Conservative strategists gawp at their end-of-year opinion-poll ratings like European space officials watching another Ariane rocket plop into the ocean off French Guiana. Fret not! To misquote Emperor Hirohito, electoral fortunes may have developed not necessarily to their advantage, but extinction could yet be averted by adopting the following measures:

• Be more cheerful and stop Rishi doing his ‘your cat just died’ voice.
• Scrap the government car service and tell ministers to take National Express coaches or hitchhike. Give National Express coach drivers a small pourboire as compensation for having to accept these difficult new passengers.
• Short, sharp Bill to remove the last hereditary peers from the Lords. Bishops to be given the heave-ho, too. Tell them to concentrate on their empty churches.
• If Justin Welby retires, replace him with the Revd Marcus Walker, Rector of Great St Bart’s, possibly the last rightie in the Church of England.
• No more knighthoods for mandarins.
• But a damehood to Nadine Dorries. For services to fiction. She won’t get the joke.
• Abandon this new custom of the Prime Minister’s New Year message. Nobody listens to them. Instead say ‘you hear enough from politicians the rest of the year, so we’re leaving you in peace for once’. Immediate poll bounce.
• Grade II* listing for Dame Margaret Beckett.
• Met Office to stop naming every storm that sweeps in from the Atlantic or North Sea. This has only added to media hysteria about the weather. Met instead to give numbers to these storms. This can be done in the name of Rishi’s boring numeracy drive.
• Sponsored swearing match between James Cleverly and the Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan. A soap firm to sponsor it. Proceeds to HM Treasury.
• Ask Penny ‘Brunhilde’ Mordaunt, in one of her bracing speeches, to attack the VAR system that’s ruining football and rugby.
• Turn Parliament Square into a cricket pitch for evening fixtures in summer months.
• Invite the new President of Argentina, Benny Hill-lookalike Señor Milei, to London for a state visit. He looks a blast. Might chase Lady Hussey round the Buckingham Palace gardens.
• Next time Just Stop Oil protestors climb an M25 gantry, leave them there for days.
• Drop any talk of banning protest marches/dog breeds/vaping/unhealthy foods etc. Bans are for socialists and Reform party poujadists. Tories should live and let live.
• When replacing police cars, let them be Sunderland-built Nissan Micras, not top-range BMWs.
• Repeal the ridiculous ban on household coal.
• Release schools from the requirement to give sex education classes. Instead teach pupils cooking/manners/whistling/all three verses of the national anthem.
• Any future training weekends for the judiciary to be held in Rwanda.
• Andrew Mitchell to have a haircut.
• In a commendable surrender of patronage, the next BBC chairman to be chosen not by Downing Street but by an X-Factor-style TV show.
• Instead of former RAF bases in Lincolnshire, send asylum-seekers to Canary Wharf, which has lots of empty space. Horrible place, yes. But isn’t that the point?
• Sell the office space abandoned by WFH civil servants.
• Turn the Woolsack into a Whoopee Cushion, so that it makes a sound every time that goose the Lord Speaker sits down.
• Decent tailor to measure the PM for some spacious Oxford bags rather than those budgie-crunchers.
• Arrange dinner date between Michael Gove and Italian PM Giorgia Meloni. A little bilateral come sta tuo padre? might cheer them both up and boost Anglo-Italian trade.
• Theresa May to become minister for fun.
• In an intriguing test case for equalities law, offer Harriet Harman a baronetcy.
• Rename the London Underground’s Circle line the Whitehall line – it just goes round and round, incredibly slowly.
• Cut taxes with one exception: a new levy on supermarket self-checkouts.
• Tell British Transport Police every time they play ‘See It, Say it, Sorted’ on Tannoys, £1,000 will be removed from their budget.
• Legalise heckling in the Supreme Court.
• Organise point-to-points in London’s Hyde Park, complete with bookies and a beer tent.
• Abandon focus groups. Strategy advisers instead to sit in barber shops and nail bars, listening to punters.
• When civil servants offer statistics in kilometres, instruct them to use miles.
• An hour’s free parking daily in market towns and at hospitals.
• Place solar panels all over the National Theatre building.
• Replace Whitehall lawn-mowers with goats.
• Seek refund from Lord Foster for his wonky Millennium Bridge.
• Enough Honorary Colonel nonsense. Princess Anne to be made an Honorary Sergeant-Major and encouraged to grow a moustache.
• No more ‘tsars’.
• Job swap for Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, and Nigel Phillips, governor of St Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha.
• Plough up parkland at Chequers, Chevening and Dorneywood for use as public allotments.
• Send the Elgin Marbles to the Turks.
• Encourage every Whitehall department to adopt a cat.
• Departing MPs and ministers no longer to receive payoffs.
• Abandon resignation honours.
• Pass a statutory instrument saying the next Poet Laureate must be able to do rhymes.