Proof By Example

More than 10 years ago I wrote this:

It’ll be a dark day for the city if the Outer London anti-Ken contingent propel his gormless, cloth-eared, crypto-fascist mophead buffoon of an opponent into power. We’ll be a laughingstock.

Obviously true, but also: Christ, I had no fucking idea.

The thing that vexes me most about the bowel-voiding embarrassment that is our current Prime Minister—and literally everything about him is vexing—is that he, like his tartrazine twin in the White House, stands as a powerful lesson, written in letters of fire a hundred metres tall for all to see. And that lesson is:

Shitty people get rewarded for doing shitty things.

Not only that, they’re encouraged to think they deserve those rewards. Incentivised to wallow in their shittiness, to proclaim it loudly far and wide, to revel in and celebrate their utter lack of redeeming features. Being a repugnant narcissistic self-serving mendacious shitbag is a fantastic career choice, they prove by example. Sign up at Shitbag University right away! Be the shitbag you truly want to be!

The very existence of these smirking entitled pricks sullies our public discourse, debases society, pollutes the Earth. And the fact that so many people line up to give the shitbags exactly what they want, knowing full well they don’t merit it, that doing so is an abject surrender to the forces of actual evil—well, that debases us more.

I hope to live to see these particular exemplars cast down, despised and rejected and acquainted with grief, stripped of every single trapping of success their rotten hearts ever desired, crawling in the gutter, drowning in sewage, torn apart by angry mobs. But even if that eventually happens—and SPOILER ALERT it won’t—it’s too fucking late. The lesson has been taught, and you can be quite sure it’s been learned. There are plenty more shitbags where these ones came from, and hordes of eager enablers ready to fawn and cringe and grease their paths to power.

So that’s something to look forward to, eh?