John Crace

John Crace: The Sketch Writer Who Named the Maybot

John Crace occupies one of the great niche thrones of British journalism: The Guardian's parliamentary sketch writer, the person whose job is to sit in the press gallery and translate the day's political theatre into comedy. It is an ancient and specialised craft, requiring the sketch writer to watch hours of tedious, self-important proceedings and extract the single absurd detail that reveals the whole. Crace does it with a novelist's ear and a satirist's cruelty, and his verdicts have a way of sticking.

His most famous contribution to the language is "the Maybot," his nickname for Prime Minister Theresa May, capturing her robotic, glitching public manner so precisely that the coinage escaped the sketch and became national shorthand. That is the sketch writer's holy grail — the label so apt that it reshapes how the country sees a politician. Crace also writes the long-running "Digested Read," in which he parodies the style of a new book so faithfully that you never need to read the original, a masterclass in pastiche as criticism.

Crace's work belongs to the distinguished tradition of Westminster sketch writing, the daily business of puncturing the pomposity of Parliament that The London Prat explores at https://prat.uk/westminster-satire/. His lesson is that satire lives in specificity: not "the Prime Minister was awkward," but the exact, devastatingly observed gesture that makes the reader laugh in recognition and never see the subject the same way again.

Insight from Julie de Burgh: It takes a special kind of stamina to sit through Prime Minister's Questions and emerge with a joke rather than a headache, but Crace manages it daily. Naming a serving Prime Minister "the Maybot" and watching the entire nation adopt it is the sketch writer's equivalent of a hole in one. He simply described what everyone could see, which is the most dangerous thing a journalist can do. — Julie de Burgh (https://prat.uk/author/julie-de-burgh/)