Happy new year! But is it too late to save British democracy as we once knew it? In 2024, details of your awkward rectal prolapse could soon be earning a pretty penny for shareholders of an American surveillance business. What a time to be alive!
The American spy technology company Palantir has been given a £330m contract by NHS England to manage its “federated data platform”, which integrates our patient records. Palantir is, genuinely, named after magical orbs in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which the actual Dark Lord, Sauron, uses to spy on the hobbits when he is sending the Nazgûl to murder them. This should perhaps have rang alarm bells.
Tolkien scholars maintain Gandalf would not use the palantír because it would bring him under the Dark Lord’s control, but I am sure the health secretary, Victoria Atkins, has risk-assessed the danger of control of the NHS by evil orbs as thoroughly as she researched the role of junior doctors, whom she thinks are toddlers dressed in white aprons prescribing Smarties.
The British Medical Association, the Doctors’ Association UK, patient groups and privacy campaigners all oppose Palantir’s acquisition of our data. And wasn’t there an evil British spyware company that could have monetised it, anyway? I didn’t spend a month in the 00s defecating blood into a bucket so a billionaire early Donald Trump backer could fly around in a private jet eating chicken out of a bucket.
Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel is a former Trump-funding libertarian who told the Oxford Union: “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb and the NHS makes people sick,” and compared the British public’s love of the NHS to “Stockholm syndrome”. You wouldn’t put a man who hated pencils in charge of Cumbria’s Derwent Pencil Museum, or have asked Freddie Starr to look after your hamster. So why is Palantir anywhere near our NHS data?
Good Law Project is a nonprofit run by the barrister Jolyon Maugham, who sounds like a racing driver from Monte Carlo Or Bust, but in fact protects the interests of the public from the government with the tenacity of a man in a woman’s silk kimono killing a fox with a baseball bat. Good Law Project recently announced it is launching legal action regarding NHS England’s use of patient data. But on 22 December, Good Law Project claimed it received leaked emails showing that a PR company called Topham Guerin was planning to discredit them, on behalf of Palantir, which wants that NHS data.
Good Law Project believes social media influencers have been asked by Topham Guerin what their “fee expectation” would be for sending two tweets criticising Good Law Project, while taking care not to mention Topham Guerin or link to Palantir. But if I was Topham Geurin, and I wanted to make Jolyon Maugham mad, I would try to get him to believe Palantir was paying for social media influencers to attack him. Is this deep-vein psyops stuff, or me overthinking everything?
Topham Guerin’s speciality is “shitty memes”. “Sometimes shitty memes are effective,” declared co-founder Sean Topham of content so deliberately unsophisticated it appears, in contrast to the slick memes of “the elite”, trustworthy. Those experts! With their lighting!! And their fonts!!!
In 2019, Topham Guerin created the famously shitty “We bumped into Boris on his tea break” meme showing shitty Boris Johnson making a shitty cup of tea, announcing his since utterly discredited shitty Brexit deal and declaring his love of the Clash, Joe Strummer’s corpse spinning like a spin doctor. The content is shitty but, in retrospect, for reasons that shitty Topham Guerin didn’t predict.
It was also shitty Topham Guerin that unethically and shittily rebranded a shitty Conservative party Twitter account as a factchecking page, “factcheckUK”, during a television election debate.
For who can fight the current Conservatives, unbound by ethics and honesty? Don’t look to the 90% of the press that are Tory loyalists, or to toytown outlets GB News or TalkTV, sustained by self-interested billionaires to amplify their talking points, evil giants breaking wind into the infosphere through sewage pipes, the massive hunting horns of malign hell gods. And don’t look to the BBC for balance, touting oil-funded Tufton Street spoke-holes on Question Time again and again, like The Lord of the Rings’s comatose King Théoden, dozing as the worm-tongued BBC board member, former Downing Street spin doctor, Tory crony and ex-GB News adviser Robbie Gibb ejaculates into his ear.
But in Tolkien’s fable, Middle-earth is saved by an unlikely band of ill-matched heroes. And it seems we have our own in waiting, many belatedly radicalised by having had enough, not accountable to Conservative-cowed media. Our Fellowship of the Ring! Jolyon Maugham is Gandalf, with his trusty enchanted baseball bat; the four hapless hobbits are Led By Donkeys, fly-projecting truth-sigils by night; Gimli the dwarf is the lawyer Peter Stefanovic, tirelessly digging the arbitrary dishonesty of the Tory lie mine; Aragorn is Marina Purkiss, devastatingly articulate daytime TV Wag, obviously; Legolas the elf is Carol Vorderman, apparently immortal, ageless, and with pointed ears and a shiny face full of facts; and our Boromir, the well-meaning but brutal human, may yet be Danny Dyer. “Tories! You toilets!! Stitch that!!!”
In 2024, we ourselves have to get behind these people, social-media the shit out of them and crowdfund our way out of the crisis of democracy. They are our best hope, because the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats and, God bless them, the Greens have no idea of the tonnage of weaponised lies that are about to descend on them. Happy new year.
Basic Lee tour dates are here; a six-week London run at Leicester Square theatre ends on 20 January
