March of the Lemmings Page 12
‘These greetings cards are sure to be top-sellers,’ I told Dacre. A photo of columnist Quentin Letts disgorges the opinion, ‘Middle-class parents are middle-class because they have learned what it takes to succeed. Happy Birthday.’ Sarah Vine opines, ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg is worth far more than the flaccid consensus of the commissars of political correctness. Merry Christmas.’10
And a sepia-toned card of the first Viscount Rothermere, the paper’s 1930s proprietor, declares, in Daily Mail font, ‘I urge all British young men and women to study the Nazi regime in Germany. There is a clamorous campaign of denunciation against “Nazi atrocities” which consist merely of a few isolated acts of violence, but which have been generalised, multiplied and exaggerated to give the impression that Nazi rule is a bloodthirsty tyranny. Congratulations on passing your driving test.’
In order to annoy politically correct prudes and killjoys, I had arranged for the darkest recesses of Paperchase to showcase a range of naughty, but saucy and harmless, adult Daily Mail-themed items. The paper’s star columnist and author of 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, Quentin Letts, had agreed to lend his image to a fun range of used female sanitary products, Quentin Lil-Letts.
Meanwhile, the vibrating head of the Daily Mail royal columnist Robert Hardman crowns the novelty ‘Hardman’ Sphincter Stimulator; and a special brass hammer, designed for nailing your own penis to a table, was to be called the Paul Dacre Nail Your Own Penis to a Table Hammer.
Dacre actually laughed himself silly at the final few strips in my Fred Basset book. In the end, the beagle just looks on bemused, while his squatting owner simply scrapes his own human foulness directly from his own bottom himself, to deposit through the offending immigrants’ door; until the climactic strip, where, perching atop a brass bust of Jan Moir,11 Fred Basset’s owner defecates directly into the immigrants’ letterbox, with a triumphant cry of, ‘Brexit Means Brexit! Now get back to Bongo Bongo-land!’12
‘We’re looking at a massive hit,’ said Dacre, his Calippo melting in his excited hand. And then the phone rang. The Paperchase partnership was off. ‘Sorry, son. You get yourself a coffee, and I’ll tidy your samples away,’ said Dacre, kindly. When I came back, my novelties were bagged, but I could hear Dacre in his private bathroom, squealing and using an electric toothbrush, so I left.
When I got home, I unpacked my futile creations. All present and correct, except the Robert Hardman probe. Never mind. It’s not like this deal is going anywhere fast.
Reading this piece reminded me of the time I was driving along a winding road in Malaysia and was suddenly confronted by a local tribesman wearing his native clothes, carrying some small dead animals and armed with a blowpipe. Sitting in my air-conditioned car it was hard to imagine how he must live his simple if precarious lifestyle. So it is with the type of humour which leaves me absolutely straight-faced but apparently packs them in to theatres in London and elsewhere. It belongs to another civilisation and I can’t begin to relate to it I’m afraid. Lurking Class Hero
‘As a proud member of the “metropolitan liberal elite”™’ Translated: Lives in London, enjoys virtue signalling and was educated at private school and Oxbridge. Summary: middle class tosser. Jaunchito
Just watched this virtue signaller on Youtube. Totally UNFUNNY! Political Correctness is just so pass. Weary Wanderer
I think it’s terrific that the Guardian has one of their standby Oxbridge comics always ready to rip the piss out of Mail/Trump/Leavers etc., but it all seems to be getting a little bit desperate now. Perhaps if there had been a little less sneering from the ‘clever’ types, the Mail would have less readers, Trump less votes and we might still be in Europe, too late now, carry on sneering. Simba’s Dad
The pure hate this man exudes of everyone who has a different opinion to him really is rather disturbing. Hala123
Lee has always confused smarm with satire, which is why he plays so well to the echo-chamber and its right-on readership. And let’s face it, smarm in this context, is little more than gentrified hate, an opportunity to sneer at the unsophisticated thinking of the masses and their choice of media. Knockdownginger
1 Fred Basset is a cartoon basset hound created by the late Alex Graham. His suburban dog adventures have run in the Daily Mail since 1963. Fred’s male owner travels to work in the City of London each day and plays golf. His female owner is a stay-at-home housewife. The strips contain minimal topical references, and each three-frame story is unrelated to the next. While charming, they explore few of the possibilities offered by the medium, apart from a strange period in the mid-’70s, when Fred fantasised about killing his owners, a series of dream sequences depicting their deaths in a variety of ever more lurid and sadistically sexual ways.
2 Winterval was the catch-all name for a series of pan-denominational events held in Birmingham in November and December 1997, which gave rise to the pervasive alt-right foundation myth that politically correct killjoys have banned Christmas. In 2011, the Daily Mail’s Melanie Phillips agreed to a correction, noting that Winterval was not intended to replace Christmas. The myth of Winterval was even cited in the Leveson Inquiry as an example of the press’s lack of responsibility.
3 … as exploited by Joel Morris and Jason Hazely of Bollocks to Alton Towers repute, who first explored the idea in their Framley Examiner local newspaper parody in the early 2000s.
4 It’s such a thin line between people power and left-wing bullying.
5 When I met my wife, she was temping, between acting work and stand-up gigs, on the showbiz section of the Daily Mail and had also been working as an unofficial aide to one of the paper’s former star writers, who was now unwell (she appears uncredited in a photo of him visiting a Catholic shrine that appeared in an authorised biography). Wisely, my future wife realised she could not tell me she worked for the Daily Mail, as the paper had, at that point, been instrumental in sabotaging my career, such as it was, and essentially rendering me destitute. Because she was so cagey about the source of her income, I assumed it was derived from amoral earnings (which it was, ironically, but not in the way I imagined), and yet I still loved her, and was prepared to accommodate this. The upside of this is, fifteen years later, if they ever come for me, I know where the bodies are buried, and who buried them.
6 I had never heard of coddled eggs until Jeremy Corbyn said he liked to eat them, when he was a guest on a 2017 edition of Celebrity Gogglebox. I googled ‘coddled eggs’, liked the sound of them, and whenever we were on our travels subsequently, we kept our eyes skinned for egg coddlers in charity shops. Our first were a pair we picked up in the town of Coleford, in the Forest of Dean, and now we have five egg coddlers, including two in a velvet-lined presentation box. Coddled eggs are not the kind of fast food you can whip up on a schoolday, but at weekends I like to experiment with adding different ingredients to the basic egg – mushrooms, leeks, hot chilis – before submerging the egg coddlers in boiling water, and now coddled eggs are one of the family’s favourite breakfast treats. And all thanks to Marxist firebrand and terrorist sympathiser Jeremy Corbyn, who should perhaps think about fronting his own coddled egg-based reality TV show, Celebrity Coddlebox!
7 I don’t think the bad-sex novelist Christopher Hart even believes the things he has written about me. He’s just a hack who has to fill space in the style he imagines his current employer expects, a process I attempt to parody, while also fulfilling it to the letter, in the Observer.
8 This is a genuine example of Hart’s sex writing. Oddly, thinking of Ranulph Fiennes during coitus is, for me, a tried and tested method of delaying ejaculation.
9 Less than a year after this column was written, anti-Brexit editor Geordie Greig was put in charge of the Daily Mail, presumably in order to detoxify it. If Brexit turns out to be as bad as experts think, then it would be wise for the paper’s shareholders to put some clear water between the Daily Mail and the catastrophe it helped cause.
10 Real quotes, obviously.
11 For
years, Jan Moir was the Mail’s most reliable sluice of calculatedly provocative opinion, making up a load of stupid wank about me, for example, in 2011, but she seems to have lost her mojo of late and has manufactured little real outrage since around 2013. Suggesting, without any proof, that Boyzone’s Stephen Gately’s death was due to his ‘lifestyle’, in 2009, was probably her career highpoint, the equivalent of my ‘Paul Nuttalls from the Ukips’ routine, and Moir has found it hard to maintain that level of uncut hate since. The trick, as the former pop star Julian Cope once told me, is to push through being a has-been and onwards into being a legend. You go, girl!
12 UKIP’s Godfrey Bloom put Bongo Bongo-land back on the map in August 2017, the country having been forgotten since it was last mentioned by the columnist Taki, in a 2004 piece for the Spectator, obviously. Ironically, in the decade or so that it was off the radar, Bongo Bongo-land had thrived, mining a powerful mineral called vibranium and evolving into a democratic state that combined traditional values with cutting-edge technology, in a style best described as Afro-Futurism. Bongo Bongo-land’s King T’Challa invited Godfrey Bloom to stay in the country and have his prejudices confounded, but he, of course, declined to visit.
Can Harry and Meghan make Britain whole again?
3 December 2017
In 2005, the then twenty-year-old Prince Harry appeared as a Nazi at a fancy-dress party. Perhaps the uniform had been inherited from his great-great-uncle, Edward VIII, who was not averse to a spot of recreational Sieg Heiling.
But next year Prince Harry is to marry the mixed-race descendant of a black American slave, his wedding garments scrupulously stripped of any stray swastikas. Cosmic order is restored.
Has the prince nobly taken upon himself the symbolic role of a healing force in our rapidly unravelling world, which is suddenly riven with the sort of open racism and fears of nuclear annihilations that we had assumed had been laid to rest? I’m all for ’70s and ’80s revivals, but these aren’t the parts of my childhood I feel nostalgic for. A Fab lolly, an Altered Images twelve-inch remix and a vibrant trade union movement would have done.
Today, we need the hope that the forthcoming royal nuptials offer more than ever. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s marriage could be a healing ritual for our ruined land, a joining of races that fascists would have us divide. But of course, the racist writing has been on the wall for years.
In 1965, during Eric Clapton’s tenure in John Mayall’s Blues-breakers, the phrase ‘Clapton Is God’ began to be grafittied around London. But in 1966, Jimi Hendrix arrived in the city, and Clapton was usurped, a seething Salieri to Hendrix’s soaring Mozart.
Ten years later, on stage in Birmingham, a drunken Clapton praised Enoch Powell and declared, ‘Get the foreigners out, get the wogs out, get the coons out. Keep Britain white.’1 The Rock Against Racism movement was formed soon after his pronouncement, and The Stranglers brought cavorting strippers on stage with them to smash racism at a Victoria Park RAR concert. Different times.2
Today, western world leaders openly praise neo-Nazis, but instead of forming a grass-roots rock’n’roll resistance, young people remain passively plugged into their PS4s playing Pac-Man Go, waiting for their brain-dead fuck-buddies to come round with some pacifying bong-weed, I expect, while laughing at You-net films of people gobbling down more cinnamon than is necessary, squandering bakers’ dwindling spice reserves.
There’s currently a cynical viral marketing campaign for Clapton’s forthcoming Hyde Park show that sees the ancient phrase ‘Clapton Is God’ sprayed all around London once more by paid PR vandals. I have prepared a stencil saying, ‘Clapton is an alcoholic racist,’ but getting it out there doesn’t, at the moment, seem like a great use of time. There are worse people to worry about than Clapton or, to give him his blues name, Mississippi Nigel Farage.
We should have seen all this coming, but I thought the culture wars were won when New Order got John Barnes to do a rap on their 1990 World Cup single. I expect I was too busy being ironically racist in a Shoreditch bar, drinking Grolsch from a pop-top bottle and toasting Tony Blair. It’s not only Eric Clapton who has a shameful past.
Alarm bells should have been ringing. Somewhere around the turn of the century, in the perineal period between the ubiquity of email and the pervasive idiocy tsunami of Twitter, my BNP-voting auntie sent me an attachment, typical of the era, designed to melt my snowflake mind.
It comprised a supposedly scientific study, using history and genetics, to prove that all Muslims were demonstrably culturally and morally inferior, and downright dangerous. Of course, a quick google showed that neither the academic who wrote it nor the institution he worked for had ever existed, a discovery that one would have thought would discredit the piece.
But confronted with this evidence, my auntie just said, ‘All the same, I think it makes a lot of good points.’ How pleased she would be, were she alive today, to know that her research reached the same exacting standards as that of the president of the United States of America.
This morning, on LBC radio, the professional wasps’-nest-poker Nick Ferrari was audibly rattled. Ferrari, a man who is 85 per cent wazzock, and who has made a living out of inflaming the unstable passions of the ‘political correctness has gone mad’ brigade, realised the monster robot he had reared on raw opinion meat and a vapour of Facebook hearsay was now beyond his control and he’d forgotten to install its emergency-stop button.3
Cautiously describing Trump’s Britain First-endorsing missive4 as ‘a tweet too far’, Ferrari suddenly found his white-knuckled listeners largely disagreeing with him and retorting that these videos needed to be aired, whether they were verifiable or not. Could straight-talking Ferrari smell the smoking torches of a previously loyal mob approaching his own mountaintop castle, his Jaguar F-Type aflame on the brick-paved driveway?5
On Monday, as Theresa May cautiously accepted that we will have to pay for EU schemes we were already signed up for, and the inevitable impossibility of the fluid Irish border was at last made flesh, it seemed to me that the wheels had finally fallen off the lie-encrusted Brexit battlebus. But the quiet coup currently enacted by the billionaire tax-avoiders behind Brexit continued its forward motion, as cognitive dissonance drove their brainwashed Leave-voting serfs to misdirect their ongoing anger towards everyone but themselves.6
But Harry knows the power of symbols, and he begins the enactment of a healing ritual. Has Harry, ever the self-aware prankster, chosen the tiny St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, as his wedding venue in a coded satirical message every bit as meaningful as the clearly pro-EU hat his grandmother wore at the opening of Parliament last June?7
In a comic pantomime of self-immolating isolationism, our next National Royal Ceremony will be performed in a room too small to accommodate all those who might have been expected to attend, in a building named after our national saint, a man famous for fighting something that didn’t exist: a dragon as unreal as Boris Johnson’s Daily Telegraph vision of a banana-hating EU. The chapel’s roof is decorated with heraldic animals. Guests might find themselves staring up at a unicorn, which canters away into the mist of myth, as gaseous as an NHS promise, the porous Irish border, the cake that can be eaten and had.
And here come the prince and his scion of slaves, to make us whole again. Meghan Markle. Her name even sounds like ‘Mrs Merkel’, and she symbolises an America far better than Trump’s, a virgin new land coming into conjugal union with a grizzled Britain that, like the prince himself, could still choose to divest itself of its unattractive fascist garments and begin again.
We went to a Stewart Lee gig on our honeymoon. Never laughed so much in my life. The woman next to us was really funny. We stopped laughing when Stewart came on. Weary Wanderer
This man, apparently some form of comic, is a poseur, and his form of humour one that appeals only to people like you. I read the article 3 times, and found no value in it at all, nor did it even once cause me to smile. Maciver
A pr
ince symbolising a feudal system of inherited title and privilege and a celebrity actress … I think our problems run deeper than that lol … is this article for real? The Thoughtful One
St George is the patron saint of England, not Britain. Another columnist who is unconsciously exclusive of the other countries making up these islands. Disappointing how fundamentally these entitled attitudes still thrive. Barbara C McLuskie
‘Alcoholic’ you really want to attack Clapton over that one? I paid good money to see you in Birmingham a couple of years back, you were a little tired and emotional yourself. RobindraJayaJaya
It’s extremely difficult to tell, but apparently, Stewart Lee is a comedian. Druadh
Can Harry and Meghan make Britain whole again? Yes, as long as the progressives doff their caps in deference and know their place and stay firmly in it! A Balrog Has Come
‘Her name even sounds like “Mrs Merkel”, and she symbolises an America far better than Trump’s, a virgin new land’ Wow.. Opinion writer, put these magical rose-tinted glasses for sale on eBay and you’ll make a fortune quickly. Groniady
Can the Guardian please be a little more intelligent than other newspapers and stop writing such drivel. Who the hell cares if two banal and uninteresting people are falling in love, getting engaged and then married? I’d rather see a good film. I think us loyal Guardian readers need you to move on from the most boring subject of the year. Thank you for a future free paparazzi journalism … CFJGaillard
1 To be fair, lots of people said much the same thing in Birmingham in 1976, but they weren’t making a living playing a music derived from the culture of the people they wanted deported. A major ’80s breakthrough with my elderly relatives was their attempt to use the word ‘coloured’ to describe black people, rather than more traditional epithets. Today, one rarely hears the word ‘coloured’, although it is still used accidentally by the Windrush scandal’s mortified Amber Rudd, herself the sometime lover of a ‘coloured’ man.