Not that parodying Morrissey’s prose style is itself a great challenge – it mostly does that by itself – but Craig Brown’s Morrissey diary manages to build a world of grandiose self-pity that is almost as affecting as Brown’s evocation of Princess Margaret in ‘Ma’am Darling’. A bottle of champagne “chilled as an unborn baby’s grave”. A royalty cheque falling out of an envelope like “a fallen soldier of the Somme, sent out to die on a foreign field by the uncaring upper classes”. Tears falling “like so many sad people from the top floor of a skyscraper onto the unforgiving ground below.”

Published in Private Eye, October 2013, available online here