Miles Kington: Why not combine two great Christmas institutions into one?

Widow Twankey may not be everyone's idea of the Virgin Mary, but she too is a worried mother with laundry problems and an unusual child

There are two great Christmas entertainment traditions which are, I think, unusually British, namely, the pantomime and the school Nativity Play.

Well, there are lots of others, of course; there's the old Handel's Messiah show, and the TV Christmas Special, and the midnight mass, and the candles'*'carols festival, and the New Year's Cash for Titles List, but the two I keep coming back to are the school Nativity play and the panto, because I have a dream, ladies and gentlemen, and my dream is none other than to combine these two great institutions in one masterpiece called Jesus the Panto!

My initial vision of this theatrical blockbuster is based, almost certainly, on the opening scenes of Aladdin. Widow Twankey may not be everyone's idea of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but she too is a worried mother with lots of laundry problems, an absentee father and an unusual child, so I have no difficulty seeing her appear in the opening scene, crying helplessly: "Jesus? Jesus? Oh, where is that dratted lad!"

It is only after that that I have any difficulty. Truth to tell, that is as far as I can really get. Which probably explains why my masterpiece Jesus the Panto! has never seen the light of day.

I do occasionally get glimpses of other scenes. Sometimes Joseph the Carpenter finds that Jesus has made a botch of all his jobs and needs a miracle to get straight again. Then Abanazar turns up out of the blue to tempt Jesus rather as Satan did in the original ...

But the only hint of a breakthrough in this perpetual writer's gridlock came this very last weekend, with the announcement that Tony Blair was going to be received into the Catholic Church. It occurred to me suddenly that I might have been chasing the wrong plot after all. Not Aladdin. But Dick Whittington. Not even Dick, but Boy Blair. Boy Blair is making his way to London to seek his fortune with his trusty cat Cherie ...

Blair: Gosh, Cherie, look! The whole of London spread out before us like ... like ...

Cherie: A map of London?

Blair: Yes!

Cherie: Showing at least 85 constituencies waiting to turn red and go Labour?

Blair: Yes!

Cherie: Thus preparing to sweep you into power over the whole country?

Blair: Yes! ... I say, Puss, isn't this a bit serious for a panto?

Cherie: Think so? You wait till the bit where God takes over ....

And sure enough, Boy Blair is taken on as an apprentice in London and sent abroad in charge of a merchant ship to Italy, where Cherie comes to his rescue during a plague of mice ...

Blair: Well done, Puss! That was jolly lucky having you along to hunt down those mice and kill them all! That certainly seemed to please the master of this palace, the man they call the ... the ...

Cherie: The Pope.

Blair: Yes. He seemed very nice, by the way.

And so, before you can say Monsignor Jack Robinson, Boy Blair becomes a Catholic and does his very first confession.

Priest: My son, tell me what sins you have committed.

Blair: None.

Priest: None? None at all? Ever?

Blair: No.

Priest: Extraordinary. Tell me more.

Blair: All right, well, perhaps sins have been committed. This much we know. But those who have been responsible for the committing of these sins have been singled out, and dealt with, and fired, and forgiven and rehired, and everyone has moved on since then.

Priest: So you have no sins at all you want to tell me about.

Blair: Look, I think I have already explained that we have been into all this and now we have drawn a line under all that, and it is now all finished, and it really is time to move on and tackle the future and not look back the whole while, because where on earth does it get you trying to point the finger of blame in retrospect the whole time?

Priest: Fair enough.

Blair: Gosh, this confession business is really easy!

Oh dear we seem to have lost sight of Jesus in all this. Back to the drawing board, I'm afraid ...