On election day in 2010, Nigel Farage had his plane crash. It was funny and also rubbish – two things that a plane crash shouldn’t be.
In the February of 2019, Ross Thompson, the former Conservative member for Aberdeen South, got drunk in a House of Commons bar and started grabbing men’s genitals. Which ran counter to parliamentary protocol and was also rubbish – two things that the venerated Palace of Westminster shouldn’t be.
And on last week’s Strictly, at the behest of the show’s racist viewers, hard Brexit call girl Sir Bill Cash MP wore a gilded jockstrap as he performed his sex paso doble to the Jason Donovan hit ‘Nothing Can Divide Us’, right on Anton Du Beke and his stupid, Brexit-shaped face, which 17.4 million people then voted for.
It was the philosopher Mungo Jerry, in his meditation upon driving drunk and shagging women, who declared that ‘In the summertime when the weather is hot, you can stretch right up and touch the sky.’ But it’s not summertime now. It’s dark outside, and the streets are full of old dears slipping on black ice and discarded leaflets with Jo Swinson’s Aga-baked expression on them. Mungo Jerry, an open bottle of bourbon in the footwell, cruising round Brexitland in his penis-shaped Ford Cortina in the rain – he’s not gonna dig that, is he? And then there’s Little Lord FauntleFuck, cruising round Brexitland in his penis-shaped election charabanc. ‘If her daddy’s rich take her out for a meal. If her daddy’s poor just do what you feel.’ ‘In the Summertime’, or Boris Johnson’s campaign slogan? Is life genuinely no better than a shit tune from the ‘70’s?
When it comes to principle FauntleFuck is famously unburdened. Life for him is one big theme park, filled with privilege and vaginas. Every day he wakes to the knowledge that he is Boris Johnston, and whilst for most of us that would be enough to have us skewered to our beds in a k-hole of shame and self-loathing, FauntleFuck is untroubled by such notions, instead pouring himself into his Spiderman romper suit as he begins to climb his own ego, like a Fathers 4 Justice protester from a Julian Fellowes netherworld.
This is election capital. Johnson’s integrity vacuum comes pre-loaded, so it doesn’t really matter if he’s saying ‘Build more hospitals,’ or ‘Dead in a ditch’ or ‘Ooh, look, balloons,’ because he exists purely in the moment. He’s the poster star for the big boy that did it then ran away; all those lost Commons votes, illegal prorogations, farcical Queen’s speeches and purgings of his Europhilic parliamentary underbelly – Dominic Cummings did that. Cummings, who earlier in his career played a horny alien in Tim Burton’s 1996 McCarthyism pastiche Mars Attacks!, reportedly without make-up or special effects.
Jeremy Corbyn, who hates the Jews and who ran a dissident Republican sleeper cell back when Mungo Jerry was a thing, believes in words and their meanings. Which is terribly old-fashioned of him. FauntleFuck, who was paid actual money by the Daily Telegraph to keep him out of trouble, used to stuff his weekly comic strip with words detached entirely from meaning, like a free-jazz performance for cunts, and so they made him Prime Minister to show their gratitude.
Back in the 2017 election, when we were young and our heart was an open book, the Labour manifesto performed a robust impersonation of a costed, left-of-centre, neo-liberalism handbrake. But it did so by using words, not some pre-schooler’s drawings of Donald Tusk burning at the stake for being a witch, or Greta Thunberg burning at the stake for being a witch, or some actual witches, camped out across the gender spectrum, all advocating the redistribution of wealth as they burn at the stake for being a witch, so we got Theresa May instead, and then Boris Johnson, who likes to put his flabby penis into pretty ladies then have ice cream for his tea.
This time around the Labour manifesto will perform a robust impersonation of a costed, left-of-centre, neo-liberalism handbrake, just with the bits about Brexit redacted, or individually defaced by Len McCluskey. No-one will read it. There won’t be time, what with all the politics of envy thinkpieces by algorithm I have to fire off for The Spectator, and Jo Swinson’s Aga-baked expression, and Michael Gove, who is a real, genuine man, and not the featured article in a medieval demonology textbook.
Elsewhere, and there’s a pair of Kremlin sex bot Nigel Farage’s skid-marked y-fronts free for every reader, only in tomorrow’s Daily Express. Farage is demanding a fully deregulated Aryan Brexit, plus two-hundred fags and the right to have asbestos in his full English, and to get it has a crack troupe of dribbling gammoneers that he’ll unleash on every constituency in the land. Or maybe not – perhaps he’ll have a token gesture instead, up north, in one of those dreary towns the press are obsessed with because Ilkley Moor and whippets and vox pops from the British Legion. But that’s what Faragism is; an inability to follow through on itself, not fascist enough for the bootboys, not serious enough to get the free market frot-fraternity onside, operating in a fetid, unctuous loop of its own clickbait, its own Brexit filth, full of turds and Ian Botham sex videos.
The Brexit Party, in journalistic parlance, is a side dish; it may be an important and nutritional accompaniment to the story, but it’s probably just a stale bread roll with some sautéed cockroach on top. Same with tactical voting and the Lib Dem/Green/Plaid Cymru/used-to-be-a-Tory-but-ain’t any-longer circle-jerk thing, where they’re standing aside for each other in seats such as Borsetshire South and Dunny-on-the-Wold (and hopefully remembering that they shouldn’t all be standing aside at the same time).
Bang! Dunny-on-the-Wold! That’s a Blackadder gag, straight from the chuckle mines of 1987. In fact, this whole sorry screed uses humour – or its distant, distressed relative “humour” – to make a series of strained points of borderline relevance about a general election in which the fuck-you framework of social injustice – food bank use, the slashed public services and the dehumanisation of the welfare system – comes second, or third, or eighty-ninth on the agenda to satisfying 17.4 million little Englander fantasies about setting fire to Guy Verhofstadt’s fringe, the crispy-scalped Tintin botherer.
This election won’t solve Brexit. It’s not simply the feedback howl of legislative dissonance – Withdrawal Bills, free-trade deals, confirmatory referenda, Jo Swinson’s expression. No; Brexit is too pernicious. Too embedded within our psyche to merely let go. The other day I sat atop the railway embankment and threw fifty pence pieces at some Remainers. Not just any fifty pence pieces, but the long-since withdrawn, 1973 coin, commemorating our ascendency to the European Common Market. I like to think that the Remainers appreciated such commitment to detail as they dug the heptagonal shrapnel from their bloody foreheads, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
And on the ferry to Mull, wind scudding flat against the Sound, the castle at Ardtornish slinking into the gloom behind us, I thought about the SNP and a vista free of Westminster oppression. I thought about the Labour party and its strange propensity for self-immolation. I thought about Nigel Farage, England’s Rose, never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in. And I thought about Little Lord FauntleFuck, as a child, pulling his nanny’s pinny aside and inserting his moral compass right up her bum, which come to think of it seems like a curious place to put it; how would he be telling right from wrong?
Oh, FauntleFuck. It’s all so tawdry, all so cheap, and a twenty, thirty, forty seat Tory majority lurks well within pollster margin of error. I caught up with Mungo Jerry the other day. The decades of touring the countryside, drunk and aroused, had clearly caught up with him, and as he sat there, ten thirty in the morning, weeping silently into the Wetherspoons full English that neither Farage nor Tim Martin had put asbestos in, he wasn’t all that certain that his youthful indiscretions were time well spent.
‘I rode that particular vibe for quite a while,’ he admitted. ‘I was young, free, the country lanes full of ladies, some with daddies who were rich, and some with daddies who were not, like in a song, or a Boris Johnson campaign trail.
‘But then all that Pernod and the service station sausage rolls and the driving about – they began to take their toll, what with the daddies who weren’t rich having their Universal Credit sanctioned, and the other daddies who weren’t rich having their permanent residency application thrown out, and yet more daddies, who had lots of money but all of it channelled via quasi-governmental outfits in Moscow back streets, and I thought to myself…’
But he didn’t continue, and after a while I realised it was time for me to leave.
‘Who are you voting for?’ I asked, pulling on my coat.
‘The Liberal Democrats,’ he slurred.
‘Any particular reason?’ He looked up at that point, but through me, not at me, an expression free of hope, and I could tell that we were in for a hard road before December played out.
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