The race to lead the British Paperclip Association is hotting up. Four candidates are slugging it out to win the leadership contest, to the considerable disinterest of all concerned.
A spokesman explained: 'British paperclips used to be exported to the four corners of the world. They represented British inventiveness, tenacity and pluck. They conquered every country they went to. But that was long ago; over the years we have been forced to retreat. Other countries invented staples and treasury tags. We were standing still in a stationery world.
'We need a new leader who can bring back the glory days for us. But that looks like an impossible mission.
'We have four candidates who aspire to lead us, all as mad as a box of frogs. There's talk of banning sellotape, restricting the movement of foreign paperclips, of new laws to increase paperclip use by the working classes, and withdrawing from the World Stationery Alliance. There's talk of suing Microsoft for royalties over their digital assistant, Clippy. It all seems pretty extreme and pretty irrelevant. All the candidates need a good clip round the ear.
'The British Stationery Association is laughing at us. They get all the media attention, and they get all our freebies now. Bastards.
'Young people are rebelling against paperclips and all they stand for. They all want jobs in right-on unionised third sector social media start ups. They don't aspire to traditional private sector manufacturing jobs any more. Our leadership candidates aren't young and dynamic. They are old and stale and doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over.
'It's disappointing that the best leadership candidates we've got are dinosaurs and weirdos. We needed the crème de la crème, not the crumb de la crumb. The candidates are ripping into each other, pouncing on mistakes and trying to clip each other round the ear. Camera crews follow them round, making videos that nobody watches. It is all very sad.
The British Paperclip Association used to be respected – now it's just a clip joint.'
Image: AlexanderStein - Pixabay