Not everyone who voted to leave the EU wanted to see Britain immediately descend into being an unaccountable single-party state, exploiting people’s worst prejudices to maintain power indefinitely. Some people just wanted to have bendy bananas.
As a member of the metropolitan liberal elite in the pre-Brexit wasteland, I wake up every day, my little liberal heart fit to burst with grief. Momentarily, I took bitter comfort in the fact that it could be worse. I could be American. In which case, not only would I be broken-hearted, I would also be even fatter.
But in the daily Doomsday Clock countdown of Donald Trump’s presidency we at least see the foot-soldiers of the American government machine hurling themselves bodily into its gears, unconcerned for their own careers. Our opposition simply folded in front of Brexit like shit-smeared toilet tissue and posted itself politely into the municipal recreation ground bin full of dog muck that is the future of the parliamentary Labour party.
My constituency voted 78% remain. On Wednesday, my MP was too ill to vote. I’m joining the Liberal Democrats, itself on some level a hopeless admission of defeat.
On the Sun’s 29 June front page, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove promised ongoing single-market access, a promise now dematerialised unchallenged. The weekly £350m for the NHS has disappeared, and the buses the figure was written on have been wrapped up in Boris Johnson’s old gym pants and buried in Sarah Vine’s fennel patch.
Who gave these liars a free pass? Johnson compares François Hollande to Nazi guards and they say it’s “theatrical”. MPs compare Trump’s rise to 1930s Germany and Johnson says it’s “trivialising the Holocaust”. But the historian Deborah Lipstadt says Trump’s Holocaust Memorial Day speech was “classic softcore denial. The Holocaust was de-Judaised.” It’s so hard to tell what trivialising the Holocaust looks like these days. Arguably, Johnson was trivialising trivialising the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Putin threatens Europe. Trump threatens Europe. And Trump threatens the whole planet with climate change denial, although admittedly it is a very overrated planet, one of the most overrated planets in the cosmos. Would Britain still have pursued Brexit last June if it had foreseen this horrible future, less than a year away?
The Guardian's Brexit Means... Brex and the City – Brexit podcast
Listen
And what must the world think of us? On the many occasions I have been dumped by disappointed women, I was always heartened when they had the kindness to leave me for partners demonstrably superior to me – the clever and athletic Scottish doctor; the rakishly handsome Irish theatre promoter; the talented Canadian interior designer; the charming Australian pianist; the enigmatic and nameless Interrailing Dutchman; I took some comfort in this. At least my exes traded up.
But we have dumped a stable relationship with sophisticated and elegant Europe, fragrant with roquefort and Ricola, and flawed though her thickening beauty may have been, for the promise of having our pussies grabbed behind the bike sheds by Donald Trump and Recep Erdoğan, who look like an-out-of-shape golf instructor and a bloke who sells zombie knives to kids in the market, respectively. How humiliating for us. Looks like we were punching way above our weight when we were lucky enough to get laid in Brussels.
If our Brexit trade plan relies on wooing despised tyrants, what kind of morally bankrupt corner have we backed ourselves into? Public objections to Trump’s state visit are understandable, but are denounced as hypocrisy by shrill Brexit bullies pointing out that no one complained when the Queen hosted the entire entourage of Doctor Victor Von Doom, iron-faced autocratic dictator of Latveria, a totalitarian state policed by Doom’s flying sentinels, the Doombots.
But we do not expect exemplary behaviour from Dr Doom and his fellow dictators. As Doom explained, in horticultural terms, to Prince Charles at a Buckingham Palace state banquet, “My methods are a means to an end, no different than pruning weeds in order to let an orchid flourish.” The president of the United States, however, should be better than a hideously disfigured two-dimensional fictional comic book dictator, and ideally at least as eloquent.
When she was home secretary, in 2014, Theresa May denied a visa to the pick-up artist Julien Blanc on the grounds that his attitudes to women legitimised sexual assault, a charge you could equally well level at Donald Trump. It’s a shame Blanc doesn’t have a load of old smelly chicken going cheap. He might find that, instead of a ban, he received an invitation to the Queen’s high table. By comparison with Trump, Blanc is a gentleman. At least he never boasted on air that he could have “nailed” the Queen’s grandchildren’s “crazy” mum “without hesitation”.
But, with Trump’s trade deal help, at least our bananas will be bendy again. And on 1 February 2019, a man dressed as a sensible pirate will stand at the foot of an obelisk in Ripon, North Yorkshire, and blow an enchanted bendy horn, a horn only to be blown in Britain’s hour of need. And when that bendy horn is blown, as if by magic, all the straight bananas in Brexit Britain will suddenly bend once more, never to be straight again.
Ken Clarke, the treacherous jazz doom-monger, has warned that we cats are messing with forces we do not understand, daddio. There is a risk that all sorts of previously straight things, not just bananas, may, if they are too near the blast of the magic horn, turn bent too. TV idiot Richard Hammond has been advised to avoid Yorkshire altogether during the horn blast, to protect the investment made in his monetisable straightness by Amazon Fire Stick.
Ripon constituency’s referendum split reflected pretty much the national percentages, at 52% to 48% in favour of the reinstatement of perpetually bendy bananas, hence its horn duty. I have already booked a room at the Weatherspoon’s in Ripon square for 2019, in order to be at the epicentre of the people’s populist banana-bending revolution.
Weatherspoon’s owner Tim Martin, a vocal opponent of straight bananas, funded a boisterous chapbook ridiculing the insolent yellow fruits, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Straight Bananas. And Tim has promised to be at his Ripon outlet personally on bendy banana day, handing out free bendy bananas to his regular clientele of terminally nostalgic drinkers and plucky all-day breakfasteers, toasting their own imminent obsolescence.
Me? I will be drunk in the gutter, looking up at the stars, the 12 gold stars of the EU flag. Enjoy your bananas. You twats.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/brexit-donald-trump-trade-deal-bendy-bananas-stewart-lee
