If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know my opinion on Brexit – and by extension, what I think of the current UK government with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. If you don’t, my feelings can be summarised as this: Both things are a crock of shit.
I’m not going to go over any of the arguments in this post, just suffice it to say that’s what my opinion is. Brexit is a crock of shit – and the government under Boris Johnson is a crock of shit.
However, I was having a bit of fun with it all for a while last year, ‘photoshopping’ (but using either The Gimp or Xara Photo and Graphic Designer, or a combination of both, rather than Photoshop). My abilities aren’t as good as some, but it can be good fun to do – and I’ve decided I might as well gather the results together and dump them here.
This, then, is the cream of the crap – which you can either interpret as a reflection of my photo editing skills, or as a reflection of the people within the photos. I’m easy. 🙂
This is where it started. Lord Paul Strasburger put a photo of Johnson on Twitter, and asked if anyone could give him a longer nose (as per Pinocchio) so it could be posted when he lies. I thought I’d give it a try, and duly sent him the following image.
That was actually the second attempt. Edited in The Gimp, I selected a portion of the end of his nose, and pasted it back onto the image repeatedly, moving it left and down a bit each time. The first attempt was done the same way, but I used a larger selection, and moved it further in each direction at each step. The result looked ribbed – and in fact looked scarily like I’d taken a picture of a penis and attached it to his face.
Unfortunately, I can’t find that version – I probably deleted it on the basis that it was a bit of a cock up.
Shortly after that, I saw a news report mentioning Sajid Javid (Chancellor at the time) and I immediately thought of The Hood from Thunderbirds.
And I think I’d already been referring to Dominic Cummings as the Mekon, so when I saw a suitable picture of him in a caption (by someone else) I did the necessary photo edit to produce this.
I then did another using different starting images.
Then I found a picture of the Cabinet in session, and added that image to it.
There was a lot of publicity when Johnson got a pet dog, and when I saw the pictures of it arriving at 10 Downing Street, I thought it looked a bit sad, so I immediately thought:
I saw an image of Conservative MP Gavin Williamson, and the first thing that came to mind was “Aha!”
References to the odious Crispin Odey was popping up in my feed a fair bit – this bastard made huge profits (over two hundred million quid, if memory serves) on the result of the EU referendum and the hit the pound took. Whenever I see him, I think of Shrek.
There had been some comments about how much control Johnson would, in effect, be giving to Trump if and when we sign a deal with the US. So the obvious thing to do was put Trump at the despatch Box in the House of Commons.
But if I’ve replaced Johnson with Trump, it’s only right to replace Trump with Johnson – so I took that famous picture of Trump apparently shouting at a boy.
I should have added a caption to that, in retrospect. My immediate thought now is “HEY, WHERE’S THE NEAREST FRIDGE!” – but Johnson hiding in a fridge hadn’t yet happened when I produced the image.
When Johnson was losing support in the Commons, I saw an image posted with the caption “This time next week” showing him alone on his side of the house, with the opposition side packed. I thought it lacked one thing, so I added Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The ironically named James Cleverley once put up a picture of him pointing at a Brexit clock. Too obvious, really.
And I also made a version for use on RISCOSitory in the run up to the 2019 London Show.
Remember that time Johnson chose not to appear at a press conference in Luxembourg with Xavier Bettel (Luxembourg’s own PM), and the press conference went ahead with an empty podium? What a chicken.
Around the time of the unlawful proroguing of Parliament, I wondered how Cummings, Johnson, and Rees-Mogg would adapt to life in prison.
A headline in the Daily Telegraph said “Johnson to enshrine 2020 Brexit in law”, with a picture of him with a group, pointing and laughing. I corrected it.
I also helped Johnson achieve his ultimate goal:
Those were all from the last few months of 2019, and here’s something a little more recent – like the very first image above, prompted by Lord Paul Strasburger; he asked for captions for the original picture, and I obliged with my take on it.
Finally, glancing through my files, I also found a work in progress that I hadn’t touched in months. I’ve been saying for a long time that Dominic Raab reminds me of Simon Cadell from Hi-de-Hi, so I grabbed a picture of the Hi-de-Hi cast and did the necessary, then added Johnson, Rees-Mogg, and Kate Hoey (actually a labour MP at the time, but a vocal brexiter). I’ve now very quickly added a few more faces – it’s now mostly the cabinet, with a couple of exceptions, such as Hoey.
In future, if and when I knock together any other silly images of this type, I’ll post them on this blog.
