Children of the revolution

As the left sinks into psychosis, what remains? The answer is sugar, profanity, snacks and toys. Protest now resembles Clown Town, a dystopic toddler play barn near Finchley Central.

To mark the American President’s trip to London this week, the Donald-Trump-in-a-nappy balloon rose again. There was also a Donald Trump robot. It sat on a toilet in Trafalgar Square and farted. ‘The fart we couldn’t get from him,’ said its creator, Dom Lesson, ‘so we had to use a generic fart’. Meanwhile, a man mowed a penis shape into a lawn to protest against climate change. He was hoping that Trump might see it from his aeroplane.

The fashion, when faced with a politician you despise, is to attack them with milkshake. During the elections in May, milkshakes were thrown at Tommy Robinson in Warrington (-strawberry) and Bury (also strawberry), and at Nigel Farage in Newcastle (banana and salted caramel). On Tuesday, a milkshake was thrown at a Trump supporter, as a woman screamed ‘Nazi!’ at him.

Others have progressed to solid foods. Remain campaigners buy fairy cakes that say ‘Brexit Justice’. Leavers bake their own.

Why? Is it an inversion of a bread riot and so a reminder that things could be worse? Snack-themed insults follow Donald Trump everywhere. At the anti-Trump protests last year, I saw banners that said: go home wotsitface, wots-hitler and wotsit hitler. Many have returned this year. nazi wotsit was actually spelt out in Wotsits. ‘I think people need to be reminded of history,’ the owner of the wotsit hitler sign told me. ‘That is why I use that name.’ She was very grave, but I wanted to laugh and ask: if people had only stood outside the Reichstag in 1933 holding signs that said shitler made of pretzels, might the outcome have been different? But British leftists like calling Trump a Wotsit because he is orange-coloured like a Wotsit, and it is a class-based taunt of the kind that they depend on.