Many on the left have blamed Keir Starmer, and the white working class’s perceived abandonment by Labour’s patronising metropolitan elite, for the political survival of the corrupt liar Boris Johnson. And it helps that Johnson showered our body-strewn streets with costly vaccines, like a negligent drunken father suddenly treating his starving children to a spaff-up Saturday dinner at McDonald’s. But Starmer alone cannot be held responsible for failing to inculcate a sense of Johnson’s mendacity into, for example, the citizens of Hartlepool. They are, after all, people whose forebears hanged a monkey in case it was French. One may as well try to teach wool to sing.
In a civilised democracy, a shameless pariah such as Boris Johnson should not thrive. The fact that he can is evidence not simply of Starmer’s shortcomings, but of a dereliction of duty by the nation’s cowed media, which have a moral responsibility to explain clearly to the electorate why Johnson is unsuitable for office; and by its trembling cultural institutions, which should be using public funds to discredit Johnson daily in mediums such as drama, sculpture, dance, tasteful nudity and the morris. This is what they are for.
Instead, the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, is an undaunted Johnson fantasist who looks at the prime minister with the same loyal longing that the Welsh myth-hound Gelert gazed upon his lord Llywelyn, later to slaughter the dog in a hut. Last week, Kuenssberg spaffed 2,000 words up the wall of the publicly funded journalism toilet of the BBC while avoiding calling the prime minister categorically dishonest and finding more than a dozen gently teasing synonyms for lying. What larks! Greater love hath no political editor than to lay down her credibility for her lord.
Johnson, according to Kuenssberg and her unnamed sources, “chooses to remember certain things or not remember others”. Johnson’s “attitude to the truth and facts is not based on what is real and what is not, but is driven by what… he desires, rather than what he believes”. Johnson is a “fibster”, a “pseudophile”, a “verb fluffer” and a “truth felcher”. The “white thighs of Johnson’s desires are too slippery to grasp the dance pole of truth”. The “wallpaper paste of Johnson’s lie-spaff rarely sploshes on to the decorator’s radio of fact”. And Johnson “orders the truth to suit his ambitions”. In short, the BBC’s political editor blames the feckless universe itself for not conforming to Johnson’s view of it. How inconvenient of space and time to bow relentlessly to the unbending laws of physics!
All through this land, where Christ’s foot once did walk, the Conservatives seek to limit broadcasters’ and cultural organisations’ abilities to inform and entertain and to hold the proven liar Boris Johnson to account, by stuffing their administrative bodies with supporters and by removing pesky intellectuals and black people. The government attempted to block Mary Beard as a trustee of the British Museum because of her pro-European views and because beards mean beatniks; the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is poised to regulate British media as the new head of Ofcom, a move akin to giving Jimmy Savile the keys to a morgue; the government-appointed BBC chair, banker Richard Sharp, donated £400,000 to the Conservatives. And yet even Sharp must know that a BBC so toothless it allows the clearly wrongful Johnson to reign unchecked, instead of driving the populace to No 10 with flaming torches, is not doing its publicly funded job and must offer his resignation.
As should the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden. Aristotelian ethics maintain art should save society from itself. Johnson’s rising ratings evidence Dowden’s failure to inspire and support creatives. The descendants of those ennobled by William the Conqueror still control the majority of wealth and power in Britain. The Conservatives’ placement of pliant ghouls in positions of inappropriate influence could strangle our news sources and art funnels for ever. Conscientious board members, such as Royal Museums Greenwich’s Sir Charles Dunstone, quit in protest, exposing Britannia’s white flanks, a culture war win for the Conservatives. But someone, a visionary artist of course, saw this coming.
Like many postwar comics writers, the anglophile X-Men scribe Chris Claremont, who bought my bored mother a coffee at the 1979 Birmingham Comics Convention, was an accidental seer in pixelated panels. In 1989, in Marvel’s Excalibur issue 13, Claremont posited a prophetic storyline. The do-gooding mutants and philanthropic aristocrats of the Arthurian-inspired British super-team Excalibur ™ ® were partially replaced, at the Conservative government’s insistence, with right-leaning loyalist mortals. The Bavarian circus-freak Nightcrawler ™ ® was substituted for the News of the World’s 71-year-old “Voice of Reason” Lord Woodrow Wyatt, who viewed Britain’s black population as being largely “lawless, drug-taking, violent and unemployable”. The teenage telepath Shadowcat ™ ® was benched for TV’s 64-year-old Record Breakers fact-fascist Norris McWhirter, a far-right Freedom Association figurehead opposed to sanctions on apartheid South Africa. Meggan ™ ® the Gypsy bat-girl surrendered her place to Mary Whitehouse, the crimplene-faced 79-year-old sex-arbiter from the National Viewers’ And Listeners’ Association. The comic’s preteen readership was traumatised.
Though the Excalibur ™ ® team still included fan-favourites Captain Britain ™ ®, the orange space-dragon Lockheed ™ ® and the alternate Earth incarnation of Phoenix ™ ®, the Wyatt/McWhirter/Whitehouse version swiftly relocated its headquarters from Lord Braddock’s enchanted Cornish lighthouse to the cramped offices of an opaquely funded, right-leaning thinktank, the Policy Study Centre for Centralised Policy Studies, at 55 Tufton Street, London. How could coffee-proffering Chris Claremont have known, that in just over four decades, his vision of noble British institutions infested with gerrymandered Conservative wreckers would come terrifyingly true?
• A 12-inch of the January No 1 hit single, Comin’ Over Here, by Asian Dub Foundation (feat Stewart Lee) is now available. Stewart Lee appears on the B-side of the Nightingales’ new 7-inch Ten Bob Each Way. The acclaimed anti- rockumentary King Rocker streams on Now TV. Rescheduled 2022 dates of Lee’s 2020 tour are now on sale
