If I was staying under wraps successfully though, a lot of people got unmasked. Comedians who had made much of their vaguely leftish sympathies back when there was little chance of a Labour leader introducing policies that might affect the value of their property portfolios jumped on the anti-Corbyn train, a trend skewered by Juliet Jacques, who pointed out they could not 'pretend that they didn’t respond to Corbyn’s challenge to the status quo with the same sneering hostility as the Murdoch press, the Blairite establishment or the Conservative government'. Ultimately, this trahison des buffons, as well as the complete abandonment of impartiality by the BBC (to the extent of covering up the Dear Leader's visible drunkenness at a Cenotaph wreath-laying by playing footage of a similar event from his tenure as Mayor of London instead, and 'sweetening' footage of him taking questions from the public to remove booing, rather in the same way the WWE would sometimes do when the audience failed to take to a wrestler who had found favour with Vince McMahon), did its job and stopped the unthinkable, a government that might have actually cared for the people of these islands and beyond, from being elected.
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| Not that the beeb have ever really been impartial, as founder John Reith admits |
I was infuriated by the result of the 2019 election. It really was one of those Robinson moments. 'There were, he said, no mitigating circumstances...the middle class in England had continued to vote Conservative because in their miserable hearts they still believed that it was in their interests to do so.' If I had been outraged at the result of the 2015 election, I was incandescent at this turn of events. The result of that election had been the rejection of the possibility that life might get slightly less worse. In 2019 it felt like English voters had decided to reject their last chance of saving the world. Put it this way: when the novel coronavirus rampaged through this country, I wasn't surprised. And while I cannot, at this stage, reveal how I know this to be the case, I know there would never have been a covid outbreak if Corbyn had been elected. For me, the election of Boris Johnson and the death of millions of people in this country alone are linked by more than just the fact that Johnson's policies pushed the death toll higher as he used the greatest peacetime crisis in British history as a chance to bung vast sums of taxpayers' money to his chums, decrease the surplus population and, we now know, loom drunkenly over Tory staff younger and blonder than his wife in a desperate attempt to pretend long covid hadn't destroyed his libido.
Furthermore, in the same month as the election, I had received some shattering personal news: abscesses in my axillae that had been bothering me since the summer of 2019 were finally, crushingly, diagnosed as hidradenitis suppurativa, a debilitating skin condition which ruined my mother's life and may have played a role in her eventual death from cancer this year. It felt like a death sentence. It felt like defeat. It felt like the right time to draw a line under the anti-Brexit activism and move on.
And it felt like the best way to do that was by releasing a collection of the stuff I'd written during this period. That collection was England is the Enemy, and it only exists digitally because the lockdown kicked in weeks after I'd finished editing it and no-one was sure when or if there would ever be physical gigs at which to handsell books again. England is the Enemy was meant to be me swearing off political writing, a record of my crowning failure. At the time I was getting into photography, film-making and music, in all of which I was interested more in the possibility of abstraction than in overt sloganeering.
But then, as Adam Curtis would say, a strange thing happened. I found myself writing about the covid situation. About the lies about the death toll, the laughable inadequacy of the government response, the virus as the inevitable culmination of a trajectory this country had been on since at least 2010. And most meaningfully, about the obvious bullshit of Johnson's 'recovery' from coronavirus. Now, in this I know I'm tacking against the prevailing wind, as the popular conspiracy theory is that Johnson lied about getting the 'rona for sympathy. But I have never believed conspiracy theories just because they are popular. No, my theory is that not only did Johnson catch covid for real, but he still suffers with the symptoms of long covid today - hence the obviously edited footage of him running on a beach during this year's Tory conference, which even an idiot could see had been snipped and zoomed to make it look as if he was running for longer than the pathetic few seconds he could manage.
Not to fit-shame BoJo - after all, I'm a long covid sufferer myself. But as always it's the lies I can't stand. And the connivance in those lies of our media nomenklatura, whose members frequently attend dinner parties with and organise stag dos for the politicians they supposedly hold to account. And I found I enjoyed stepping into the role of the Exposer of Wrong Doing. And then everything crystallised when I read a throwaway line in Owen Hatherley's 2021 interview with the mighty Jonathan Meades:
'[Thatcher's] Christmas parties with fun loving Augusto Pinochet and Jimmy Savile who fucked her corpse in the coffin.' It's a great line. Except it couldn't possibly be accurate, because the Iron Lady died in 2013 and Britain's most prolific paedophile predeceased her by two years. Unless...readers of this blog will of course entertain no bien-pensant doubts as to the reality of psychic phenomena. The spiritual technology of willed possession has been extensively documented by anthropologists and occultists who have studied vodoun, santeria, macumba and palo mayombe. It did not seem unlikely that someone in the Tory hierarchy would possess the necessary ritual know-how to call down the spirit of Savile into a human body to effect one final coffin-fuck. This left only the question of identifying a suitable flesh-vessel for the deed. It would need to be someone as close to a literal establishment puppet as possible: someone whose zeal to protect that establishment was matched only by their personal and moral nullity. A tabula so very, very rasa that the cigar-chomping spectre could be scrawled over it with minimal permanent damage, and a person so dedicated that there was nothing they wouldn't do to ensure the eternal success of the Tory party.
There could, of course, be only one candidate.
The rest you know. 'Time is a Flat Cercle' (the misspelling a deliberate allusion to Nadhim Zahawi and Rory Stewart's tenures as chair of one of the dodgier 'foreign policy' outfits) opened the door to the creation of a nightmare version of Britain over which I could allow my paranoid fantasias free poetic reign, and which also provided a context for earlier works such as 'La Preference' (about, inter alia, the 'Beast of Jersey' attacks, which had fascinated me since I read Ted Halliday's discussion of them in The Goblin Universe, a bizarre and fascinating book which I wish some Fortean publisher would reissue) and even the much earlier 'The Long Dark Night of Frank Sinatra', which I included in the collection as a companion piece to 'Mr Inverness is tired' - which also, as it happens, alludes to wrong doings in the Channel Islands, one of the network of 'secrecy jurisdictions' which Britain uses to cement its central position in the global money-laundering and tax-avoidance ecosystem (the transposition of the 's' in the pamphlet's title is a Tori Amos allusion - unlike the author of Eskimo Papoose I'm happy to cop to my borrowings from the only good Tori, even though I can disguise them much more artfully).
For legal reasons, of course, it has to be stressed that when I describe the Britain of Secrecy's Jurisdiction as a 'nightmare version' of the UK I expect the reader to infer that this version of Britain is fictional, poetry being, after all, a branch of fiction. I certainly don't intend to imply that Sir Kieth really did mash his membrum into Maggie's mouldering remains, nor that the Tory party keep one of Savile's jackets in a vitrine in a hidden room of their headquarters for purposes of electoral haruspicy, nor that Edward Paisnel took the fall for an alliance of his island's great and good, or that JK Rowling has been an asset of certain state agencies with very grubby records since long before her one big idea (itself a rehash of an earlier minor idea of Neil Gaiman's) occurred to her on an InterCity train. You would have to be certifiably insane to believe this is what literally happened...
...but as I say in the blurb, every word of it is true. I wanted to capture how it feels to live in a one-party state whose media and government collude to hide the truth of how things really are, and the monsters that breed in the fecund interstice between official version and reality. Goya, after all, told us such things would occur when Reason slept: now that she seems to be using her bed not so much for shut-eye as enthusiastic coitus with Irreason, who knows what fearful byblows will result?
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