BORIS Johnson’s opportune new baby and wedding have already covered up Priti Patel’s incompetence, but what else will they distract from?

Whole civil service fired

The first scan picture of the prime minister’s child should mask the news that everyone in Whitehall has been fired and replaced with teenage internet edgelords who say ‘Really you should retire at 40, get five years state opiates then be euthanised’.

Michael Gove was Bosnian warlord

The MP for Surrey Heath is unmasked as a former Bosnian warlord wanted by The Hague on the very same day, coincidentally, that Symonds goes into labour. All reporters and the vital BBC helicopter are diverted to hospital coverage. Gove just brazens it out.

Pound in freefall

News is just coming in that the pound has lost 75 per cent of its value in a day when a proud Johnson and his girlfriend emerge onto the steps with his sixth or seventh child. The newspapers love it and the pound recovers by 5.8 per cent anyway.

The birth of Boris’s other baby

The birth of a half-sister to the Johnson-Symonds baby, to a junior Commons researcher formerly atttached to the Foreign Office, takes place just a fortnight later but goes unnoticed by the media as the prime minister announces his son will be called Donald, after Trump.

No-deal exit

The wedding of Johnson and Symonds in November will obscure announcements that the UK is to have an Equatorial Guinea-style trade deal with the EU, in that it won’t have one. Cheering crowds won’t care about food and petrol rationing as they watch the radiant bride and her dishevelled groom.

Martial law

Adorable Christmas pictures of the impish No 10 newborn are used to announce a curfew enforced by the military, mandatory ID cards and random checks at roadblocks.

Rejoining the EU

The baby’s first birthday will neatly hide that the UK is rejoining the EU after just six months out, because all the people with money are deserting Britain and the Tories have realised what they’ve done.