Downing Street today confirmed that Dominic Cummings has been sacked and replaced by George Orwell as the government’s chief political advisor – effective immediately, The Rochdale Herald has learned. 

A new-speakesperson from the newly formed Ministry of Truth said, “…all government policy has been extensively borrowed from fiction and we realised we no longer needed anyone making it all up on the fly. We realised that the overwhelming majority of Cummings’s ideas were directly borrowed from a political bible written by Orwell in 1948.”

Major government initiates will now include:

  • New-speak will become the official language of Whitehall. Double-speak in which word meanings and definitions are arbitrary will be policy. For example the word ‘failure’ will mean ‘success’, i.e. “The failure to keep the Covid-19 death toll below 20,000” will now be written as, “The success of keeping the Covid-19 death toll below 70,000”. Equally, “Government advisor breaks lockdown by driving family 250 miles while infected with Covid and then ‘checking his eyesight’ by driving to Barnard Castle” becomes “There was no breach of the rules.” Double-think will become part of the national curriculum in primary schools.
  • The Daily Mail, in partnership with selective Murdoch press titles, will be given responsibility for running The Morning Hate, featuring an exhaustive selection of targeted hate at immigrants, asylum-seekers, Muslims, transexuals, ethnic minorities and socialists. Real news will henceforth be known as ‘Fake News’ and vice-versa.
  • Britain is currently at war with Eastasia (China) but may at any time arbitrarily change to being at war with Eurasia (Russia) when it is politically expedient to do so.
  • An extensive upgrade of the CCTV system is planned and individual households will have cameras installed in living rooms across the nation.

The government has not ruled out borrowing from other fictional works in the near future. Ideas include the renaming of major political parties – The Conservative Party will become Griffindor, the Liberal Democrats Hufflepuff, the SNP Ravenclaw and The Labour Party will be known as Slytherin – with an added caveat that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will be known as ‘Corbymort’ or ‘He Who Shall Not Be Named’ and held up as a bogeyman to terrify children of school age.

Public schools and Oxbridge Universities will now hold the title of ‘Institutions for Special Educational Needs’ as it is recognised that rich and privileged people need to be ‘specially educated’ in order to rule the rest of us. Normal schools will become ‘Super Academies’ with head-teachers being replaced by ‘Deans’ and ordinary teachers becoming ‘Professors’. All children will wear gowns.

The Russia Report will be re-named ‘The Eurasia Report’. The Rochdale Herald will keep you informed as to who we are at war with as soon as it is released.