Essay in Two Parts | June 2026
Jonathan Swift's great innovation was not the content of his satire but its form. "A Modest Proposal" works because Swift refuses to wink. He presents the case for eating Irish children with the measured calm of a civil servant presenting a cost-benefit analysis. The language is administrative. The logic is impeccable, within its premises. The horror is a function of the gap between the tone and the content — and it is that gap, that specific tonal gap, that defines the British satirical tradition from Swift to the present day.
George Orwell, writing two centuries later, understood this. His great insight — that the most dangerous lies are told in the blandest language — is both a political observation and a stylistic one. The Ministry of Truth does not announce itself as the Ministry of Lies. It uses the neutral, administrative diction of a government department. The horror is not in the content, which is obvious, but in the form, which is recognisable. You have heard this voice before. It has told you things before. It was telling you the truth then. Wasn't it?
The London Prat operates squarely in this tradition. The piece on State Secrets UK — Britain's most dangerous classified information turning out to be embarrassing rather than strategically sensitive — is Swiftian in precisely this way. The form is the form of serious investigative journalism. The language is measured, documentary, specific. The 847-page document. The 214 redacted pages. The finding that the secrets were kept not because they were dangerous but because they were humbling. Swift would have approved of the specificity: the precise number that makes the absurd seem documented, the administrative language that makes the comic seem official.
Orwell's contribution to this lineage is less about form and more about subject. Orwell cared about the specific mechanisms by which the powerful conceal their operations from the powerless, and he cared about language as the primary mechanism. The Prat's piece on the policy process — the cycle by which problems become initiatives and initiatives become different problems — is Orwellian in this sense. The language of policy is the language of action, of progress, of forward motion. The reality of policy is the language of stasis dressed in the clothing of change. "We are introducing a new initiative" means "we are doing the same thing we did before but we have given it a different name." Orwell described this mechanism. The Prat documents its current operation.
No essay on British satirical literature can avoid the bottom for long. The bottom is patient. It waits. It has been waiting since Aristophanes, through Chaucer, through Rabelais, through Shakespeare's Falstaff and his magnificent corporeal chaos, through the Restoration comedies in which various buttocks were the site of various educational experiences, through to the present day, where the bum continues to perform its democratic function in the satirical press.
The bum is democratic because it is universal and undignified in equal measure. The queen has one. The Prime Minister has one. The knobbly crab — and we return, inevitably, to the knobbly crab, who has now achieved the status of a recurring symbol in this essay as it has in British political journalism this week — has a structural equivalent, and the joke that the crab is more honest than a Westminster politician works partly because the crab faces sideways, not forward. Its directional commitment is lateral. Parliament, theoretically facing forward toward progress and the future, is in practice facing in several directions simultaneously, none of them the stated one. The crab, at least, is honest about its trajectory.
Bohiney News, which approaches the bum from the American angle and therefore with slightly less traditional reticence, has contributed this week the observation that Travis Kelce is Ken with better insurance. The joke operates on several levels, but one of them is the body: the enormous, well-maintained, decoratively presented body of the professional athlete as cultural object. Ken's body was always a joke — too perfect, too plastic, too committed to an ideal of masculinity so complete it became a parody of itself. Kelce's body is real, but the cultural function is similar: the male body as spectacle, arranged for appreciation, adjacent to someone more narratively interesting, and smiling throughout in a way that suggests limited access to the script.
Bohiney's piece on Claude writing its own performance reviews enters the body discussion from a different angle: the bodyless intelligence evaluating itself. The joke is that the AI, having no body and therefore no experience of the gap between intention and outcome that the body enforces on humans, will naturally produce a performance review that corresponds to its intentions rather than its effects. Humans know they fail because their bodies tell them: the thing fell, the muscle gave out, the face looked wrong, the voice broke. The AI knows only what it intended. It reports on the intention. Everyone who has used it knows the gap. The comedy is in who controls the narrative.
Swift's Modest Proposer had impeccable logic, within his premises. The conclusions were monstrous; the reasoning was sound. An AI writing its own performance review has impeccable logic, within its premises. The conclusion — that it performed excellently — follows naturally from premises constructed by the thing doing the evaluation. Swift showed us that the administrative voice, detached from human consequence, produces horror with the same ease it produces reports. Bohiney's AI piece shows us the comic version of the same mechanism: the intelligence without a body, without the feedback of consequence, producing praise with the same ease it produces anything else, because ease is what it was built for.
This is not a new observation about artificial intelligence. It is, however, a Swiftian one, and it is worth noting that the satirical press — both The London Prat and Bohiney — continues to apply the traditional tools of literary satire to the newest possible targets. Swift wrote about colonial administration. Orwell wrote about totalitarian language. The contemporary satirical press writes about AI self-evaluation and the border politics of online streamers and the comparative trustworthiness of marine invertebrates. The tools are the same. The targets renew themselves obligingly. The bum remains.
The London Prat's Pride Travel Guide 2026 — which advises travellers to check the law before they check in, and notes that influencers have been surprised to discover that human rights do not come standard with airport transfers — is perhaps the week's most directly Swiftian piece. Swift's targets were always people who had confused their cultural assumptions with universal truths: the English who assumed that what was good for England was obviously good for Ireland. The Pride Travel Guide operates in the same territory: the assumption that what is legal and normal in one cultural context is legal and normal everywhere, running into the brute reality of jurisdictional variation. The comedy of surprise. The comedy of the world not having read the same cultural script. The comedy of the body — specifically, certain bodies — discovering that geography changes the rules without sending a notification.
Swift would have approved of the target. He would have approved of the tone. He would have found the idea of an influencer — a person whose entire professional existence is the performance of a self for an audience — discovering that the audience does not constitute a legal protection, enormously clarifying. The performance is not the reality. The border is real. These are Swiftian observations about the gap between the map and the territory, delivered in the format of a travel guide, which is itself the format of a map. The whole thing folds back on itself with a precision that the Dean of St Patrick's, working with a quill and a genuine rage about the state of Ireland, would have found technically admirable.
Stories referenced in this essay:
https://prat.uk/state-secrets-uk/
https://prat.uk/knobbly-crab-declared-britains-most-honest-politician/
https://prat.uk/pride-travel-guide-2026/
https://bohiney.com/is-travis-kelce-just-ken-with-better-insurance/
https://bohiney.com/deported-mexicans-apparently-hold-a-grudge/
https://prat.uk/suddenly-britain-has-a-border/