Bring back fat MPs – politicians on Ozempic have no zest for life
If only there were a miracle cure for the Tories. Some kind of magic solution that would inject new life into their ailing party and transform their lamentable figures.
Well, according to an exposé this weekend, Conservative MPs believe they’ve found it. Only these aren’t the figures you’ll find in any polls. No, these are the kind that were once on the portly side, spilling out of suits and over waistbands on the Commons’ riverside terrace, after one too many glasses of Bordeaux and half a dozen pigs in blankets – and have now been drastically shrunk, thanks to the fat-busting wonder drug of the moment: Ozempic.
Word on the Westminster grapevine is that at least two of the party’s leadership hopefuls are injecting themselves with the drug in order to hit their fighting weight in time for the election – while many more are said to have become devotees of the medication. Which isn’t altogether surprising. After all, the Commons lifestyle isn’t conducive to a slimline physique, and since semaglutide – the primary ingredient in both Ozempic and Wegovy – has the effect of suppressing appetite, it does take the mental anguish out of weight loss.
There’s only one problem, and it’s a fairly hefty one: the side effects. After all, we’re talking about a nausea so pronounced that one girlfriend admitted she was “scarcely able to keep anything down”. In fact, she couldn’t “even look at a sandwich without wanting to be sick”. Gleefully, because this particular girlfriend lost 6kg in the first six weeks.
Add to that abdominal pain, burping, constipation, diarrhoea, dizziness, flatulence, fatigue, an increase in heart rate and an inability to hold your liquor and you… really have to want to shed those pounds.
Indeed, we’re told that while “one heavily overweight politician who started taking it” had to be carted off “in a wheelchair” from the bar by paramedics, another front-runner to succeed Rishi Sunak has told friends that they had to be careful about the timing of the medication as they “usually needed a lie-down on the office sofa afterwards”.
I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but Ozempic may not be the way to swing the election. The disillusioned electorate has put up with a great deal over the years, but exhausted, dizzy, flatulent, burping MPs are unlikely to win them over, however good they look in a sharply tailored XXS Savile Row suit.
Buried in the piece was one interesting fact: “Most MPs tend to use the same slimming clinic in Harley Street, details of which have been passed by word of mouth.” And I’d love to know both the name of the good doctor handing out the sweeties so generously – and where their political allegiances lie?
