The Illusion of Power

"Thank God he's real - I was beginning to think that I'd suffered a psychotic episode and that he was an hallucination that only I could see," revealed shadow foreign secretary William Hague after learning that Tory leader David Cameron was, in fact, real. "I mean, I was really beginning to doubt his existence - it seemed that nobody else could hear a thing he said. How else could you explain the fact that we seem to be going further backwards in the opinion polls the closer the election gets?" According to the former Tory leader, he only accepted Cameron's reality after his successor had an egg thrown at him by a heckler during a recent public appearance. "Obviously, if someone could throw an egg at him, they had to be able see him, didn't they?" Hague says. "Either that, or we're both suffering the same delusion!" Hague hadn't always doubted his leader's reality. "I was a firm believer when he was first elected and had absolutely no doubts as we moved ahead in the polls," he muses. "But as our popularity began to slip, I started to question what was really happening. After all, looking back at his early days as leader, it did seem like a dream, didn't it? We finally choose a young, charismatic and dynamic leader who, despite his complete lack of experience, was able to constantly outmanoeuvre a Prime Minister who had formerly been the most successful Chancellor for decades!"

Hague admits that he began to harbour suspicions that he might have imagined Cameron's accession to the leadership. "I thought that, after all those years of humiliation at the polls and bitter infighting which had made the Conservative Party a laughing stock, perhaps the mental strain had caused my mind to crack. Maybe I was experiencing an extreme wish fulfilment fantasy," he says. "I even started to think that perhaps I was still Tory leader, that the Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard regimes were just another nightmare in my disturbed brain!" Cameron's apparent inability to come up with any concrete policy proposals reinforced Hague's suspicions that the new leader was merely a fantasy figure. "The fact that nobody else in the party seemed to listen to anything he said fuelled the fires of my doubts," he reveals. "All his talk of cleaning up the party and improving our image seemed to fall on deaf ears as everyone just carried on as before, fiddling their expenses, accepting company directorships, taking contributions from non-doms!" However, confirmation of Cameron's reality has set the politician's mind at rest. "It really is a relief," he declares. "Our election prospects might be turning to shit, but at least I'm not going bonkers!"