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Stealing books from the KLF, Parts 1 and 2

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Part 1

Sometime in c.1994 a fax arrived at the radio station where I worked which had me and my then drinking partner Brian punching the air with anticipatory glee. It invited whoever fancied it to Dublin’s most salubrious nitespot The Pod to hang out with none other than stadium-techno prankster Bill Drummond, who had just a short time before burned his bridges with the music industry and thrown every remaining penny it’d rewarded/bribed him with onto the pyre because whyever not. (You can see the resulting documentary ‘Watch the K Foundation burn a million quid’ here). The event was to mark the publication of a book he’d written about a trip he’d purportedly undertaken to the North Pole in the company of Zodiac Mindwarp (of minor 1980s pop fame). On the evening in question we ambled along and got stuck into the free Canadian beer, chatting with the other liggers who included minor Dublin pop aristocracy such as the erstwhile Paul Wonderful, aka the funniest man in the world, who would just a couple of years later introduce the world to his masterwork Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly. At some point a huge book started to circulate, a version of the work being launched, which was said to be bound in calfskin and to exist in a limited edition of only five copies. It was all a bit silly, and in our mounting giddiness we may have spilled a bit of free beer on some of the pages, which as I recall featured pornographic photos in which the faces of the participants had been replaced with the heads of Disney characters. Our sense of exhilaration at the absurdity of the occasion and the fact of our presence there hit new heights when Bill Drummond himself limped in, accompanied by some bloke wearing a frilly shirt and an expression of considerable self-importance. Emboldened by our or third or was it thirteenth free bottle of Molson Export or was it Big Rock, we pushed through the crowd and introduced ourselves, explaining to Bill (who, I seem to recall, had green teeth) why burning a million pounds was totally the right thing to do, displaying a indepth knowledge of his movements and motivations derived from obsessive lifelong study of the music press and generally (we thought) being uproariously entertaining. At some point it became clear that there were still some other people in the room who wanted to talk to Bill, a fact that Mr Frilly Shirt was keen to stress, but his constant interruptions only prompted Bill to utter the following deathless phrase in his uplands lilt: “Nooo, these are the only interesting people I’ve met all night!”. Confirmed in our ascendency to the position of Coolest People In The World For One Night Only, we continued to celebrate by chugging even more ice-cold free Canadian lager, which served to make the evening even more deliriously exciting, and also to disorient us to the point where we lost contact not only with Bill but with each other, and from the heights of fraternising publicly with one of the world’s hippest human beings (with whom we were, we believed, just on the brink of exchanging contact details in preparation for a joint trip to Shangri-La), the evening descended precipitously into a messy finale of fallen barstools, broken glass, heavy-handed bouncers, and an eventual fine of three thousand pounds imposed on Brian for, with catastrophically ill-judged overexuberance, jumping up and down on one or two cars in the immediate vicinity of Harcourt Street, which is, after all, where Ireland’s largest police station happens to be located. Luckily, by the time the gardaí got involved, I myself was stumbling northwards feeling like I’d been blessed by the Pope of pop himself.

The following morning, buoyed up with starstruck hubris and basically still drunk, I floated into work and bathed in the admiration of my colleagues, some of whom had no idea who Bill Drummond was but seem impressed that I’d managed to survive the whole escapade. Brian hadn’t, in the sense that he now in almost all certainty faced the prospect of having to find a proper job for a few months to pay off his debauchery. At lunchtime we staggered off down Wicklow Street towards a local greasy spoon which we hoped might soak up some of the excess blood in our alcohol streams. As we walked and tried to relive or at least recall the glory of the previous night, we were startled to be violently set upon by one of its protagonists: Bill Drummond’s frilly-shirted assistant, who ran across the street and set about trying to kick us both up the arse while shouting something about a missing book. We were nonplussed, and after some slapstick tomfoolery managed to get him to give up and fuck off. It was only when we got back to work that someone pointed to an article in the gossip section of the hot-off-the-press Evening Herald, which reported that former pop icon Bill Drummond had successfully launched his new book, but that in the process it appeared that someone has stolen a special edition of which there were only five in the world, and that he and his publishers were keen that it be returned in its original condition as soon as possible.

The whole experience was so exciting and so very odd that I promptly forgot to tell one of my very best friends (a fellow KLF enthusiast) about it for several years. When I finally remembered to do so, it turned out to be somewhat serendipitous, because he responded with the following anecdote: 

Part 2

Summer 1999. My girlfriend and I are living on a shared giro of £52.something pence a fortnight. She likes to spend much of this money on brand name suntan lotion which she applies to her entire body, every day, regardless of season. We can scarcely afford to eat, never mind go out and get drunk. She did have very soft skin, though.

We were living in a boring city in the UK where we, alongside our similarly financially endowed friends would seek out any free cultural events, no matter how mundane. So imagine my joy when I saw posters advertising a talk by fucking Bill Drummond from out of the KLF, a band I had loved since the 1980s, for free!

It was taking place in a posh and inevitably boring “brasserie” pub. The premise of the event was thrilling: Drummond had written his autobiography, 45. He was 45 years old at the time and most of the records he’d made played at 45rpm. The book was seven inches square to represent a 7″ single. But this evening, he announced that his publisher’s lawyers had said that twelve anecdotes from his text were unpublishable and as he anyway preferred the twelve inch single to the seven inch, he had decided to self-publish twelve copies of the book with the twelve unpublishable anecdotes published within, in a hardback twelve inch squared format. These twelve books were scattered around various tables at which we were sitting, and by each book was a packet of crayons.

He told us that if we wanted to, we could leaf through the book, read parts, make comments or drawings in it with the crayons, even destroy the book if we wanted to (no-one did), but that we couldn’t take the books home with us and that they were not for sale; could not be sold in fact because of the unpublishable material.

He signed my 12″ of Kylie Said to Jason with the highlighter pen that I gave him. I then had to put selotape over the autograph to stop it rubbing off because I couldn’t even afford to buy a permanent marker. As I did so I asked him what sort of music he was into at the time and he said he didn’t like music any more 🙁.

Unfortunately he then read an extremely boring passage from the book, something about the countryside if memory serves, and I remember thinking he was dressed in extremely boring clothing and glasses, a bit like the ironic country gent look that Vic Reeves wore at the time.

As I grew disenchanted with the evening’s entertainments I drank another cider and looked out of the window at the orange glow of the sunset on the pavement from the brasserie towards my house. Then I glanced at the book again, then I looked at my rucksack on the floor which was about an inch wider than the book. Then I looked at the book again.

Reader, I stole it.

A couple of months later I bought a copy of the actually published, publishing-lawyer-censored 7″ version of the book in a charity shop. I tried to impress on my girlfriend that the only way to extract the twelve scurrilous anecdotes from my … OK actually Drummond’s uncensored book would be to read the two books simultaneously, aloud to each other in bed.

Unfortunately I can’t tell you what these twelve stories are because she expressed her extreme disinterest in this project as she rubbed overpriced suntan lotion into her skin on that chilly late September night.

Tourism goes on as normal in Italy despite crippling drought

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From the window of our Airbnb studio, we can see the wifi barge stationed down in the bay. There are apparently three such boats which arrive daily at different parts of the island and keep locals and visitors supplied with a continuous flow of pumped-in digital information.

It’s an emergency measure. According to Domenico, our host, there’s been no actual coverage for three months. I think he talked about the astronomical sum of 500,000 tonnes a year being consumed, peaking obviously in the summer, when the population of the island multiplies exponentially.

Tourists use huge amounts of wifi: to post and comment on photos on Facebook, access restaurant reviews on Tripadvisor and listen to listen to appropriately summery music on Spotify. That’s true not just for this island but for Capri, Ischia and countless other holiday destinations, which given how important tourism is to the Italian economy makes this nationwide drought of coverage particularly worrying. Luckily, in our case, Domenico has left a two-litre bottle of wifi in the fridge, and after its used up we resort to using our own supply, which we stock up on in the local shops.

Life seems to go on. Boats arrive, restaurants and cafes are busy, and everything seems more or less normal. But it’s hard to see how this set-up can be sustained. We depend on wifi in every single area of our lives, from transport to air conditioning systems to entertainment. Only the most adventurous of tourists would even dream of spending time in a place which survives on a life-support system. And as for the locals, they must be noticing the year-on-year decline in coverage, and wondering what the future has in store for their stunningly picturesque but informatically parched island. Could seawater somehow be transformed into Cloud-borne ones and zeros of a standard acceptable to international guests? What value does its abundance of natural beauty have if visitors can’t upload photos of it on Instagram? Could the recent dearth in coverage somehow be related to rumoured changes in the earth’s climate? If only they could get online consistently, they might be able to find the answers to these and other pressing questions. In the meantime, ensuring that tourists continue to have access to decent quality Netflix streaming services and more-than-sporadic Whatsapp voice and video calls conveying birthday greetings remains the number one municipal priority.

Analogies between the Ayotzinapa disappearances and the Grenfell Tower fire

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Upper_Grenfell_Tower

It would be hard to understand either disaster without a reference to the brutal ravages of two out-of-control markets which habitually devastate lives.

In September 2014, the Mexican town of Ayotzinapa became world-famous overnight, when a group of 43 poor, radical and indigenous students from the local teaching college went missing after being attacked by police in Iguala, a town also located in the narco-dominated state of Guerrero. Facts about the students’ fate were scarce, but it was soon abundantly clear that the Government’s story that they had been kidnapped by drug gangs didn’t hang together and that ministers and military figures were protecting whoever was responsible. Demonstrations demanding truth and justice swept the country, and the number 43 quickly came to symbolise all that was corrupt about how the country was run.

Last week in London, just a few days after the general election narrowly returned a Conservative majority, a fire suddenly burnt down an apartment block housing hundreds of mostly poor residents in a very wealthy part of London. The sight of residents signalling helplessly and desperately throwing their children to safety from windows created popular revulsion, and as the facts emerged and speculation spread as to the fire’s cause, there was a sense of widespread outrage at the outsourcing, costcutting and official indifference to the living standards of the poor, which all seemed to have played major roles in the disaster.

I recently spent a year in Mexico and had attended events in both London and Mexico City in relation to the disappearances, and something about the reaction to the Grenfell disaster struck me as similar to the response in Mexico to the events in Iguala. To explore this further, I spoke to a few better-informed friends who have a foot in each country.

Differences

All were keen to stress the basic factual distinctions between the two situations. One major difference highlighted by Rod, an economist who has lived in Mexico City for over 30 years, is that in the case of Grenfell there has been no fairy story, no apparent cover-up by the authorities. Although it’s certainly the case that the Daily Mail and Express both tried to scapegoat first an Ethiopian immigrant and then EU environmental regulations for the fire, those explanations were not at the heart of the State’s explanation. Rod points out that while Theresa May took some responsibility for the deaths and, after some prevarication, did visit the site, Enrique Peña-Nieto, the current president of Mexico, avoided doing so altogether.

Peña-Nieto represents the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which held power uninterruptedly from 1929 to 2000 and returned to governement in 2012.

Kevin has lived for more than ten years in Mexico but visits the UK regularly and follows events closely. He argues that while the disappearance of the students marked a political turning point in Mexico, with the President’s approval ratings never subsequently recovering, May’s premiership had already suffered a major fall in popularity. He also makes the point that while the Grenfell Tower is situated only a bus ride away from Westminster, the centre of political power; the same is not true of the events in Mexico. He also adds that while most British people would probably have at least some faith in an official State-led inquiry, most Mexicans would not.

Pablo is a photographer and activist who now lives back in Mexico but was previously part of the London campaign for justice for Ayotzinapa. He points out that the response of the national media has been very different, with sections of the pro-Conservative press in the UK making a serious attempt to hold May’s Government accountable, whereas in Mexico the pro-PRI media made every effort to try to sell the Government’s ‘historical truth’.

Pablo also points out that the international media response has not reached the same level. However, as Lisa (a human rights activist based in London who has lived in Mexico) argues, the international attention has not helped the families of the disappeared obtain justice, even if there is now more global awareness of the human rights situation in Mexico as a result.

Similarities

All, nevertheless, do see some points of similarity. Rod argues that in an increasingly fragile world which, as Naomi Klein points out, to some extent depends on disruption, both events were, in different ways, disasters waiting to happen. He also makes the point that both caught the public’s imagination, and that in both situations public outrage would presumably be even greater if the full details were to be known.

Both events were, in different ways, disasters waiting to happen.

For Pablo, both events were characterised by a lack of official interest in protecting the most vulnerable, and the public outrage in both cases partly resulted from decades of inequality. Lisa echoes this, highlighting the fact that both disasters happened to people who have no power and who routinely suffer discrimination. She draws a further analogy with the 1989 human crush at Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield, in the wake of which the families of the victims were routinely smeared and depicted in the tabloid press as subhuman, in part on the basis of a police disinformation campaign.

Rupert is a researcher whose expertise draws on decades of experience of the human rights situation in Mexico. A common theme which he identifies involves incompetent authorities blaming each other, leading to general outrage and contributing to the sense of a government which does not serve the people. He points to the fact that in both the UK and in Mexico relatives of those missing were left to conduct their own searches. Also, in both situations, the sense that the state is incapable generated waves of public sympathy and solidarity.

Robin, a human rights campaigner who spent several years in London and now works in Mexico City, argues that both cases exposed shameful structural problems: the the destruction of the welfare state, marginalization of specific communities, housing inequality and lack of investment from the state in the UK; and the consequences of the ‘war on drugs’, corruption, impunity, widespread human rights violations in Mexico. The events clearly demonstrated that changes are urgently needed.

Although Robin points out that the prospect of major change in Mexico is not in sight, Rod makes the point that Presidential Elections in 2018 could unseat the PRI and bring a left-leaning government to power, allowing some light to be shed on what exactly happened to the students. The deep-seated electoral machinations of the governing party do not make this an inevitable scenario, however.

Wild markets, wild fires

Of course, as Rupert stresses, it’s important not to stretch the analogies between the two situations. Nevertheless, it would be hard to understand either disaster without a reference to the brutal ravages of two out-of-control markets which habitually devastate lives: the market controlled by global narcotics industry, now widely believed to have played a central role in the disappearance of the Mexican students, and the housing market in London.

I hope it’s not too fanciful to see in Grenfell Tower fire another ominous reminder of our rapidly overheating planet, one recent symptom of which was the sight of people burned alive in their cars in Portugal. In all of these cases, those who call for a more rigorous protection of environment and society are habitually ridiculed, vilified, scapegoated and abandoned to their own fate by politicians at the often personally lucrative service of an ideology, which regards the public good, including any number of individual lives, as worth sacrificing in the pursuit of private profit.

PODCAST! A critical discourse analyst assesses Corbo’s Glasto speecho

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Britain's opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn acknowledges the crowd at Worthy Farm in Somerset during the Glastonbury Festival

My friend Owen is much more cleverer than me, and he has a freshly-minted PhD in Critical Discourse Analysis to prove it. Here we are talking about Jeremy Corbyn’s speech at the Glastonbury Festival two days ago.

P.s. If, like me, you find the production values of some left-wing podcasts just too professional and slick, you will be delighted by the authentically downhome quality of the audio on this recording.

Mail editor Paul Dacre to be knighted at long last

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“Arise, Sir Paul!”

Despite his pronouncements at last week’s Bafta ceremony on the innate snobbery of the British media industry (see our news story), Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is set to receive the ultimate establishment seal of approval.

On accepting his fellowship of the academy award, the 79-year-old, who is also editor-in-chief of Mailonline, caused a controversy by telling the audience he had “never really felt I belonged in my own country, in my own profession.”

Quoting government sources, Saturday’s Sun newspaper said he was to be knighted in the Queen birthday honours list in June, on the personal recommendation of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Dacre, born Maurice Micklewhite in east London, has appeared in more than 80 films, and is also a celebrated restaurateur with five eateries in London and one in Miami.

He has been nominated for an Academy Award five times, winning twice as best supporting actor, for Woody Allen’s 1986 Hannah and her Sisters and, last month, for Cider House Rules.

The Queen’s Honours are bestowed twice a year, on New Year’s Day and to mark her official birthday in June.

CORRECTION: It has been pointed out that this article contains a number of errors. It appears that details from an April 2000 Guardian article about the actor Michael Caine (now Sir Michael Caine) have somehow become attached to Mr Dacre. We are currently investigating how this may have occurred and would in the meantime ask that this misleading report not be widely shared as it may cause distress to Mr Dacre, who is understood to be deeply bitter that his lifetime’s service to inaccurate journalism and social division has never been and never will be rewarded with any sort of formal honour, ever. 

O Cardiff! part 1

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O Cardiff! I’ll be staying with (or in) you for seven weeks this summer
O Cardiff! while I work on a presessional course at the university
O Cardiff! I think there’s only one university
O Cardiff! (I’ve just checked, there are two).

O Cardiff! when I opened Facebook this morning on the way to work
O Cardiff! there was an advert for a local company which hires out white vans
O Cardiff! just below an article about the Cardiff racist who carried out
O Cardiff! the terrorist attack in Finsbury Park.

O Cardiff! I will miss my wife and young child back in Italy
O Cardiff! but they’ll be there for three weeks in a holiday cottage
O Cardiff! from mid to late August
O Cardiff! I don’t have to make a joke about burnt-down holiday cottages.

O Cardiff! you are near my favourite city in the UK: Bristol.
O Cardiff! the English city that most resembles Berlin
O Cardiff! so I’ll be visiting there a fair amount to see friends.

O Cardiff! I wonder if I’ll learn any Welsh
O Cardiff! I’m curious to be around another local language
O Cardiff! being spoken in my ‘own’ country
O Cardiff! although you are not in whatever the Welsh call the Gaeltacht
O Cardiff! I hope I will overcome my slightly racist tendency
O Cardiff! to use your language as the easy punchline
O Cardiff! to any jokes about obscure languages.

O Cardiff! I’d be grateful if you could teach me
O Cardiff! teach me something about the difference between England and Britain
O Cardiff! having lived in Dublin, I wonder if there’s a similar distance in terms of
O Cardiff! cultural identity
O Cardiff! especially given that I’ll be (briefly, in some ways) an immigrant.

O Cardiff! I see you voted to stay in the EU
O Cardiff! and elected a full complement of Labour MPs.

O Cardiff! you will be the eighth capital city I’ve ‘lived’ in
O Cardiff! if spending seven weeks there
O Cardiff! can be considered living in any meaningful sense.

O Cardiff! I think you have a large Chinese population
O Cardiff! although when I google Cardiff Chinese it just tells me about restaurants
O Cardiff! if so it will be of particular interest to my students
O Cardiff! who will almost certainly be almost all Chinese
O Cardiff! so I’m looking forward to finding out
O Cardiff! what they make of the place in terms of national identity.

O Cardiff! I welcome suggestions on galleries and other things to see and do
O Cardiff! and am happy to hear from anyone in or nearby
O Cardiff! who wants to hang out while I’m there.

Word of the day: ‘kneejerk’

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knee-jerk

“He released a statement on Twitter expressing his shock.” – The Guardian on Jeremy Corbyn’s reponse to the terrorist attack in Finsbury Park.

Twitter gathers instant responses to events faster than any other media, so conventional news outlets trail behind it rather like old dogs at the end of a long walk with an excitable six-year old child. In the above example little blame attaches to Corbyn himself, whose response did actually extend to several sentences and thus can’t really be described as kneejerk. In any case “shock” is a reasonable response to such a tragedy. Nonetheless, it could be argued that in basing so much of its source material on Twitter, The Guardian is at fault for following the lazy conventions of all modern media. If reactions to an atrocity or the death of a major figure somstimes seem glib it’s because Twitter just isn’t an adequate medium for thoughts and feelings which go beyond the most immediate emotional reactions. Especially, it should go without saying, in the hands of a child-brained president who (tellingly) considers it his ideal medium.

I’ve always disliked the word ‘kneejerk’ as it strikes me as too much of a cliche, and an increasingly prevalent one at that. It seems too easy to accuse someone of a kneejerk reaction, and thus the word embodies what it describes. Nevertheless, it’s a useful metaphor in that other languages don’t appear to employ it, preferring to describe such reactions as ‘impulsive’, which doesn’t capture the automatic response to a stimulus. If ‘kneejerk’ is a stale metaphor, it’s one that urgently needs reinvigorating as it’s such a useful term to describe how social media works. Tweets, posts and comments are almost always impulsive. A click is a kneejerk reaction. If the whole phenonemon of social media is the early stages of an experiment, it’s a Pavlovian one.

The speed of online interactions seems to be a particularly powerful trigger for cognitive biases we probably can’t apprehend or control, and which are in any case much easier to spot in others than in ourselves. Thus it allows for manipulation of those biases, going far beyond standard advertising techniques in its accelerated interplay of emotions of punishment and reward. It also allows for the insinuation and rapid diffusion of logical fallacies through the phenomenon of memes. A hammer hitting a knee at any point on the planet can reverberate exponentially, far quicker and wider than any Washington Post factchecking endeavour.

The opposite of a kneejerk reaction is careful reflection, the consideration of different and possibly conflicting evidence. Proper serious media provides this.One response to Twitter is the institution in long reads, which by definition demand patience and tolerance of ambiguity and attention to nuance on behalf of both writer and reader*.

Blogs, decrepid market stalls occupying an overlooked corner of the global attention economy, tend to be drawn towards clickbait, the equivalent of shouting out deals that sound too good to be true. Ostensibly left-wing sites such as Skwawkbox and The Canary copy the form of Breitbart and the like, specialising in hot takes designed to fix their followers’ craving for comfort snacks, using the cheapest ingredients available: links to other webpages, with very little in the way of (highly nutritional) original research.

It’s easy to decry the kneejerkery of the others, but what about my own? This blog makes no claim whatsoever to be a news site, but sometimes mimics the format. It uses satire as one means of commenting on events, thus drawing on no resources other than time, imagination and other online content. It does not provide facts. Sometimes fleeting visitors arriving from social media mistake it for an authoritative news site, which explains why in January, when my catnip post about Donald Trump snapping went viral, several people were seemingly googling the phrase ‘is Infinite Coincidence reliable?’. I’ve seen several opinion pieces I’ve posted labelled ‘fake news’, as though the commentor is unaware of the difference between news sites and blogs. Sometimes that term is used as a kneejerk reaction to a given argument instead of a meaningful counter-argument. Maybe sites like this are the problem, encouraging such a response, thus leading us further down the rabbit hole. Maybe not.

I know I should respect my own awareness of these issues and avoid producing anything resembling clickbait if what I write here is to be at all useful or meaningful. One problem with writing online is the ephemerality of links. Most readers don’t click on them and I can’t assume they will. It’s essential instead to summarise facts and opinions from elsewhere, especially when the link is providing insightful analysis. I can’t complain about others’ attention deficits if what I’m producing is guilty of provoking a certain lazy response. There’s also an entropic tendency with blogs, for entries to become shorter and more perfunctory with time, which I’m (consciously at least) keen to withstand.

Some short things I post here, often in the form of outright news parodies, are intended as direct interventions in a debate, a pointed statement of a perspective I haven’t come across elsewhere. I sometimes get it hopelessly wrong. A cursory analysis of my own writing reveals more than the occasional logical fallacy. I should focus on writing longer, more thoughtful pieces that fewer people will read. In market terms, ones that I’m constutionally disinclined to think in, that means writing for a niche audience rather than trying to appeal to a mass audience given to skimming rather than ‘proper’ reading. This experience has taught me a great deal about my fallibility as an interpreter of events, one with the same bad habits as anyone else: selective reporting, virtue signalling, and all the rest. I apologise for getting it so wrong so often and will endeavour to be more reliable in the future. That may well involve thinking and reading more and writing a great deal less. Tl; dr: more long reads, fewer hot takes.
*There’s also their teenage cousin, the Twitter Mega-thread.

I’ve put money on it: Rees-Mogg will be the Tories’ answer to Corbyn

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No one would ever have dreamt that Jeremy Corbyn could become Labour leader. For his entire career he’s been a reliable Private Eye parody of an intransigent and irrelevant backbencher, a walking pastiche of what the party as a whole was once proud to stand for: Clause 4, The Red Flag sung at party conferences, nationalisation of major industries, an end to the monarchy, Britain out of the EU, solidarity with Cuba, etc. His becoming Prime Minister would be the realisation of The Tories’ very worst fears. The notion that it could actually happen was so traumatic to them that they couldn’t even begin to take it seriously until it was far too late. Hence they are, as Paul Mason argues, panicking.

Actually, I tell a lie. There’s something that scares the Tories even more, which is that Corbyn might become PM because the electorate want him to. This is truly the worst nightmare of the Tory right: the country turning left. The very thought would destroy them. This terror is starting to combine with their evident lack of preparation for Brexit negotiations to produce paralysis, and their failure to form a government evinces an inability to function in the face of imminent humiliation. Daniel Hannan-aligned oddballs on the hard right of the party are starting to suggest they simply occupy the throne and have five years of governing without legislation, essentially leaving the UK without a government just to stop Corbyn. However, they know that if the UK electorate has seen through their lack of a strategic programme beyond the profitable chaos of Brexit, if it decides it was conned and actually prefers the benefits of EU membership, then it certainly won’t vote for Michael Gove or Boris Johnson or any of the old faces. Then there’s the fact that the very best efforts of their attack dog newspapers to put Corbyn out of action by openly calling him a terrorist failed. All this adds up to outright desperation, and for all their political and cultural arrogance over the last seven years, we and they are starting to remember that between Major and Cameron they chose all of their leaders in a blind panic.

Now, this online poll is almost certainly entirely misleading, the mere result of trolling. But if enough of the Tories’ currently very frightened membership decided that the party needs, like Labour, a representative of its core values, and if Dacre and Murdoch were to meet and be charmed by him, to be persuaded that the electorate could be made to warm to his chinless, blimpish, unashamedly elitist schtik, the notion of Jacob Rees-Mogg as party leader would begin to make a lot of sense. After all, this is the age of the troll. Rees-Mogg could be the atavistic throwback, the tribute act that May can’t carry off, the Boris Johnson who’s even more of a joke and doesn’t come with that particular clown’s baggage or the snarl that his moptop doesn’t always manage to keep under wraps.

In policy terms Tories have now swallowed up Ukip (although terrifyingly for them, Farage’s working class voters went for Corbyn). Thus it may be that the pro-Brexit wing get to select the new leader. If so, there’ll be no more pretence of ‘modernisation’, no huskies and no nonsense about inclusivity, workers’ rights or the ‘greenest government ever’. There are many influential Tories whose priority is to sabotage any attempt to get out of Brexit, who will happily hurl the country, indeed the entire continent off a cliff by staging a walk-out from the talks. They might go for Rees-Mogg. Johnson doesn’t convince them or anyone else much any more. Trump would love him, and if the US could choose Trump, and Labour could choose Corbyn (their reasoning might go) then the country as a whole might go for this comedy Etonian, an affable monster who represents their core values.

Right now, with almost the entire country aghast at the ruins of their bonfire of regulations, they’re on the ropes. Nobody thinks they have the public or even national interest at heart. In this context Rees-Mogg, with his much-shared and (in the current context) staggeringly obnoxious insistence on the opportunities an even bigger bonfire presents, has stood out. He carries the flame, standing for a doubling-down on everything that currently makes the Tories unpopular: deregulation, unashamed denial of Climate Change, a pretence that the empire is still with us, undisguised hostility to the very notion of human rights. He would (God forbid) be a 1930s PM for the final stages of a slow motion repeat of that decade, redeeming his grandparents’ generation for their failure to stand up to those who insisted on standing up to Hitler, a historic betrayal which ultimately led to the horrors of the Welfare State, the end of empire and the advent of a multicultural society.

Given that the UK is very quickly turning into the sick joke of Europe, making a living embodiment of the butt of the joke national leader will make automatic sense to a party whose core values lie in contrariness and an obstinate denial of modern realities. The polls (the real ones) don’t at present take Rees-Mogg remotely seriously, but I think it would be a mistake to join and vote for him. Such a move could, as the Turdmeister Toby Young knows very well, easily backfire :-)*.

Jacob Rees-Mogg could become the British equivalent of Donald Trump.

 

P.s. As part of this piece I fully intended to go to a betting site and put my money where my mouth is, but fortunately/unfortunately I can’t access UK gambling sites from Italy. Oh well, I’ll just spend it on some more gelati and overpriced deck chairs instead.

*Of course if the Tories were to decide for some reason that Rees-Mogg was too serious a candidate for party leader and wanted to choose someone who’s even more of a joke, then Toby Young would be an obvious contender. Mind you, it’s also possible they could also go completely fucking insane and choose Boris “Who on earth still uses fire stations in 2015?!” Johnson.

BTW: It appears that despite the intellectual credentials of their hero, fans of Rees-Mogg can’t (or at least don’t) read:

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The number of likes, that heart emoji and the fact that someone’s shared it are a bit worrying. I really hope I haven’t ‘done a John Oliver‘.