Oh! The humanity!! Drunk on Belgian wine, I watched the Barrier Reef of the Britain I know bleach to nothing in the twin glare of Brexit’s burning certainties and Julie Etchingham’s gleaming teeth.
Leave had no arguments or facts, just pornographically arousing soundbites and lies they knew were lies, but which they calculated might stick to a wall in a depressed town somewhere, if flung with enough force, like compacted pellets ofPriti Patel’s shit.
Even Remain’s Amber Rudd, the Countess Bathory of Energy and Climate, seemed clever by comparison to Boris, who managed to make the word “expert” a pejorative term. Nonetheless, it was bleakly obvious that the audience’s disillusion led them to favour the Leavers’ lies.
I wondered how Leave could rationalise their blind stab in the dark and live with the untruths they had told. And my mind turned again to Michael Gove, who, to put their relationship in terms of Gove’s beloved Dennis Wheatley, is the supplicant Simon Aron to Boris’s satanic Mocata, their joint prize the mummified phallus of Conservative party power. “Only they who love without desire shall have power granted them in their darkest hour!”
As I have confessed before, in 1992 I was a gag writer on a doomed Channel 4 show, A Pig in a Poke.
The experimental satire programme broke new ground by positioning its performers on balsa ladders in a smoke-filled Bat Cave, while they delivered belligerent journalistic monologues to camera, the stylistic integrity of which I and the comedian Richard Herring were encouraged to compromise with jokes.
Lucky Richard was assigned to Poke’s most affable hosts, the restaurant criticTracey MacLeod and her colleague, the rapper LL Cool J, who plied him with fudge and polystyrene all day, while I was understandably ignored by my master, a capable young comic newspaper columnist called Michael Andrew Gove.
Gove attended one writers’ round-table meeting a week, where all he did was badger the producers to book the former BBC newsreader Jan Leeming, upon whom he was oddly fixated, before leaving with all the office washroom’s toilet rolls secreted in his satchel.
Instead of asking me for jokes, Gove would make me wait on the fire escape outside his Notting Hill flat, occasionally emerging to assign me mundane tasks, such as taking his weekly washing – usually just seven white pants, seven white vests, fourteen grey socks and one yellowing sock – to the dry cleaners.
One week, the old Greek couple in Dryee-Fast seemed unduly amused by Gove’s unusually bulky package. “Tell Michael we try and try but can’t get the stains outta the crotch this time!” they laughed, unravelling a full-size fur suit, the reasonably realistic costume of an unidentified Gove-size rodent.
I rolled up the outfit and returned it to Gove without comment. I needed this job. I couldn’t afford to rock the boat. Scruples were a luxury I didn’t have.
Later that day, Gove suddenly appeared beside me on the fire escape, high above the Notting Hill street.
He had a habit of sneaking up on you. “Ah, Lee,” he said, “contemplating the incalculable, I see?” “Mr Gove?” I asked, as I felt his hand upon the small of my back, applying gentle pressure.
“The leap, Lee. If you were to leap now, Leapy Lee, from this fire escape, what would happen?” “I’d die I think, Mr Gove,” I answered, unsure where this line of questioning was going. “Perhaps,” Gove countered, “and experts would agree with you, I am sure.
But would it not be thrilling to find out if one could profit from such a bold leap?” “There’s nothing to find out, Mr Gove,” I replied, “no one could survive that leap.
This is the seventh floor.” “Was it not our lord Christ,” Gove hissed, returning inside, “who urged us to consider the lemming.” I don’t think Christ did say that, did he? Wasn’t it “consider the lily”? What did Gove mean?
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