All that has really changed is that we’re all angry now. It isn’t just students who are cross
I’m worried that we are running out of people to hate. It’s all moving too fast. In the space of just a few months, we’ve had bankers and the BBC and the police and now MPs. What’s left for the summer? It’s barely 18 months since we did the House of Lords; we can’t possibly do them again already. Nurses? Trains? Traffic wardens? Something more left-field? A summer of hate against the RSPCA?
Mind you, maybe I’m being too hasty. Because, and humour me here, just close your eyes and try to imagine a copy of the Daily Telegraph. Look at the headline. It’s about MPs’ expenses, isn’t it? Now knuckle your eyelids, shake your head and visualise another. Expenses again, right? Not a bad thing, in my view. It’s probably the dormant gossip columnist in me, but I can’t get enough of this sort of thing. John Reid’s glittery loo seat? Brilliant. What I’d like to see, most of all, is a big CGI mash-up of every claim, all stuck together, like a crazed version of Through the Keyhole. Who bought a ladies’ blouse like this? Bing! Phil Woolas! Five points! Who needs a £1,300 television? Who claimed a 23p lemon? Not with Loyd Grossman, though. Is Peter Snow still around? He’d be great.
But no, I don’t think it’s going to last. I think we’re going to need somebody else. So I’ve been casting about, trying to figure out who could be next. The royals, maybe? I think they’re probably due a kicking. Because really, it’s all one story, isn’t it? The MPs, the banks, the BBC, the Metropolitan Police, even those bastards at the RSPCA. It’s the impotent rage of the little man against the big system. I interviewed a bunch of students a few months ago, about student protest. They thought they were angry about the environment, or Gaza, or tuition fees, or animal rights, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that their anger was actually an amorphous, bubbling thing, and all they were after was an outlet. We’re all angry now. That’s all that has changed.
For a while this week, I was tracking, in an idle, geeky sort of way, the number of times that people have mentioned ‘public outrage’ in relation to MPs’ expenses. When it hit triple figures, I gave up. Politicians have been saying it, and the media too, and it always strikes me as entirely disingenuous. Doesn’t ‘outrage’ contain notions of recentness, or change? Tell me, when was this golden period when everybody agreed that all politicians were fine and wholesome people, entirely motivated by selfless altruism? Did it happen in my lifetime? If so, I must have missed it. As the child of a politician unblemished by scandal or disaster, I’ve always had a relatively easy time, but I’ve still spent the bulk of my life meeting people, telling them my name, and waiting.
Since I left Scotland for Medialand about a decade ago, people have usually been nice. Beforehand, out there in the wild, they often weren’t. I’m not talking about aggression or actual hostility, just a sort of weary, judgmental disdain. As a teenager, I often used to go to the pub around the corner from our house. I’d worked there, my sister had worked there, everybody knew who we were. I remember once standing next to the village pisshead in the gents. ‘We aww’ ken whae’s paying fer your pints,’ he said, with bottomless scorn. And I blushed in front of this faultless, superior moral agent, and then I looked down and saw that he had vomited on his shoes. True story. My point is, your man at the puke-flecked Edinburgh urinal is not surprised to learn that his taxes are paying for repairs to Oliver Letwin’s tennis court. He thinks all MPs have tennis courts, and he thinks that they all nicked them from him. Nothing will convince him otherwise.
The public looks to the Commons today, and sees a prejudice confirmed. They did the same with the Met police after the G20 baton charges, and the same with the City after Fred Goodwin’s pension, and all that has changed is the intensity of the anger. That’s the real story here. Anger, growing. Pulling on its boot and looking for the next arse to kick. Whose will it be?
Duck sex. It worries me. Last week, on Camden Road, just outside the dry-cleaners, I stopped and stared and watched seven mallards try to rape another mallard. She got away, but I doubt she’ll have got far. They weren’t in the mood for giving up, those ducks. You could see it in the set of their feathered brows. Beaks curled into hard and brutal leers.
I’d forgotten about this sort of thing. I used to see it a lot. When I was at university, the cloisters of my college were an avian sado-masochist pleasure dungeon. Take it from me, Emmanuel College, Cambridge was a bad place for female ducks. They’re evil little buggers, mallard drakes. Well, maybe not buggers. Hard to tell. You’d see them all, nodding their sinister green heads at each other, as some sprightly brown duckess wandered around the corner of the library, blue flash glinting innocently in the sun. Then they’d be off, and fast, moving with a rapist’s waddle, like the boys who follow the other boy into the greenhouse in that borstal film starring Ray Winstone.
You’d hear quacks, and then screams. You’d run around the corner and find one gripping her head with his beak as the others climbed on and off, all the while dodging kicks from shrieking and outraged students of Feminist Critical Theory. The ducklings were cute, but the making of them always shook me to my moral base. I think I’d blacked it out. Now it all comes flooding back.
In 2005, I remember, a Dutch biologist won an award for a paper entitled (brace yourself) ‘The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos’. I haven’t seen anything like that yet, not even in Camden. Still, that’s the Dutch for you. Always one step ahead.
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