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Priti Patel's lifetime of being disinvited to things

BEING disinvited by France is the latest in a long line of snubs for Priti Patel. Here is everything the Home Secretary has been turned away from during her life so far.

Classmates’ birthday parties

Patel’s Marvel-style origin story. She merrily skipped to a classmate’s house for cake and jelly, then enforced the rules of pass the parcel with iron discipline and terrified the other children with stories about scary migrants. She was shown the door and now we’re all suffering the consequences.

Office Christmas bashes

She was once invited to one, only to ruin the fun by restricting everyone to two drinks and forbidding any arses being scanned on the photocopier. Ever since her colleagues have tried to stop her coming with flimsy excuses like Christmas being cancelled that year to give everyone a rest from it.

Hen dos

While the other women were happy to make twats of themselves by wearing stupid outfits and drinking out of cock-shaped straws, Priti Patel stood off to the side in her personalised flak jacket sneering at proceedings with a superior smirk. All her other hen do invites have mysteriously got lost in the post.

Baby showers

Patel believes babies are soft on law and order, only taking an interest in gurgling and eating mush from a jar. Mums-to-be can’t be blamed for not inviting the humanity-sucking Dementor into their homes for a baby shower in case she picks an argument with the baby while it’s still in the womb.

Basic human decency lessons

All Tory MPs have to attend basic common decency lessons so they can appear vaguely sympathetic in front of the cameras. And while they all forget everything they’re taught, Patel wasn’t even invited because the organisers correctly thought it would be pointless and just add to the cost of the buffet.

Pythagoras' Theorem, and other pointless things from school still taking up space in your head

DESPITE having left school many, many years ago, there are still some absolutely useless pieces of learning clogging up your brain…

Oxbow lakes

It beggars belief that so much time was spent teaching you that some lakes are shaped slightly like beans. Or, more correctly, an obsolete harness for a castrated bull. We invented the tractor ages ago, you know. Your Year 9 teacher was full of shit.

Shakespeare quotes

You had to rote learn them for exams, but let’s see how useful knowing ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head’ is when you’ve got to change the tyre on a Vauxhall Astra on a busy A-road.

Pythagoras’ theorem

If school’s to believed, triangles are going to play an incredibly important role in your adult life. Well, unless you’re a mathematician or a pyramid architect this is horseshit. But you’ll still have nonsense about hypotenuses popping into your head while you’re trying to remember your PIN in Tesco.

Planets in the solar system

Knowing the order of the planets in the solar system might be helpful if you ever appear on a quiz show. But failing that, it is utterly irrelevant to your daily life to know that Uranus is further from the sun than Saturn. ‘Uranus’ isn’t even sidesplittingly hilarious once you’re older than 35.

The periodic table

There are the names of some 100 metals and gases rattling around your head. Having the word ‘cadmium’ pointlessly burned into your brain, without even really knowing what it is, is the reason you can never remember your niece’s name. 

How to throw a javelin

Not being a hunter-gatherer or an Olympian, teaching children to ‘correctly’ hurl spears across a field was a waste of time. There’s a slim chance Brexit food shortages might make hunting with a spear relevant again, but you were rubbish at it anyway. 

Hieroglyphics

For some bizarre reason, when you were so young you could barely write in your actual first language, you were made to spend several weeks learning how to copy a select few hieroglyphs. Now, even if you discovered time travel, you’d be busy getting rich from it, not visiting Ancient Egypt and contracting plagues.

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