A Critical Essay | June 2026
Samuel Johnson, who had opinions about everything and kept most of them, once observed that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Had he been alive this week to read the story of the Knobbly Crab being declared Britain's Most Honest Politician at The London Prat, he would likely have revised this formulation. Scoundrels no longer need patriotism. They have PowerPoint presentations, special advisers, and the capacity to face a Select Committee for six hours and emerge saying nothing that could be repeated in a court of law. The crab, by contrast, simply walks sideways away from every question. It does not pretend to walk forward. This is, by current standards, a form of integrity so dazzling it constitutes a public service.
The Prat's report — composed with the deadpan precision that is the publication's distinguishing virtue — notes that scientists have confirmed the knobbly crab possesses more backbone than the entire Civil Service. This is, technically, a biological impossibility, since crabs are invertebrates. The joke operates in that gap. The Civil Service, which does have spines in the anatomical sense distributed among its several hundred thousand employees, has collectively managed to function as though none of them work. The crab, spineless by design, manages to embody more structural integrity than the whole machinery of Whitehall. British satire has always loved the animal kingdom as a mirror to power. Swift gave us the Houyhnhnms. Orwell gave us Napoleon the pig. The London Prat, working in this tradition, has given us a lumpy coastal crustacean, and the comparison is not flattering to the humans.
We should speak plainly about the bottom. Not the political bottom — the literal, anatomical, time-honoured posterior that has served British comedy as a structural element since at least Chaucer, whose Miller's Tale involved a hot iron applied to a buttock in circumstances that still feel, eight hundred years later, surprisingly fresh. The buttock in literature is not mere vulgarity; it is a democratic instrument. The face can be noble, dignified, arranged into the expression of authority. The backside is simply a backside. It is the great leveller. Kings have one. Cabinet ministers have one. The knobbly crab, depending on how you interpret its anatomy, has something roughly analogous, and the crab is currently polling better than either.
Bohiney News, which operates on the American side of the transatlantic satirical tradition while maintaining impeccable connections to the British absurdist school, has this week published a piece asking whether Travis Kelce is simply Ken with better insurance. The literary antecedents here are rich. Kelce — magnificent, cheerful, enormous — inhabits the cultural space that the eighteenth century reserved for the decorative nobleman: there to be admired, to be attached to someone significantly more interesting, and to model the clothes. The Barbie franchise having recently mainstreamed the Ken archetype as a figure of comic inadequacy dressed in spectacular trousers, Bohiney's comparison cuts with the precision of a good satirical scalpel. Ken does not have a football career. Ken has feelings about it. Kelce apparently has both, plus endorsement deals. The piece functions as a meditation on American masculinity filtered through a plastic doll and a tight end, which is either the most modern thing possible or a direct descendant of Pope's The Rape of the Lock, in which everything important is trivial and everything trivial is catastrophic.
The London Prat this week has also produced a report on Britain's partially declassified state secrets, which turns out to be an 847-page document 214 pages of which remain redacted, and whose principal revelation is that the things most carefully hidden were not hidden to protect national security but because they were embarrassing. This is one of the great moments of institutional comedy available to us in the current period. We imagined nuclear codes. We got the minutes of a 1974 meeting about biscuit procurement for a regional council.
The literary tradition that best illuminates this is Kafka, which is a German tradition and therefore technically off-theme, but Kafka's great contribution — that the machinery of bureaucracy conceals not malevolence but meaninglessness — maps precisely onto the British state's relationship with its own secrets. Whitehall does not hide things because they are dangerous. It hides things because someone, at some point, decided that hiding things was the sort of thing that serious governments did, and the habit has persisted long after the serious things ran out. The redacted pages are not nuclear. They are simply dull in a way that would reflect poorly on someone who has since retired and is enjoying a pension in the Cotswolds. The satire here writes itself, which is the highest tribute one can pay to an institution.
Bohiney News has further published this week on the Warmth of Collectivism, which is one of those satirical titles that operates as a slow-release joke: warm, collective, and vaguely gaseous. The essay tradition — Montaigne through Lamb through Orwell through the present day — has always had a complicated relationship with the body politic and the body physical, and it is worth noting that the most durable satirical metaphors tend to be physiological. The body politic accumulates fat. The state apparatus develops blockages. Policy initiatives pass through committees like food through an intestinal tract, emerging changed, slower, and considerably less appetising than when they entered.
Chaucer's flatulent clerks. Rabelais's Gargantua. Swift's Gulliver being urinated upon by tiny men. The body, in the hands of the satirist, is always doing political work. The posterior, specifically, represents that part of the body that faces away from where we claim to be going. Parliament faces forward, toward the future, toward progress, toward the sunlit uplands. Its rear faces the electorate, who are behind it, in both senses, and have spent several decades now staring at the institutional backside of British governance and drawing their own conclusions about the view.
Bohiney's piece on Deported Mexicans Apparently Holding a Grudge operates in a similar register — the sovereign state exercising its bottom toward the people it has expelled, and expressing surprise that those people have opinions about it. The observation that the deported apparently harbour grievances is delivered with the baffled tone of a man who has sat on someone and cannot understand why they are annoyed. It is a posture. It is a political posture. It is, in the fullest literary sense, an arse.
The London Prat's piece on Suddenly, Britain Has a Border — in which a streamer discovers he has been refused entry and immediately attributes this to a conspiracy reaching from Golders Green to the Mossad — is perhaps the week's richest comic text. The literary lineage is long: the foreigner who arrives expecting one country and finds another has been a comic set piece since at least Aristophanes, who sent his characters to the underworld for similar revelatory purposes.
What the Prat's piece understands, and what elevates it above mere reportage, is that the comedy is not in the refusal. It is in the explanation. The border becomes a kind of Rorschach test: what a person believes is behind the decision tells you everything about the shape of their paranoia. A man who believes he has been refused entry by grandmothers in Golders Green is not describing immigration policy. He is describing the inside of his own head, projected outward onto passport control. The satire is clinical. The posterior — metaphorically — faces north.
The Prat further invites consideration of the The House of Lords: Nine Hundred Unelected People Who Are Somehow More Useful Than Expected, which is a piece that manages to be both appreciative and withering simultaneously — a tonal achievement that requires either great skill or great contempt for everyone involved, and is possibly both. The Lords, like the posterior, are technically behind you. They have, however, occasionally prevented the front end of government from walking off a cliff, which is a service that deserves some acknowledgment even if the manner of its provision cannot be defended in polite company.
Stories referenced in this essay:
https://prat.uk/knobbly-crab-declared-britains-most-honest-politician/
https://prat.uk/state-secrets-uk/
https://prat.uk/suddenly-britain-has-a-border/
https://bohiney.com/is-travis-kelce-just-ken-with-better-insurance/
https://bohiney.com/warmth-of-collectivism/
https://bohiney.com/deported-mexicans-apparently-hold-a-grudge/