Regulars of FSB know that this is a collection of contemporaneous sketches written during the EU Referendum campaign in 2016. Your comments and suggestions are very welcome, and all are noted. Many have already been valuable in the editing process as I look towards producing a finished volume which I hope to see published for the 10th anniversary of the referendum next year.
God knows how this will be achieved, but I’ve had some very good advice from Clive Matelas of this parish on some of the options.
As per, I’m still looking for a pen and ink cartoonist to illustrate the book. Tom’s talented friend Alpha India looks good for a colour cover, but costs of colour printing lead me towards choosing black and white cartoons for the body of the volume and I’m more inclined towards the mordant style of caricature of Scarfe vs Giles, for example, as older readers will understand this comparison.
Part 9
Corporal Corbyn stood aghast. His secret, and long cherished, hopes for a unified European Federation of Socialist States were now in mortal peril. He'd even got a name for it - The European Union of Socialist States and Republics - EUSSR. What could possibly go wrong with this?
He’d spent many happy hours contemplating this utopian objective whilst gazing through windows in the Lower and Upper Sixth instead of listening to the fascist schoolteachers who’d thought so little of him, as testified by their cruel end of term reports:
‘Jeremy rarely identifies a point of interest without subsequently taking lots of time to then miss it completely.’
‘Sadly, for Jeremy, banal verbosity is unlikely to become fashionable outside of the Houses of Parliament.’
‘There is a village, somewhere in this country, which will be looking to replace its idiot. Jeremy’s best hope for a modest living is that he’s in the right place at the right time.’
Ha! He’d shown them what he was capable of!
At some point in his life-long journey through Marxist-Leninist dialectical analysis, the Gramscian bit about the capitalistic geopolitical hegemony had, mysteriously, crept into his mind. This, of itself, was a bit of mystery as Jeremy had adopted an unusually rigid and purist posture towards books soon after finishing the fifth volume of the ‘Janet and John’ books.
Over the subsequent decades he’d remained ‘unpolluted’ by the contents of books, preferring to glean what he deemed useful from the headlines and comments in such weekly newspapers as ‘The Morning Star’, ‘Socialist Worker’, and the dust jackets of the books he sold in his bookshop, along with the first paragraphs of the many tracts and pamphlets which adorned his shelves. He was fiercely proud of the fact that his independence of thought was utterly untainted by ever having read a book.
Swapping verbal notes with a privileged few members of the working classes with whom he’d had contact had helped in his quest for knowledge. Mummy and Daddy’s gardener, one of the porters at school, and the occasional encounter with a tramp swigging Buckfast on a park bench, had helped to nurture his belief in the need for a class revolution in England, Britain, Europe, and the World.
‘Fuck off! Toff arsehole! Leave me in peace!’….Ah! Peace! This was the cry from the downtrodden to which he’d responded.
The very people that he'd pledged to fight for, and defend, from his childhood had become somehow more real. Playing Tonto, as Mummy and Daddy had told him to, and threatening his brother, The Lone Ranger, with a Community Exclusion Order had been part of his happy upbringing in a non-gender, anti-age hierarchical sort of middle-class type of happy family.
The fact that they’d been quite well off had, perversely accentuated Jeremy’s sense of injustice in ways that he couldn’t quite fathom. There was a good reason for this, yet it remained one of the many mysteries which he has yet to address.
Breezing through school with a couple of Ds at A level, Voluntary Service Overseas on a small island in the Caribbean, teaching English to classes of black children who all had a firmer grasp of syntax than he'd had, followed by a brief excursion to the North London Polytechnic hadn't been a challenge.
Failing his first-year exams in Trades Union History and getting a job as a research assistant to the ancient Union of Cobble-Blunters and Gas-lighters had set him on his trajectory to greatness.
He'd proved his teachers wrong and went into The House of Commons to defend the important values held by the oppressed in British society – The Provisional IRA and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
Sitting, and rising occasionally to harangue a Tory in Parliament, were hardly arduous tasks - so long as he stayed with the script he'd written in 1971.
And a few months ago, September 2015, just after his 96th birthday, everything had changed.
Since then, he'd found himself on the same team as a juvenile Etonian who was pretending to run the country. How the hell did this happen? Viscount Stansgate, Anthony Wedgewood Benn, and Michael Foot had been his lodestars in the political firmament. He'd followed them slavishly - as good Party members were supposed to, especially if they had little to offer beyond unquestioning servitude, and he’d fitted this requirement to perfection.
All of sudden he'd found out that a practical joke had misfired, and he was suddenly in charge of 229 other people in a house he'd enjoyed sitting in for 33 years, opposing whoever was in charge and being paid for this. He was bereft of guidance. Lost, and supposedly in charge…
He remembered very well that Viscount Stansgate and Michael Foot had vehemently opposed Britain being in the European club and he'd gone along with this until that bloody birthday party last September.
Shortly after the vaguely recalled 96th birthday party, he'd been marched into a room and proclaimed Leader of something or other. And, before he knew what was going on, he'd been instructed by some overweight thug, sharp suit and designer specs, to 'toe the line' or somebody might come round and chop bits off anything growing in, or near, his allotment whether vegetable or animal. He abhorred this sort of threatened violence, just as he knew did his friends in the IRA and the PLO, unless it was in a ‘just cause’. Could he be a ‘just cause’?
The next thing he remembered were the loud and threatening exhortations from his new, so-called friends, to promote the same capitalistic, hegemonistic club in Brussels he'd spent 42 years condemning.
Staring into a vast, empty sky he tried to reconcile his existence with the day-to-day stuff. The alliance with Captain Cameron was, at best, a compromise too far. At worst, oblivion threatened them both. Oblivion was starting to look quite attractive.
It was all a little too much, and he wondered, not for the first time, if anybody was still looking after his little bookshop while he was facing enemy fire on the frontline.
He missed his comfortable, happy and secure, 1960s and 1970s which had offered the assurance of the inevitable overthrow of the entire corrupt oligarchic hegemony which unjustly dominated the proletariat. A tear trickled over his grizzled cheek and rested on a new, small boil, which reminded him that he hadn’t been eating enough of his own, natural, allotment vegetables.
He raged, internally. His impeccable and consistently blameless ascendancy to power, should have removed him from the tiresome adjunct of any semblance of personal responsibility. None of this had been even a remote part of his teenage life plan, and at the age of 96¾, this 'power' thing seemed more ludicrous and frightening than ever.
The recollection of moments of passionate, yet trivial, Marxist dialectical analytical bliss with the ‘well-upholstered’ black skinned girl he'd shown off to his chums, and the later liaisons with women who'd enjoyed his finely honed, slight, modest, yet perfectly formed person, brought a vestigial quiver to his now geriatric loins.
He was proud to say that he'd always had more to be modest about than most and, if he was now alone in this, so be it.
And yet. Here he was, within a hair's breadth of thrusting the sword of righteous proletarian indignation up the fundamental part of the Etonian bastard in charge of the campaign to end all campaigns. And what did he do? He'd cowered. He'd equivocated, and then he'd succumbed.
After that, he'd asked Captain ‘Call-me-Dave’ Cameron and Sergeant ‘Mad-Dog’ Osborne if it was OK to pop out and have a chat with his troops.
They'd both responded with a sound he'd last heard on a BBC wildlife documentary showing other species regurgitating semi-digested food into the beaks of their offspring. Could it get any worse?
In another place, Captain Nigel 'Bonkers' Farage looked about the tattered, warring factions of the British Resistance. In his heart he knew that he would survive this campaign. It had been pretty bloody as indeed, most campaigns were. He'd lost a testicle, a bit of his spine, a marriage, a large slice of income, and more, over the years.
He refused to be defined by his singular, or multiple, losses - testicular, vertebral, uxorial or otherwise.
What was left of his happy, yet damaged body remained resolute. Whether Captain Boris de Stauffenberg Johnson, Private 'Speccy' Gove or Colonel Iain "Quietly" Duncan Smith succeeded in toppling and replacing Captain Cameron at the end of this campaign was a matter of supreme indifference to him.
As the Remainian forces' barrages of shells diminished, the British Resistance, confused as ever, decided to embrace a new, and radical tactic.
In order to win support from the largely apathetic, often confused, majority of the citizens, they decided to go out and about the country and discuss the values which still resonated with some of those citizens.
This was a radical and unusual tactic. Actually meeting voters in person. Not since the distant days when Prospective Candidates for Parliament were required to submit to public hustings had such a thing been proposed.
This was the sort of war which Captain Nigel 'Bonkers' Farage knew he could fight and win.
He summoned his driver - 'Take me to me the nearest pub north of the Watford Gap. Let’s get this campaign on the bloody road!’….