Private Eye (Cyclops/563) Xmas Special – Where are they now?

It’s Christmas and like the strange man at the back of the night bus Cyclops shows us a worryingly large monster.

As expected, there is a theme and this is spelt out in the preamble:

Running clockwise around the shaded squares are the (first and last) names of nine prominent MPs who lost their seats in the 2015 general Election. A thick line separates each entry; no name starts or ends at a corner square. The (52) letters of these names not intersecting with the normal clue answers are:

AAAAAAAAA CC DDD EEEEEEEEE HH LLL M NNNNN OOO RRR SSSSS T U VVV W Y

So this year the theme is not related to the magazine itself but to a major event of the year trying to scrape some morsel of joy from the absurdity of the results.  After all, what better sport than seeing the powerful humbled.   For instance, few who saw it will forget the scene when Portillo lost his seat in 1997.

At the 2015 General Election there were several big names that lost out, particularly with the wipe-out of the Lib Dems and surge of the SNP in Scotland.

In fact there were 110 sitting MPs who stood for re-election in May 2015 and lost their seat.  More information about them than anyone could want or need can be found here [wiki link]

Before starting the puzzle I wrote down a list of suspects and first among these was Ed Balls.  Eye crossword favourite, he will certainly appear in Cyclops clues and answers for many years to come.  And yes he was there! But not where I first thought (see below).  A few other names I thought of in advance did appear:
Danny Alexander, Simon Hughes, Vince Cable
But most names I thought of did not.  Sad not to see: Mike Hancock, Mark Reckless, George Galloway, David Laws, Charles Kennedy, Jim Murphy.
I admit I also wrote down: Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Ming Campbell, and Sarah Teather
but I now realise they stood down at the election and didn’t actually re-contest their seat.

The Nine were found lurking in the shadowy squares near the edge like some latter-day ringwraithes. In order clockwise from near 6 Down they are:
Lynne Featherstone
Jo Swinson
Ed Davey
Danny Alexander
Esther NcVey
Simon Hughes
Ed Balls
Vince Cable
Anas Sarwar

(All names above are links to their Wiki page)

Solving took a few days.
I started this puzzle on Christmas Eve when I thought I had the time to attack it.  After preparing the list of suspects I got stuck into the clues – I also got stuck into the “Christmas cheer” so I had to call a halt due to general befuddlement.  So in the first day’s play I had only solved about a dozen normal clues but was rather pleased to have put in one ex-MP – Lynne Featherstone.  Not one on my list but once I had a few crossing letters including the Y and N of Lynne she sprang to mind.
Christmas morning I ploughed on through.  The general standard of the clues I found to be a little easier than some Cyclops puzzles, and even if the answer didn’t come immediately they were amenable to giving them a bit of time. Anyway I was taking it gently there was plenty of time – unfortunately there was also a lot of them.
I found the trail of solved clues wiggled down the right hand side of the grid as I solved it.  So soon I found myself looking at 43D and thought the final word in might be SEX, and so it proved, and that gave me a great joy (Alex Comfort, eat your heart out) to put in the first ex-MP off my list: Danny Alexander.
Then soon after I got 62A which put a D as 2nd letter in a 7-letter MP – surely it could only be the one and only Ed Balls!   Time for the Christmas lunch!
You may be surprised to learn that in the magnet household this involves eating and drinking far too much. So we sensibly take a break and delay Christmas Pudding till about 5 p.m. cover it with far too much brandy and eat far too much of it.  This year this meant I fell asleep in front of Dr Who and then slept a further 12 hours straight.  Must’ve been the exertion of trying to solve this puzzle.
So I didn’t get back to the puzzle till sometime on Boxing Day armed with a steely determination to finish it off.
This was a more business-like solving effort and after a while, when I had several crossing letters with the remaining unsolved ex-MPs but couldn’t definitely fit in suspects from my list, I realised I could make use of the provided “52 letters not intersecting” list and started crossing them off – then I found Ed Balls could not go in the bottom right corner because there was no B in the 52!  This was not some much of a set-back as I first thought because it allowed Ed to go in the 7-letter stretch up the left hand side.  So it was not until this 3rd day that I recorded the “first pass” where all clues had been attempted, by which time I only had 3 ex-MPs but still over 20 normal clues to get.  These got solved without too much trouble apart from the very last – 65A OMAGH – and I have to admit to going to Wikipedia’s pages of MPs to get the last ex-MP – Anas Sarwar – (who he?).

Frankly, in the end it seemed a bit of a slog.  I think that was because the puzzle did not seem to be as big as it really is.  This is a 27 x 27 grid which is more than 3 times bigger than a usual 15 x 15, but the clues only go up to 67 which makes it seem as if there is only around a bit more than twice as much to solve.  This is because the shadowy ex-MPs are unclued and caused more trouble than they know.  In many ways I got more out of the clues when writing up the blog – that is usual and one of the reasons I enjoy blogging.

Chaps! Careful when encouraging that hipster beard

From @GingerSlim