THE SUNDAY ESSAY. LEST WE FORGET, AGAIN.

 JOINED TOGETHER IN HOLY DEADLOCK

LOVE AND MARRIAGE, LOVE AND MARRIAGE, 

IT'S AN INSTITUTE YOU CAN'T DISPARAGE.

She led him on to the stage as though she was his carer, one of those useless parasites whom we must discard or die. (They - far more than the political establishment shitehawks, all doing a great job - they are the ones we must seek out and punish; the low-waged, it’s all their fault.) She led him by the snotty, nail-bitten, clunking, Claw of Doom hand, her ageing hero; what he needs, of course is somebody to lead him by the throat to the gallows tree of public opinion but Sarah - game, feisty Sarah - was put in place to thwart such a deliverance. We must await reports on how she takes prime ministerial wifely retirement, rotting away in dire, smug, tut-tutting Kirkcaldy, alongside the most detested, mocked, reviled man in recent British history, doing charity work, whilst Imelda Blair collects mansions and millions and richbitch SamCam poses for the cameras with her healthy baby.
     Look, somebody halfway normal, and a woman, too, cares for Gordon Snot, they thought, maybe she’ll teach him hankythings, bless, he’s been too busy, you see, ruining everything, the horrible fucking bastard, hearing his father’s dreadful sermonising I-Know-Besting voice in his head, telling him how very fucking clever he is; nae wonder he was far too busy to wipe his nose on a hanky and not throw phones at staff or burn all the money and give the gold away. But now he’s married and that’ll make him a much better incompetent bullying fuckwit; nothing like a woman to bring out the best in a chap. Sarah will tell him that he’s not really a stone mad, immature, snot-eating lunatic up to his neck in all kinds of shit; fuck, no, it’s the others. He’s not really insane, a delusional freak, madly lusting for power, convinced that only he can save the nation - the world, even - from itself. He’s not really smarting, still, over some imaginary betrayal by some imaginary friend, he’s not really consumed, eaten from the inside out by his hatred of the empty-headed poltroon, Blair and his greedy doxy, Imelda, the one with her fat ankles squeezed into fashion boots and her mouth like Portsmouth harbour. No, he’s just a normal, cuddly, big man. A hero, really. It’s what carers do; calm and sedate and nourish  the self-esteem of their client. Not much good, though, Sarah, at winning elections. Perhaps she, too, now, is gobbling happy pills to ward off the evil truth that yes, after all, she did marry a nutter, and none of her supposed PR skills could alter that fact, not in the public’s eyes, now not, alas, even in her own; we do not know.
     Maybe if he’d gone for a floozy, it might have been different; imagine Gordon Brown, the bloated, snot-eating, nail-bitten boy-man coming bowling out of Downing Street with a sexbomb on his arm, a pouting, lipsticked bimbo in spike heels, someone like the frog dwarf’s bicyclette Parisienne, wossname, Karla, somebody whose appearance just announced, in neon capital letters, that she was only good for fucking and what more could you want than  that; a showbiz harlot reeking of the boudoir, and not some wretchedly worthy, blue-stocking, Home Counties amazon, Hell-bent upon rearing this mad old bastard’s spawn. Yes, I’m just like any other normal, young parent - he never actually said it like that, he said parent of young children, which implied the same thing, the same normalcy - and we just like to do family things together; look, I even have a sports jacket. It is the right thing to wear.

 AND Y’KNOW, WHEN WE GET HOME,

YOU MUST GO TO YOUR ROOM, SOURIS.
IT IS SOURIS, ISN’T IT?
I HAVE SOME WORK I SIMPLY MUST GET ON WITH…

I don’t really care about this prime ministering stuff. Although, of course, I never use them for political gain, my children, just all the time, constantly, relentlessly, without fail; ever since they have been born, I have been mentioning how even though I mention them all the time, the living and the dead - is it one of each, two of each, six of one and half-a-dozen of the other? - I am really not mentioning them, not like other political leaders do, not that there are any other political leaders, not compared with me. Y’know, to link the premature death of a child into my support for the NHS is a rotten thing to do and if I did it, not that I would, unless, of course, I felt I had to, for the good of the country, then people could say that I was using my children, for political gain. It’s the sort of thing Mr Cameron would do, but not me. Did I tell you how much I love  my sons? It is the right thing to do. For the country. Y’know, families and children, they are what makes this country so wonderful and that’s why, at the fine age of fifty, I couldn’t wait to start mine, especially if it would get me votes. Which it didn’t.

 What a fucking wretch that Brown is. A floozy and no kids and he might still be there, doing that sol-you-shuns thing. Strange men and wildly attractive women, you see them everywhere. That’s the sort of wife that wins elections, not doleful, martyred Sarah. Sarah didn’t help le cause Brunois, just made him look more like angry mildew than he already did, a miserable mess, cubed, nightmarish in appearance, nightmarish in outcome. 

     It’s not, en passant, just Gordon Snot. Champagne Charlie Kennedy did just the same thing. Scenting power, in the 2005 election, he thought he’d better normal himself up and so wed another stodgy, glamourless breeder, to knock out, he thought, some vote-winning sprog. And look at him now, all over the place, his life a mixture of boozy vomit and stagey bluster, dark glasses on an overcast day, all his future behind him. Usedta be the youngest MP in parliament. Lookatim now, Ma.
     We are not here, though, to bury Kennedy but to rhapsodise, in tones of darkness and cruelty, scorn and ridicule, maybe one last time, over this malformed, ill-reared, bad-mannered, scrofulous freak, Brown. A grotesque, snivelling, cowardly, blame-shifting apology for a man, even by the dismal standards of contemporary politicians, Gordon Brown lost his long-presumed leadership of Labour when the Party voted overwhelmingly for Blair; the early indications having shown 36% in favour of Blair, just 9% for Brown, he had no option but to withdraw from the election, in which Tony and Imelda romped home to beggar the nation, ultimately ignite World War Three and secure for themselves the fantastic fortune to which they felt entitled. Typically, though, the horrible fucking bastard, Brown, growling and hectoring, would not accept the democratic verdict of the majority of his party, demanding of the feeble, skittish, grinning Blair that he guarantee to step aside, soon, so that he, Brown, the real leader, rejected, as he was, by the party electorate but never mind that, could take over the job he felt was his destiny.
     Mad as a fucking hatter from the start of Ruin’s parliamentary dominion, Brown was able to bully all in his malevolent orbit, having colleagues (such as Harriet Soursister and Dame Frank Field) removed or sidelined when they failed to heed his threatening voice. By establishing a separate Ministry of Leader-in-Waiting, in which he was able to withold from his prime minister, the First Lord of the Treasury, any and all information regarding budgetary matters. The useless popinjay, Blair, was generally too concerned with his world image, too busy touching up his twennyfourseven make-up to trouble Brown overmuch, happy playing Foreign Secretary to Brown’s domestic prime minister. Madeupnewsandfilth joked about this travesty of government, about this constitutional outrage, government by tittle-tattle, encouraging the Prudence-of-No-More-Boom-And-Bust’s Ruinous posturing until it became a running national joke that the prime minister couldn’t sack his Chancellor, that neither prime minister nor cabinet but Chancellor decided government policy. Such is the power of MediaMinster to belittle and cheapen our national discourse that nobody cared, and the same gang was voted into power three times, nearly four. Such is the power of Murdoch’s madeupnewsandfilth that the poxy imprimatur of some cheap slag like Trevor Kavanagh or Kelvin McCunt is enough to install governments or depose them. All those now damning Brown and Blair for their economic infelicity once endlessly applauded their vision, their prudence, their mad shepherding of Ruin, through our streets, into our kitchens and bedrooms; all of those, but not we, here.

     Let the work of change begin, he gobbled, caring, dopey Sarah planted at his side, as he entered Downing Street, unelected; No More This and No More That, he grunted, as though the efforts of all others, the previous ten years, had been misguided and worthless, as though his empty, bitter coup set straight a history blighted by impertinent reality; his stitching up of the leadership was, at last, the true, magnificent result of the May 1997 general election. Let The Work Of Change Begin, he intoned, like some Chinese Emperor, at the start of a new dynasty. Impudent cunt. And not a word of resistance from the ministerial colleagues he was so openly berating with his No More This and No More That, their past ten years sermonised into disrepute and invalidity. Now, It Really Begins, he blustered, in his maladroit grandiosity, his fevered bombast, now, Now That I’m In Charge, and they applauded Brown and Mousey as they entered his governmental manse to lead a grateful nation to New Presbyteria.

STICK WITH ME, BABE.

TODAY DOWNING STREET, TOMORROW KIRKCALDY.

Just as Imelda before her had her own interests - paid best friends, freebies and whining - so Sarah had hers. She was big in BGLT, Gordon’s Sarah, friend to the priding heterophobes, the bisexual, gay, lettuce and tomato Thought Police hungry for a harmless old-fashioned normo to abuse, Ruin’s bullyboys and girls, let loose on society to insist that sodomy and bondage and coprophilia are the very will of God, opposition to them the work of the New AntiChrist. Sarah carved out a niche for herself; no little woman, bare-foot and pregnant, she. No, right out there she was, at the very rim of sexual liberation’s merry arsehole; how comfortable she looked, there with the five-o’clock-shadow drag queens, the resilient old queers, waltzing their miserable, annual Exhibitionists’ Waltz. 

 ONE OF THEM'S  MARRIED TO THE LIMEY

PRIME MINISTER, YOU SAY?

(Those blokes in chaps, with their arses hanging out, marching down the street - where are their heads at? Wherever it is, Sarah’s was in the same place, apparently. Although now that she’s no longer Ms Prime Minister, no longer in the First Ladies’ Club, her priorities may have altered; making Gordon’s sandwiches,  ready for his day down the Kirkcaldy Oxfam shop, will infuse her life with a duller, more prosaic flavour; Prince Alberts, nipple clamps, transvestism and gender-realignment surgery all now, we must regretfully assume, largely a thing of the past.)

     Anointed as First Lady in much the same desperate, last-throw-of-the-dice manner as Peter Mandelson was brought in as Joint  PM, she, too, failed to stop the unstoppable rot, and her public appearances, like Mandy’s, served only to floodlight Gordon’s Feet of Snot, or is it Stone, it doesn’t matter, he never had an emissary up to the task. All his messengers wound up with their ears cut off; all his wine was water, all his pearls were clay.

     Sarah’s folly, then, which she shall ever rue, was to imagine that she could refine, by dint of her sluggish personal charm, transmute, with a twirl of her skirt, alchemise his coarse, base metal into something precious. Sic transit gloria mundi; and now she joins him in miserable rejection, in defiant but irredeemable has-beenery. And serve her fucking well right.

The 2010 Miliband conference was a last hurrah for Sarah and her poor, nonsensical ambitions. This was probably her last appearance on a national platform, grim as it was, joining passively, abjectly in her husband’s apparent insistence that, now that he had nothing better to do, the work of his love-affair with her would begin - Let, in effect, he seemed to be saying - Let The Work Of My Marriage Begin. Like most Brown speeches, it was teeth-grindingly, buttock-clenchingly, Oh-Fuck-No, embarrassing. The random, inexplicable Domestos grin, the tractor statistics, and now his Sarah-And-The-Children shtick remind us all of our own constant potential for  nightmarish Never-Going-Back-There Humiliation. No one should with Decency delight in Brown’s ritual self-humiliations and yet we do, even though here, here in this ghastly fuck-up, here in this contretemps of a life, is tragedy so pungently, so assiduously self-wrought, so accentuated by clod-hopping, slipshod, ruinous cack-handedness, so fractious and self-destructive, so craven-cowardly, so bloody, so wickedly cruel, so back-stabbing hypocritical, so absolutely start-to-finish fucking awful that Shakespeare would shrink from dramatising it; King David, psalming it, would falter.
     Madeupnewsandfilth are done with Brown, and would fillet, instead, the gormless Miliband and whoever carries his woodwormy, blunted and misaligned spears. It is only we, here, Ruin’s cyber-boulevardiers, who have the stomach for Snotty Brown; he is our creature. And in wishing him the worst we are only true to form - constant, even noble. For without us he can feign forgiveness, anoint himself in the oils of hypocrisy. Ah, he can whimper, a prophet is without honour in his own land. History will be kinder to me. And at least I have the kind of pension which, thanks to me, few others now enjoy.
 Sarah’s desserts are - fairly - of interest. It seems likely that in see- king to normalise such a horrible fucking bastard she will have made accommodations far outside those usually accepted in matrimony but will have anticipated far greater rewards, one of which, we must assume, was a lengthier term in Downing Street, and a departure less humiliating - parading her children, as though in rebuke to an ungracious electorate, was another of those needless, stagey, counter-productive gestures in which Snotty seemed to delight, beating his retreat, as it were, en famille, for the first time publicly, the manner of his going as crass and blood-curdling as his Let-The-Work-Of-Change-Begin arrival. It seems likely that Sarah, a powerful, PR career woman, would have agreed to, maybe even devised Brown’s ghastly stratagems; she was in any event at his side, we are told, throughout his premiership, joining him enthusiastically on platforms, cheerleading, praise-singing him, as had no previous prime minsiterial spouses; not even the shameless, sticky-fingered, jumped-up, shrew-faced Glenys ever led her wind-bagging
ginger nonentity, the money-grubbing fuckpig, Neil, by hand onto the stage. It was always a high-risk strategy, Sarah’s, dependant upon the kindness of others, and almost unbelievably stupid; that she signed off as Leader’s Wife with such nonsensical bravado was, like the GayPride posturing, typical of her. Going through the motions is what the hand-picked zombies do at party conferences and those at Manchester applauded Sarah and her man to the rooftops but after that, even for those gullibles, Sarah’s spell, if ever there was one, lies, like her snotty, bullying, incompetent husband’s, forever broken. And serve her right, cheeky cow.
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all*
Who knows what the future holds. Now that the Project is well and truly over, she might prefer to be anywhere else than where she is today, nursing Snotty’s wounded vanity, all the way from here to the cemetery. Whether the Browns are sundered by the chill winds of blighted ambition or joined together in holy deadlock,  we, here in Ishmaelia, equal opportunities enthusiasts from way back, cordially wish a good, virulent pox on the both of them.
 
 
                                                             * Bob Dylan, 

Love Minus Zero/No Limit