Labour, lizards and anti-Semitism

There’s a very funny moment in Jon Ronson’s book Them: Adventures with Extremists, part of which follows the New Age mental case David Icke on a tour of Canada. All the way across the great plains, Icke has been promulgating his thesis that we are the unwitting subjects of shape-shifting reptilian alien overlords. Aside from Ronson, a protestor has been following Icke, too — demonstrating outside each venue —convinced that when Icke says ‘shape-shifting reptilian overlords’ he really means ‘Jews’. Eventually, having heard Icke speak on perhaps a dozen occasions, Ronson asks the protestor, ‘Do you still think that when Icke says lizards, he means Jews?’ And the protester replies, a little crestfallen: ‘No. He really does mean lizards, doesn’t he?’

People get deranged by stuff and end up thinking we’re controlled by mysterious creatures which are sometimes a euphemism for ‘Jews’ and sometimes perhaps not. I don’t know what exactly deranged Mr Icke. With my colleague Matthew Parris — who seems to be headed on an express train to the booby hatch, with my old friend Nick Cohen checking his ticket and offering light refreshments — it was Brexit and the rise of populism.

In an article for the Times last week Parris gave a rather startling debut to the mysterious creatures jabbering away inside his head: ‘the shadow.’ It was the shadow, a convocation of philistine, pig-ignorant, ill-bred, jingoistic scum which delivered us Brexit and is now busy ushering us into an age of authoritarianism and intolerance.

By which I think he means ‘people who, inexplicably, have a different political opinion to myself’. But the result is the same, a dehumanising of more than half of the country. Not really people at all, just a kind of semi-sentient vast and toxic soup, like something out of The Quatermass Experiment.