Kevin McKenna: Warning to Tory MPs in new territories

LAST week’s election triumph saw the party make gains in unfamiliar territory. Many of these occurred in the former Labour heartlands of northern England and the north Midlands. While Dominic and Boris are delighted about this, our unexpected windfall presents us all with new challenges if we are to maintain our presence in these communities and break down any cultural barriers that might exist.

New MPs along with their Westminster staff and teams of advisers are thus advised to study this short guide about how to engage with northerners. This also provides details of crash courses in northern lore and traditions which all those affected will be expected to attend over the coming weeks.

Dominic and his team are also working on a series of themed Facebook adverts which will re-inforce the messages we are trying to convey in our new northern territories. A special screening of these will be arranged in due course. Our heartfelt thanks go to our good friends at Johnson & Johnson; Pfizer and Biogen for sponsoring this booklet and our forthcoming Facebook campaign.

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To get the most out of this booklet and to ensure your encounters with northerners are rewarding ones, we have downloaded an attachment of Monty Python’s famous Four Yorkshiremen sketch which has come to be regarded as the ultimate study of classic northern behaviour. A special screening of the classic film Kes, complete with subtitles, will also be arranged. You are advised to keep an eye on party message boards for details. For further study we recommend old rugby league commentaries by Eddie Waring on YouTube … or at least Mike Yarwood’s impersonations of him.

Northern MPs will be expected to attend special role-playing exercises. Dominic is working on these right now and costumes, including flat-caps and donkey jackets, will be available from the quartermaster’s office. Northerners can at first appear to be sullen, resentful and unco-operative churls but if you avoid eye contact, touch your cap and look at the ground they won’t perceive you as a threat.

Some members and their staff have already expressed concern about the apparent paucity of five-star hotels and hunting lodges in the north, so a list of those that do exist will be provided during any constituency visits. Before embarking on your expeditions to the north you’ll be expected to acquire a taste for Newcastle Brown ale and Boddingtons. It’s recommended also that you familiarise yourselves with other northern elixirs such as Golden Oxter, Abbot Hargreaves’ Gangrene and Old Shearer’s Diesel. Special tasting nights on the House of Commons terrace will be arranged.

A list of northern football teams will also be provided and each new MP will be assigned one of them to support. After all, we can’t all be expected to pretend to support Liverpool, Manchester United and Accrington Stanley if we want to maintain a veneer of sincerity. There are so many other clubs to choose from like Darlington Town, Doncaster Rovers, Halifax Town and Wigan Wanderers. You will be expected to study the short histories provided and to memorise them. Northerners also play a rather rudimentary game of rugger called rugby league and you must be expected to know about this too.

Families who have lived in the north for several generations have also developed a highly specialised fowl-based diet which is believed to give them that thick accent. This has also created a genetic disposition that produces small and wiry people with facial features that make them older than they look. Local delicacies like blackbirds baked in a pie, stuffed ferret and squirrel-tale soup are known to us all but each town and village has its own and it is considered very disrespectful to refuse anything that is put before you. On no account must you ever ask for a vegetarian or vegan menu.

LANGUAGE issues can often present a problem and care must be taken to familiarise yourselves with the strange sounds and exotic locutions you may encounter. Northerners are a very religious people in a Low Church sort of way and this is why they always say thee and thou and tha instead of you. Sometimes they miss out the definite article in their sentence construction or slip in “it” when you’re not expecting it. Tinternet is the northern equivalent of the internet and you will be provided with local tinternet passwords to let you access this system.

On those occasions when you can’t for the life of you understand what a chap is saying, here is a list of universal responses which won’t make you seem rude: “I see wor Jackie scored another hat-trick at weekend, like”; “ee, you don’t know you’re living till your dead, like”; “I’ve just had special linings sewn into my trousers for ferrets, like” and “I see old Seth’s pigeons came back early today, like”.

Northern males like to go about bare-chested in winter, even in their offices, and it’s expected that on constituency visits you’ll be expected to do the same, so regular flu jabs are strongly recommended.

Dominic has organised a suite of Facebook adverts to soften them up and help you overcome any initial hostility to our future initiatives. Many of them will be expecting new hospitals because of our Brexit pledge and we must let them down gently. Northerners have abnormally large families and are concerned about local maternity services, so we’ll be making a number of adverts on the theme of Call The Midwife.

We’ll also be revealing how Dennis Skinner used an offshore account in the Caymans to purchase a Scottish shooting estate and how the European Union are making plans to give cars away for nothing to destroy the car industry in the north. We’ll also reveal how the left stigmatised the use of food banks. Our message will highlight food banks as a great national asset and emblem of national unity. All of our adverts will be shot in grainy black and white to emphasise a new sense of gritty realism.

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Classes in northern primary schools will soon finish at lunchtime and children will be expected to spend their afternoons on outward-bound courses where they’ll be taught the rudiments of hare-coursing, pigeon-fancying and kestrel ownership.

This will reflect the future direction of the northern economy and train young people to meet its brave, new challenges.

For all London-based staff who have never visited the north there will be full debriefing facilities. Trauma counselling will also be offered by a team of specialists in this area to those who may wish to avail themselves of it.