet some of you thought that the only pictures I was working on were from yesterday!)

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