Don’t you just wish the silent majority would shut up? The violence that rightwing politicians and columnists evidently hoped to help on its way last Saturday (“pro-Palestinian marches… will inevitably turn a solemn anniversary into a day of rage” – Sarah Vine, the Daily Mail, 7 November) could have driven the country towards full-blown fascism. Columnists such as Vine, and the former home secretary Suella Braverman, had spent the previous week blowing their dog whistles so loudly that dogs all over the land sought out the relative quiet of municipal fireworks displays or dreamed of a peaceful night in at one of Boris Johnson’s uneventful lockdown parties.
But the apparently inevitable Cenotaph-smashing, though momentarily threatened by the very Weetabix™ ® boot boys who turned up to prevent it, was avoided by the relative calm of the peace protesters (whose ranks we must always remember included a barrel full of bad apples); and because their march had never intended to go near the Cenotaph anyway; and by the skilful policing of the police, who showed what they can do when not busy arresting teenage climate martyrs, circulating crime scene photos of murder victims, or asking “amazingly hot” women reporting muggings to go on dates with them.
Instead, the far right’s own Armistice Day riot showed us what happens when you mix newspaper tall tales about poppy sellers being assaulted (“scumbags… pushed and punched a 78-year-old veteran during a pro-Palestine protest at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station” – Sarah Vine, the Daily Mail, 7 November), senior Tory politicians’ lies about police bias, old-school racist football fans and loads of cocaine. When they meet, it is murder!
Though the Tories are now 30 points behind in the polls and have taken the remedial steps of sacking Braverman and then reshuffling the pack of damp Danish 1970s porno playing cards that constitutes the cabinet’s comprehensively drained talent pool, it’s surprising that the government is still standing at all. And that it has survived in any shape or form is down to the loyalty of one politician, Michael “Disco Dingbat” Gove. For greater gove hath no man.
Gove can always be relied upon to create a distraction. Faced with a government no-confidence vote in January 2019, for example, the then environment secretary quickly whipped up a bombastic grandstanding Oxford Union showboating smear of the leader of the opposition to pull focus, while in September that same year he cleverly drew attention away from Jeremy Corbyn’s criticisms of the government in the House of Commons by wobbling around like a jelly mannequin next to the speaker’s chair while trying to wipe imaginary cream cheese off his nose with an imaginary handkerchief.
But why did Gove walk straight into a peace protesters’ sit-in at Victoria station last Saturday, like some kind of bad idiot? According to the Daily Mail, a newspaper so trustworthy Wikipedia no longer allows it to be used in citations, Gove had been attending an event in Camberley, Surrey, but was dropped by his driver at Victoria because of road closures brought on by the demo that no one in his team knew was happening or could have planned around.
Like a down-on-his-luck American actor in an Italian zombie film, Gove “started walking through the streets but was followed by the angry mob… then walked to the station where he thought he would be safer, according to sources close to him. It was then that police intervened” (the Daily Mail, 11 November). Thank God for the police, even if they are all woke lefty snowflakes now, apparently.
The thuggish poking of Gove was one of the few moments of disobedience that voices on the right, who had bet the house on Saturday’s protests turning nasty, could attribute to anyone other than the fascist thugs their own siren songs summoned. How convenient.
Does it seem strange that a politician would not have security advisers to prevent them from just wandering into a protest? And given Gove’s history of nodding off at work, you’d imagine he would be extra vigilant in case he was compromised by accidentally sleepwalking into the Ku Klux Klan’s dogging layby.
But, on the other hand, when Johnson was foreign secretary, his security detail somehow allowed him to go unattended to an Italian party with a former KGB agent, one month after the Salisbury chemical attack. So anything’s possible.
Or was Gove’s provocative walkabout a deliberate attempt to cause an incident to distract from the government’s mishandling of Armistice Day? If Distractor of the Duchy of Lancaster is now Gove’s job, he’s going to be busy. What will Gove, the sacrificial sin-eating goat of Rishi Sunak’s rapidly decomposing government, just happen to wander into next?
The new environment secretary Steve Barclay’s wife, Karen Barclay, holds a senior position at Anglian Water, one of six companies under investigation by the regulator Ofwat for potential illegal dumping of raw sewage. Should this make the news, will loyal Gove suddenly find himself wandering into a cesspit?
The new foreign secretary, David Cameron, failed in his dodgy lobbying for Covid scheme money for Greensill Capital, and the company’s collapse cost the taxpayer up to £5bn. If this becomes an issue, will noble Gove clamber into a shepherd’s hut on wheels and roll himself off a cliff?
If he stays out of trouble, Gove could be back in line for the top job. But Sunak has threatened to pass emergency legislation declaring Rwanda, found unsafe by the supreme court, safe. If the PM can just deny observable reality on a whim, will there be any need for Gove to create his sacrificial distractions?
Ironically, in her 7 November column questioning the motives of young peace protesters, Vine herself wrote that people can be “played by far more cunning and ruthless propagandists than the ones they so enthusiastically decry”. No shit, Sherlock!
Basic Lee tour dates are here; a six-week London run begins 9 December at Leicester Square theatre
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