The prose below is the ending of a short story I wrote in January 2021. The story was titled Muppet and it charted the bumbling escapades of a faux-rebel anti-hero: a thinly veiled Boris Johnson. Reading back over the musings of my 17 year old self I cringe at its overly descriptive style, but I am also struck by how accurate my hyperbolic portrayal turned out to be.
And that is where we find him. There he lies: blue-blooded wrists encircled by furry plastic handcuffs- the closest he will ever come to being punished for his numerous crimes. His suit is expensive but his behaviour is cheap. Saville Row tailoring soiled by the champagne scented rivulets streaking down his voluptuous torso. There he lies: a snoring, spread-eagled mass slowly drowning in its own softening pool of saliva. A grounded hunter protected by the surrounding tangle of shadowy streets and the chequebook above his heart. There he lies: cut off from reality, wallowing in excess.
I was angry in January 2021, angry about the cancellation of my A-Levels at the nonchalant flick of a hand, however, instead of writing a hard-hitting political polemic I turned to fiction. In the years since, I have come to understand why my teenage self thought fiction the fitting medium. Our political landscape has continued to push the bounds of reality, making it more reminiscent of a theatrical farce or of a fairytale steeped in dark magic.
I came to truly consider the fairytale nature of our politics upon reading Angela Carter’s In Pantoland, which celebrates and mourns the unreal world of the stage. Carter begins with an homage to pantomime, but she then caveats said homage with the following admission:
But all also two-dimensional, so that Maid Marian’s house, in Pantoland’s fictive Nottingham, is flat as a pancake. The front door may well open when she goes in, but it makes a hollow sound behind her when she slams it shut and the entire façade gets the shivers.
We live in a world where ideologies are no longer deep-rooted; they are as temporary as name labels on a corporate away day. We live in a world where we do not question the integrity of a politician who writes two columns, one endorsing remain and once endorsing leave. The transience and accepted impermanence of ideology is at the root of our crumbling political culture. Despite its external grandeur, Westminster and its occupants are, in the words of Carter, ‘two-dimensional’, a cacophony of parrots who will repeat anything if it ensures them a cabinet position.
My seventeen year old self was despairing. Now at twenty, my philosophy is: ‘why not have some fun with it?’ If the political landscape increasingly feels like a fairytale then why not treat it as such? I am being governed by people who re-opened pubs before schools and cut champagne tax on the same day they cut funding to rebuild schools.
If they don’t take me seriously then why should I take them seriously?
As I see the sun setting on this particular political dynasty, I will take inspiration from my 2021 ending for Johnson and endeavour to provide endings for the characters we have met on this yellow brick road.
Nothing-but-hot-air Johnson
To fictionalise Johnson is difficult because he is nothing but an utter fiction. It is a treacherous path because it risks strengthening the cultural mythos surrounding him, adding to the dangerous epithets of ‘lovable rogue’, ‘man of the people’ and worst of all ‘rebel’. Johnson is a figure who likes to be laughed at, basks in it even, but only when those laughs are carefully curated. Instead, I suggest we return to the world of Carter’s stage. Johnson is the ageing actor, well past his prime who keeps returning to the stage for an encore nobody has asked for. Each time that deliberately ruffled blonde head returns to the stage it grows slightly in size. On the final time he returns, the aged Thespian seizes the bouquet from the principal boy, shoving him into the orchestra pit with the same rugby strength he let slip in the streets of Japan. The ageing actor’s head is so big by this point that he cannot see the crowd. He floats above what he assumes is a standing ovation and sticks his hand out to catch the flurry of bras he is sure will be thrown his way.
Bighead never returns to the stage. Instead, with irony that is almost good enough to eat, he becomes the ‘safe legal route’ the government are ostensibly looking so hard for. Good for nothing but hot air, Bighead lives out his days ferrying migrants across the channel, powered by his giant ego. A bobble-head hot air balloon that functions with the same transportive magic as Harry Potter’s Knight Bus or Santa’s Sleigh. Forget Boris bikes and Boris buses. This kingdom will be defined by the Boris balloon and unlike those other enterprises, this one has actually come from his own head- quite literally.
Thumbelina Truss
Thumbelina Truss was born in a tulip which protected her from the outside world. One day, Thumbelina Truss realised that she was much smaller than everyone else, which she didn’t like one bit. All Thumbelina wanted was to be big, so the rest of her life was spent proving that she could rise to positions beyond her stature, standing on hedgerows and molehills shouting her big, bold radical ideas to anyone who would listen. When Thumbelina made it to the big city she was surprised by how many people wanted to implement her ideas, but when they asked her to explain further, she couldn’t, and everything came crashing down. In the end Thumbelina’s premiership was shorter than she was. Thumbelina ran away, embarrassed because everyone had seen just how small she really was. In an attempt to hide from the world she looked for a tulip to curl up in. The best she could do was a green flower she took to be a rose.
Thumbelina woke up to the smell of rot and mould. She opened her eyes and took in the shadowy surroundings of a compost bin. Looking down in horror, Thumbelina realised she had been sleeping not in a rose but in a wilted lettuce with googly eyes and a blonde wig.
Jeremy in Wonderland
Alice is looking slightly worse for wear these days. She hasn’t adjusted to the real world, her blonde hair is now a blinding white, her blue pinafore is replaced by a blood red tie and she has a new name: Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy never expected to make it out of Wonderland, he entered the contest as a joke, not realising that he had somehow garnered the support of every Mad Hatter in the land. Even though Wonderland is his home, Jeremy has always been a Wondersceptic. When the vote happened in the Real World to close the Wonderland Rabbit Hole forever, Jeremy could have spoken up but he didn’t. He knows that we owe our lives to the delights of Wonderland and the relationship we still have with it when we read its stories to our children, but Jeremy thought we had outgrown it.
The irony is, Jeremy still relies on excuses that only make sense in the Topsy Turvy world of Wonderland. Jeremy knows that excuses such as ‘I was present but not involved’ and ‘I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely at the image’ only work in the logic of Wonderland. Take a long, hard look in that looking-glass Alice. I hope you don’t fall through.
Nick Clegg the Mermaid
They had to build a slide in Downing Street to accommodate Nick Clegg’s tail. He has not always had one; nobody with a tail was born with one. A tail is usually the result of a terrible curse, but in Nick’s case, it was a choice. Nick was inspired by The Little Mermaid for all the wrong reasons. Speaking to an old witch named First Past The Post, Nick begged her for a voice; all he wanted was a political voice with which he could enact his beautiful centrist agenda. What did he have to lose in return you ask? Oh, nothing important, just his backbone. You see, Nick is not an aesthetically pleasing mermaid, no he more resembles the true form of a siren. A svelte marine creature whose shoulders drop instantly into a boneless tail, meaning that on issues such as tuition fees, Nick has plenty of voice but sadly very little conviction.
Nick is so successful as a mermaid that he has managed to make it across the pond. In his US Facebook office, Nick tucks his tail under the desk and wipes the seaweed from his hair, confused as to why people keep calling him George. Nick doesn’t understand why he is so frequently mistaken for George Osborne. Nick thinks his tail is a dazzling yellow gold, with Lib Dem rosettes for scales; but, to everybody else that tail is as blue as those blue-blooded Johnsonian wrists we began with.
Midas in Number 10
Rishi would never let himself be referred to as Midas (awfully terrible for comms you see) but he is secretly very proud of his Midas touch. Rishi does not need to spend £200,000 renovating the Downing Street flat because he can turn everything to gold in the blink of an eye. PM Midas has now built himself a considerable fortress, behind which he cowers, blinded by the gleam of his golden turrets. Everything around him turns to gold, but he doesn’t see this as an affliction because he cannot see past it. The gold is not an obstacle but a permanent mirror which suits our PM just fine. Schools falling down? What sillies they are to build them out of concrete–everyone knows you should build schools out of gold! God what would they do without him?
Rishi has taken political inspiration from his Midas touch. He now wants to build everything out of computers, pooh pooh to boring old concrete, pooh pooh to boring old gold–it’s all about the technological revolution these days. Rishi could fix the crumbling country, but that would mean he would actually have to meet its people. Rishi would much rather use his Midas touch on himself.
I’m going to huff and puff and blow the house down
Be my guest Big Bad Wolf, be my guest.
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