Mainly, though, it’s the privatisation of absolutely everything: the unelected regime privatising everything in the sort of orgy of (neo)liberalisation more usually associated with a military takeover or an invasion. The NHS, the schools, the forests… it’s like the post-Iraq War fire sale out there. Hit the punch-drunk populace before they know what’s, er, hit them. Then hit them afterwards, too. (Not forgetting the bit in the middle where they start to realise what’s hitting them.)
Add in Tory MPs like Nicholas Boles saying things like, ‘Chaotic . . . in our vocabulary, is a good thing’, as if he’s part of some European punk circus that does amazing things with petrol. And the Economist calling Britain ‘the West’s test tube’, and I am inclined to think everything’s gone a bit batshit.
So, has it? Has everything gone a bit batshit? Let us ask such burning questions of the day, and also some other questions.
Why can’t the Tories agree on whether Britain is fucked and broken or not?
David declared that some pockets of Britain are well and truly fucked – really, really awful places that he does not like at all.
But then Boris said, ‘No, Britain is not fucked, and it is insulting to our great nation to say it is.’ Britain makes Boris happy.
But then Iain Duncan Smith retorted, ‘No Boris, I think you will find that it is fucked. I would encourage you to go and see some of the fucked areas for yourself, like I have. Honestly, it is fucked. I’ve got a photo somewhere….’
So is it ruined here or not? The nation needs to know. Should they not have worked it out in private first? Some Tory strategists refer to the existence of four – yes, four (count them) – ‘brokens’: broken society, broken politics, broken economy, and the other one… it’ll come to me.
Yes, it’s like a Hogarth engraving out there: sweary mums pumping out kids by different drunk dads; a world where you can’t even pop out for a bottle of White Lightning without getting stabbed a couple of times.
Don’t stay in, though, because that’s where the burglars will come. You almost have to wonder why they would even want to govern such a shithole.
Incidentally, IDS has been called the Tories’ missionary. He and his team are active Christians, doing God’s work and Tory work, combined. He wanders off into the wilds and reports back to old ladies in church halls about the savagery he has endured: ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen. Like Scotland, for example.’
Apparently he tells the feral populace not to eat each other – even if their Giro hasn’t come through. And to only ever ‘do it’ with the man on top. No wheelbarrows, please! That’s him.
What was the fourth one? There were definitely four…. Or maybe there were only three. It doesn’t matter.
Thank God for the kooky colour brought along by Sam Cam. Somehow earthier and also posher than her husband, she is good for David’s image. She makes him less of a twat.
Because Sam Cam has edge. She didn’t wear a hat to the Wedding. She is so ‘very unconventional’, David once explained, because ‘she went to a day school’ (she is no respecter of boarders). She is literally covered in piercings and tattoos (you should see her trying to get through customs!). And, yes, she invented trip-hop.
While studying in Bristol, Sam Cam befriended Adrian Vowles, aka future trip-hop auteur Tricky. The unlikely pair would hang out and play pool together. After he schooled her in some crafty manoeuvres, they hustled the mean streets of Montpelier.
At which point, oh, this journeyman rapper suddenly morphs into a multi-talented sampling/rapping guru, whose debut album carries all before it, artistically and commercially. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
They were calmly fleecing some more mugs when Sam unveiled her master plan: thus far, British hip-hop had always been a joke, but how about a stoned, sensual, distinctively English form of hip-hop; like hip-hop, only trippier. Trip-hop, yah? That definitely happened.
So, Sam Cam invented trip-hop. How’s that for colour? Suddenly, Dave is not just some off-the-peg hooray, which he otherwise could have been thanks to his looks and also personality. No, his wife invented trip-hop, and for this he must be eternally grateful.
You can also take her home to your mum.
Oh, and she’s very rich. On one level, most men do think they would like a wife who is very, very rich. And, who knows, maybe they would? A wife who plays pool but is also, you know, stinking rich. That’s what we’re looking at here: someone with more than one house.
According to reports, Tricky would have happily taken things further. Which conjures images of Cameron and Tricky both vying for the lady’s affections, like some crazy-assed Austen novel, only set in Bristol rather than Bath, and with one of the suitors being a little black guy with a West Country accent and a chronic addiction to weed (admittedly quite a departure for Austen).
Sam Cam’s maiden name was Miss Sheffield: even that’s perfect.
I guess it could be called Samantha. Or Sense and Sensimilia.
Cleggmania: what were the highs? what were the lows?
Highs: 2,000 people outside Sheffield Town Hall, just to see him pass by; the ‘I agree with Nick’ t-shirts; being carried for eight miles by a human wave of singing children; the woman who had been saving her hair to make a statue of Ghandi, who used it to make one of Clegg instead; the Taliban surrendering because ‘We agree with Nick!’
Lows: people putting shit through his letterbox; people burning his effigy; people pissing on his effigy, then burning it; people pissing on his effigy, then burning it, then pissing on it again, then putting it through his letterbox; the petition by jailed paedophiles saying he was ‘much worse’ than them; being kidnapped by a private army who made him write ‘I am a tosser’ 100 times on a piece of paper before revealing they were hired by his dad…
Is there a link between the Big Society and the occult?
Cameron’s big idea – okay, his only idea – has not been without its critics, having generally been adjudged a half-arsed load of pony. A putative Big Society roadshow had to be cancelled after people laughed at the speaker at the first one at Stockport College. Even Lord Nat Wei, the man brought in to run the fourth launch of the ‘idea‘ (fourth!), quit the next day after the launch, saying it was ‘basically just hot air and bollocks woven into a tear-stained fabric of irrelevance.’
His Lordship added that he did not understand the idea, ‘even though I said I did, for which I apologise.’ (He actually said it was a ‘farce’. Same same.)
So it hasn’t gone well.
But what these critics overlook and under-estimate is the Big Society’s intimate links to Ultimate Evil.
The idea’s progenitors – via on-off Tory house philosopher Philip ‘the Red Tory’ Blond – are the arch-English writers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton and Belloc’s new society vision saw previously atomised citizens tilling the land and running the local pub in near-mystic communion with each other and their locality.
No big state. No big business. Just the little guy, tilling the field, running the pub. It was a quaint, villagey scene, but sadly one also ineffably tainted by diabolism.
Among Chesterton’s many questionable flirtations (Mussolini, anti-Semitism) was one with the occult. As a youth, he was addicted to Ouija boards. As a writer, he could not hide his fascination,