Politician’s Family Crushed To Learn He Plans To Spend More Time With Them

By Paul Duncan on January 24, 2020 • ( 2 Comments )

Despite having just convinced more than 30,000 relative strangers to vote for him in the last election, through a combination of fear-mongering, bribery, and empty promises to return them to a time that never existed, local Mariposa politician Jean Dough today discovered that his own family’s motivation for casting a ballot in his favour was to keep him out of their lives as much as possible.

Awkwardly for everyone, Mr. Dough learned this immediately after announcing he intended to step aside to spend more time with them.

“It’s not that we don’t love you Dad,” 12-year-old Jane informed her father midway through the press conference he’d called to declare his intention to leave politics to focus on annoying the living shit out of his kin, “We just love you a lot more when you’re working 80 hours a week.”

The rest of the family nodded. Everyone, that is, except Mr. Dough’s wife Maggie, who was momentarily lost in the eyes of her husband’s young assistant, and a fleeting daydream of what it would be like to live on an island too warm for clothes and too remote for rumours.

Jean’s own mother, Judy, was also quick to note that Christmas and one week at the cottage every year were more than enough of seeing her only progeny.

“If I wanted to spend more time with the guy, don’t you think I’d live somewhere closer,” she said from Panama, where she spends half the year, but where she tells Mr. Dough she resides 11 months of the year.

Upon learning that he makes his family’s skin crawl, and that last year they quietly campaigned to have him named the ambassador to Antarctica, Mr. Dough declared that he was undeterred in his intention to inflict Forced Family Fun on his “team” for the foreseeable future.

“If I gave up that easily, do you think I would be quitting today?” he asked the surrounding reporters, in what appeared to be an oddly self-defeating line of questioning, given that this was precisely what he had called the press conference for.

“Oh no, I am resolved. Despite my mother living in Panama year round, my children attending school from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM every day, and my wife being signed up for an almost unbelievable amount of yoga classes, I am henceforward retiring from politics to spend time with my favourite constituents. All of whom love it when I call them that.”

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