This series of sketches was written during the Referendum campaign in 2016 and a few of the references may be unfamiliar to some. I should probably get around to citing such references in a glossary. The Panama Papers and TTIP, (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) being two such.
I am enjoying the comments from FSB readers and have had quite a few useful suggestions which I’ll be considering in my next edit. Please keep them coming.
The idea is to get this published for the 10th anniversary of the Referendum next year.
I’m still in need of a pen and ink cartoonist and if you happen to know of somebody who fits the bill, I’d be very grateful for a referral! My own efforts at this art are, mercifully, confined to a short-lived cartoon strip in a student weekly newspaper some 340 years ago – ‘‘Far-Out’ The Puffin’. In my defence, I was very young, and I was the editor, and none of the other three people on the paper objected to this – we were always short of staff. I pulled it after four weeks, which was a mercy.
Part 8
Peering over the ramparts and observing the shambolic, yet typical, deployment of the Remainian forces, Captain ‘Call-me-Dave’ Cameron drew a sharp breath and stiffened his sinews for the next battle. Crossing swords with Sergeant ‘Mad Dog’ Osborne wasn't something one would embark on lightly, and, whilst it appeared to Captain Cameron that this was a matter of honour, his honour, this thought did little to assuage a deep and abiding foreboding.
He pondered. He pondered rather a lot these days. It beat the hell out of dealing with reality which, he was happy to admit to himself, had never been his strong suit. Pondering had always been such a pleasant way to pass a few hours in his happy childhood. A time when he'd thought that Panama was just some banana republic on a largely pink coloured map. Certainly not a foul dagger aimed at his heart. Bastards!
As he'd swiped the badger-haired shaving brush covered in Trumpers' best over the noble phizog earlier that morning, he'd wiped the condensation off the mirror. Expecting to see his shiny, rubicund image reflected, he'd been shocked to his handmade Lobbs to see a wizened, grey haired, grey bearded and sallow complexioned face in its place. Maintaining his, now fragile, equanimity and establishing the fact that Corporal Corbyn hadn't bashed a hole in the wall and chosen this moment to appear via the hole in q., he pondered further.
He knew that he'd let himself go a bit. It had, after all been an awful and bloody few weeks in the campaign. He'd had to call up all his reserves for the last 'big push'.
Remainian HQ now included regiments from all over the world absolutely stiff with acronyms, OECD, IMF, WB, G20, G7, G4.75, plus a crack unit supplied by his new best friend in Washington, the TTIP'ers, armed with the newest weapons of mass media delusion, not to mention a Scottish Regiment of the Independent Freeloaders, who'd left him with a bar bill so big he couldn't climb over it without ropes and crampons.
The last push had drained him, and he hadn't dared to count its cost. He looked around the staff quarters and realised that there were no kitchen sinks left. Good God! Had it come to this?
And yet… And yet…. He knew that those bastards of the British Resistance were still happily drawing breath, quaffing pints of ale - pints, mark you, not litres - and generally behaving as if nothing in the least untoward had occurred.
It was time for a grand gesture. Something to show the Remainian forces that he was worthy of their fealty and that he could still lead them to victory. It was time to kill Sergeant ‘Mad Dog’ Osborne. The phrase, ‘Pour encourager les autres!’ sprang to mind.
'George!' he cried. Duly summoned to the Leader's presence, what was left of Sergeant Osborne oiled his way into the Presence, offered a nervous bow and shuffled about a bit on his new prosthetic legs. 'OK George, I shall speak plainly. You know I'm a chap who speaks plainly. Yes of course you do. Well, I shall speak plainly. Plainly put, and let there be no misunderstanding about this. I wish to, plainly speaking, put this to you.'. At this point Sergeant Osborne sought to both assert himself and put his Leader out of his obvious misery. 'If it's about the last few billions of pounds I've slightly failed to account for, I'm almost absolutely certain'ish that they'll turn up before Christmas....2018...without a shadow of a thinggie. They're out there somewhere, I've just been so bloody busy with this 'Project Fear' thing and everything, I've not had time to catch up. Anyway, it's all your fault for telling me to send all those extra billions to HQ in Brussels last year. You can't expect me to keep this place neat and tidy if you suddenly go all soppy over that fat German bint and her ghastly little chum in HQ, and tell me to do this and do that! It's not fair! You're a big bully! There! Now I've said it!'.
Captain Cameron was stunned. Not since Nanny had caught him interfering with the family tortoise, 135 years old last year, had he been so taken aback. He paused to recover a little of his fading confidence.
'The thing is George. You don't mind if I call you George? OK - the thing is, it's either you or me and I've decided that it's going to be you.'. Sergeant Osborne recoiled, in a very oily sort of way, in horror. He didn’t like the sound of this one bit…..
Not far away from the Remainian redoubt, Captain Nigel 'Bonkers' Farage was taking stock of his own situation, uncharacteristically, in a sombre manner. Sombrely, he gulped a large swig of his quart of British Resistance Bulldog Brewery's Extra Special Spitfire Ale and took a heavy drag on his duty-free.
It hadn't been a bad campaign so far - but. As he’d reflected on having his regiment removed from his command and taken over by Captain Boris de Stauffenberg Johnson, Private 'Speccy' Gove and Colonel Iain "Quietly" Duncan Smith, he’d concluded that this may not have been such a bad thing after all.
There was the probability of an honourable defeat, if the bookies were right and, second to fags, beer, and totty, Farage knew his bookies.
Defeat would mean he could collect another 20 years pay from the German Chancellor's Friendship Committee in Strasbourg. Winning this war might cost him a lot of money, as the redundancy pay wouldn't go very far, and his chances of gainful employ in a Free Britain were exceedingly slim. A victory for the British Resistance would leave him very much surplus to requirements. He remembered buying a pair of khaki underpants from the Army and Navy Surplus shop many years ago. He didn't want to end up on the shelf of a surplus shop….That wasn’t in his plans at all.
Meanwhile, tidying up the officers' mess, after yet another Junior Officers' raucous and drunken breakfast in the Remainian camp, Corporal Corbyn tried his hearty best to make light of the role which a cruel fate had allotted him.
He consoled himself with thoughts of his new best friend from Greece. He was very good looking, in a leather-clad, tanned, bald, and raw sort of way. Once again, he wondered what the hell had happened since his 96th birthday party last September. A few too many drinks, certainly, but it was now some six months since that modest celebration. Had he always been attracted to leather-clad Greek men with a fluent knowledge of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic? Was he gay? And, if he was gay, how did the voluminous black bird whose image flitted across his mind fit in? And, more importantly, who the hell is looking after my lovely little old bookshop?
Sweeping up the last of the VAT-free tampons which the junior officers enjoyed throwing around the mess, he wandered off to see if his old chum Ken ‘Newt-Man’ Livingstone might help him make some sort of sense of this living hell.
And then he remembered why he wouldn’t be able to find Ken on this side of the lines. Bugger! Another of his life-long certainties vanished in cloud of confusion leaving behind the faint tang of sulphur in his nostrils….
Inadvertently, he found himself begging a god that he passionately didn’t believe in to let him wake up from this nightmare…
