I Have A Bream

Isn’t it always the way? You wait ages for one purple flour-filled condom and then three come along at once. Of course the correct procedure for a chemical attack in the House of Commons would have been for MPs to remain in the chamber and remove all items of clothing. I’m not sure which is the more horrific vision: anthrax all over London or Nicholas Soames slipping out of his Y-fronts while chatting to a naked Ann Widdecombe.

Here at last is the third and final collection of Guardian columns from John O’Farrell, award-winning comedy writer and compulsive liar. In this eye-watering journey from innocence to revelation, he discovers that Margaret Thatcher is actually his mother.

Contained within these covers are a hundred funny, satirical essays on subjects as diverse as Man’s ascent from the apes and the re-election of George W. Bush. Plus there is a full account of O’Farrell’s heroic but doomed attempt to capture his Tory home town for socialism. Maidenhead has never been the same since.

He also makes a number of preposterous claims, including that identity fraud has got so bad that an audacious impostor using the name A. L. Blair even managed to get himself a Labour Party card by posing as a left-wing champion of wealth distribution and civil rights. He asks why a Blackberry isn’t compatible with an Apple. And finds out why the Queen didn’t go to her own son’s wedding: ‘What happened to that other girl you were seeing?’ ‘Mother, we got divorced and then she died in a car crash, remember?’ ‘Well, sometimes you have to work at these things, dear . . .’

John O’Farrell has been a writer for the satirical television show Spitting Image and on the film Chicken Run and is a regular columnist for The Independent (London). His nonfiction book on the futility of being a Labour Party supporter, Things Can Only Get Better, was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller in Great Britain. He lives in Clapham, England, with his wife and two children–when he isn’t “working.”