Liddle Britain

‘How can I steal a motorbike?’

Wednesday, 24th January 2007

Rod Liddle observes a beautiful microcosm of British society on Branscombe beach, as slavering chavs and media monkeys make the most of a shipwreck

The police stopped the chavs from driving down to the beach and loading up, forcing them instead to carry their spoils, wheezing with the exertion, a mile or so up the steep and narrow road to the pretty and extremely affluent village of Branscombe. ‘You have to do something,’ I heard a woman resident implore a tired and patient copper in the village centre, ‘these people have been on my patio. And we have young children!’ She said the word ‘people’ as if she wasn’t quite sure it was right, but couldn’t think what word to use instead.

A sickle moon rose above the beach. The cold bit down a little deeper and fires were lit. Some of the scavengers had done the sensible thing and hired beach huts for the night; their lights blinked above the shoreline. As darkness fell and the sea lapped ever closer in, people got ready to greet this mythical tide which would bring in yet more consumer durables, to be flogged extremely cheaply the next day on the internet.

I retired to the lovely Victoria Hotel in Sidmouth — with its eternal heavy drapes and ferns and doilies and punctilious staff — hoping for dinner, but found myself thwarted by the fact that the minimum age requirement for the dining-room was 86. Instead, I sat in the bar with a drip feed of genteel alcohol and listened to one of the younger locals — he’d have been in his late seventies, I would guess — talk about the last time there’d been a shipwreck in these parts. They all remembered it very well, though it must have been 30 or 40 years ago now. A privately hired hovercraft had, somewhat ill-advisedly, attempted to gain access to Sidmouth harbour. It was not successful in so doing, apparently. Some way out it foundered and began to sink. And yet this terrible wrecking also brought forth bounty of a kind.

As the craft flapped pointlessly in the surf, many yards from shore, a magisterial figure in a smart suit emerged from within its bowels and waded, with steadfast expression and immense resolve, through the waves, a look of destiny upon his face. People looked on in amazement and trepidation. For it was the Right Honourable Jeremy Thorpe MP — and he’d come to do a spot of canvassing.