After the events of the past week - Tories lying down with Labour, aggressive homosexuals, divisions over Europe - I wanted to write a personal note to explain how none of this is my fault.
It's the donkeys'.
I have been a swivel-eyed Loon for 25 years. Some time after I joined I was introduced to other Loons and for the first time in my life felt accepted and relatively sane. It was good to know there were other people who, like me, wanted to sit in makeshift campaign headquarters wearing tinfoil hats and humming in D sharp to keep the gays away.
We have been together through good times and bad; we saw the other Loons get in on a landslide in 1997 because we were so hopelessly obsessed with re-enacting the Second World War, and we seized power in 2010 even though no-one had voted for us which in many other situations would have led to either a new election or a ground invasion by the Americans.
(It's all right though - at least we don't have any chemical weapons! Unless you count Eric Pickles!)
But this is more than a working relationship. It is a deep and lasting co-dependent psychosis, not unlike that reportedly shared by murderous GP Harold Shipman and his wife Primrose. If one of us tells the other one something often enough we'll end up believing it.
We believe that everyone should be able to get on in life if they have family friends who can get them easy, well-paid jobs; we look after those we went to school with; that it's family and community and covering up your love-children that matter; that a dose of lithium is worth more than a ton of things learned from books; that Britain is a great and proud nation that really needs stricter governesses, fewer newspapers and for gays just to get back in that closet where we can cruise them without our wives finding out.
Above all, we Loons believe you change things by criticising stuff we don't understand from our armchairs like artificially-inseminated gay donkey queens who aren't prepared to get on their dykes and actually LOOK for work like our fathers did.
Across the country you will find people like us quietly doing their bit to make everything less sensible. It was people like us that ensured gays couldn't get married years ago, and had to have a special 'Seville partnership' which was only recognised in some regions of Spain and gave them all the legal protection of being locked up in an institution for their own safety.
Time and again, we have stood for Loony values by arguing that true equality comes from everyone being as bonkers as us, and that if they're not then they're promoting inequality by trying to be all sane and logical. It's no good pointing out Norman Tebbit can't marry his daughter under opposite sex marriage laws so there's no reason for him to go overboard if same sex marriage is introduced: that would be denying his born-Loony nature, and it's oppressing us.
That's why I am proud to lead you. I am proud of your utter inability to connect with the people who pay for and refuse to vote for you. I am proud of the way you take logic and turn it into piffle, and I would never have around me those who sneered or thought otherwise. We are a team, from the parish asylum to the Westminster madhouse, and I will never forget it.
Loons have always been a broad church and we will never agree on anything. Especially not Europe, which sector of the poor to demonise first, what kind of price we could get for the NHS and whether it wouldn't be better in the long run to have Boris Johnson's gentleman sausage cut off and replaced with Michael Gove's head. Perhaps he'd keep his trousers up that way!
But we can shout from the rooftops about how far we've already come, which is out of our cells, through several locked doors and onto the roof where there's a charming collection of artisan tiles to hurl down onto the peasants below and plenty of incendiary material in the shape of sheets, books, NHS fake boobs, Gerald Howarth and other things aggressive homosexuals will want to get their hands on next. I'm going to leave that with Norman, he's got the matches.
And we can be clear about where we're going, too. We are engaged in a great fight to convince people we're charmingly ditzy rather than dangerously unbalanced, to teach children Lunacy in schools, to fix our welfare system so that no-one pays into it and no-one can claim it and we can all sit and look at it and think that it's great. And yes, we have a policy on Europe that is right for our country. We're going to wait for them to invade Poland again and then let all the plumbers go home.
Amid all the Loony-bashing which is sadly so fashionable these days remember this: that donkeys can kill. They can become increasingly aggressive, surround you, demand the right to marry and have IVF on the NHS then hurl you to the ground, trample and maul you so that it looks like you've been torn apart by wolves and forced to marry your own son for inheritance tax purposes.
We have committed to a referendum on a nationwide culling programme for
So to those reading this, here is my message: there will always be criticism from non-Loons, people whose eyes point in roughly the same direction and can't see the sidelines as well as we do. But we must remember what we have always been about: acting like complete arseholes in our own self-interest, preferably while having access to a moat, tennis court, swimming pool and state-funded cleaning lady.
Our task today is to hold on until 2015 while making as much of a mess as we can so that Loons can stand tall again and I can go on to make a fortune on the international lecture circuit. We have a job to do for our country, and we must do it together - right here, at the edge of the roof, where we can wave at all the people looking at us and shaking their heads.
Now all we need to do is hold hands and jump and we will LIVE FOREVER!
Who's with me?