Except as a private member of Parliament he is as dead as a dodo. The flightless dodo was first discovered on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius in the late 16th Century.
The earliest record I can find of 'as dead as a dodo' is a reprint of a story from a Liverpool newspaper in the Bangor Daily Whig And Courier, May 1891: There are citings of the phrases 'as rare as the dodo' in the 1860s and in the 1870s we find 'as extinct as a dodo'. Lewis Carroll used the Dodo as a character in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865, and it was the popularity of this book that led to the widespread use of the phrase 'as dead as a dodo'. Discoveries of skeletal remains of the birds have enabled biologists to reconstruct their form, which is now thought to be somewhat more slender then the familiar representations. a Dodo and why is it dead in an idiom Here you'll find a quick, animated explanation of the idiom with an example to make the meaning. There are no precise pictorial records of live dodos and paintings of them date from after 1662.
It's a good job we didn't choose 'as dead as a coelacanth'. The extinction of the species is attributed to the introduction of domestic animals to Mauritius following the first visits to the island by the Portuguese in 1507 and the later settlement by the Dutch - although the species was thought to be then already in decline. It was native to Mauritius the last live specimen was seen in 1662 and they are thought to have died out completely by 1690. The dodo was a flightless bird somewhat like a turkey. What's the origin of the phrase 'As dead as a dodo'? Similes What's the meaning of the phrase 'As dead as a dodo'?.
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