I have always admired those great souls in the world who re-invent themselves. The ones who triumph personally over circumstance and bend the world to their shape. Those who disregard convention and what is considered decent behaviour and forge an identity completely their own. I am drawn to these people: the Richard Burtons of this world. The Michael Caines. The Vito Corleones. The Ari Onassis. Onassis was half shade, half light. He enjoyed both facets of his character. It is what makes him so fascinating as a man and so attractive to so many women. He welcomed that duality, that Janus faced humanity and was shameless about it. He would say that he was a mere peasant so must be forgiven for his outbursts and vulgar speech. This disarming honesty was also charming and sexy – here was a man so self-confident he could be totally honest about who he was.

For those on the wrong side of his business dealings, it made him scurrilous, untrustworthy, sly. It also made him shrewd, sharp and cunning in search of a deal and profit – two things he was legendarily brilliant at creating. For those on the wrong side of his egocentricity, he was faithless, cheating and selfish. But he could also be thoughtful and caring – a regular guest on his iconic yacht, Christina, was Winston Churchill, then in his incontinent dotage. Ari looked after him and his needs personally and welcomed him aboard whenever the Great Man wanted a voyage.

Onassis stories are legion. He has been depicted in film and attracted controversy and headlines in both serious national newspapers and in the celebrity gossip magazines. He married the heiress to another shipping fortune – and lost that wife to his arch shipping rival, Stavros Niarchos, after she tired of his affairs. He pulled off the marriage coup of the C20th by convincing JFK’s widow, Jackie, then the most eligible woman in the world, to become Jackie O. Perhaps unwisely as her spending habits shocked even this paragon of generosity. And the great love of his life was La Divina herself, the American born Greek soprano, Maria Callas.

But my favourite story about Onassis is not about women. It is not about business. It is about the nature of the man. His approach to those who opposed him. Much of his business life and all of his relationships were characterised by huge drama. The anti-Trust suit brought against the Onassis shipping line by the US Government; the failed deal of the century struck with the Kingdom of Saudi that went sour; the controversy over his rapacious and indiscriminate whaling activities in defiance of the law. His troubled relationships with his children and the seemingly loveless mismatch with Jackie Kennedy – was she just a bauble to signal acceptance by the establishment? I don’t envy him any of these heartaches, even though – a mark of the man – he shrugged them all off stoicly and even revelled in the notoriety some of them brought. And I certainly don’t envy him having to bury his beloved son, Alexander, who died at the controls in a plane crash – a tragedy the tycoon never recovered from and which broke his heart.

No. None of these stories.

I like this story, the story about Onassis buying the Monte Carlo Casino. The casino in Monte Carlo is famous. Not just because James Bond plays there. In its heyday, it was the most glamorous place in the world. The Czarina of all the Russias brought the Imperial Russian Ballet to dance whilst she gambled and an aggrieved patron lobbed a hand grenade on to one of the tables after losing at roulette. There is even a song about the place: The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

As I walk along the Bois de Boulogne
With an independent air
You can hear the girls declare
“He must be a Millionaire.”
You can hear them sigh and wish to die
You can see them wink the other eye
At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo

Fred Gilbert 1892

Onassis wanted offices in the Mediterranean and he had struck up a friendship with Prince Rainier, the ruler of Monaco (Onassis pretty much paid for Rainier’s wedding to the movie star Grace Kelly and the after party was held on Onassis’s yacht). Naturally, he turned to Monte Carlo as the intended location. The Societe des Bains de Mer et Cercle des Strangers (Sea Bathing Society and Foreigners Club) controlled the casino and about a third of all land in the principality, but they rejected Onassis’s request to rent office space. So Onassis bought them. And moved in.

How brilliant. How magnificently one up. Churlish. Vain. Couldn’t make it up. Revenge against the establishment’s snobbery and antipathy to an outsider. But also, good business and very good new business – Ari used his connection with Ranier to stitch up the deal behind the SBM board’s back. He out established the establishment. He had better allies than they did and totally outmanoeuvred their Machiavellian ruse. It is the stuff of movie plots, of third rate novels, and yet, like so much of Onassis’ larger than life life, it happened. Onassis was, for real, the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

Ari had homes in Paris, New York, Montevideo and Antibes. But his home was a converted Canadian Navy anti-submarine frigate which had protected North Atlantic convoys in the war and also been at the D-Day landings: the Christina O. She was converted by Onassis to be a combined pleasure palace and office and she represented his character more completely than any of his other hideaways. With 17 cabins she could handle parties for over 150 people and had some breathtaking innovations: a Roman mosaic tiled swimming pool which had a floor to conceal the pool when the space was needed for entertaining and a bar where the stools were covered in whale foreskin. Onassis delighted in telling his female guests that they were now sitting on the largest cock in the world.

It was this coarse vulgarity that both attracted people to him and repelled them. The man himself just laughed, whatever the reaction.

Onassis did life superbly well. He witnessed everything he knew go up in flames as a boy and arrived from Anatolia in Turkey to Athens in Greece as a refugee. He learnt to speak seven languages fluently. He was diminutive in size but his presence and influence were immense. He partied and joked and flirted and fucked, collected art and artefacts, spoilt his children and consorts, amassed wealth akin to Roman Emperors. He counted the good and the great as personal friends and had everything at his fingertips and whim. But he also worked like a demon, in the wee small hours, labouring through the night until dawn after all his guests had partied out and gone to bed. He was inexhaustible. He was alive with life. He was all that a man is – both the terrible rage and ruthlessness as well as the fun and light heartedness. His command of details was ferocious and even if he was bettered, he would usually turn setback to his profit – if not financially then karmically.

I like largesse. I like flamboyance – when done stylishly and without having to be the centre of attention personally. These were Onassis’ qualities. A barrel chested force of nature. Brilliant. Unstoppable. International. Fast. Impatient. Wily. Terrific company. An enjoyer. Entirely self-made. Scion of Greece. A Greek. A man. Aristotle Socrates Onassis. Hero.

In the most famous TV sketch that Eric and Ernie appeared in with the world class conductor Andre Previn (“Mr. Preview”), Eric (think Boris) misses his cue several times. Taking too long to walk to the piano due to his showboating (think Boris), he is at least a yard too far from the piano when the time comes for him to play. In a real classical concert, this would be a tragedy. We now enter Eric’s surreal world and the serious minded Previn is dragged into an Alice in Wonderland world of nightmarish proportions (think us – seriously trying to get a sensible solution – in Boris’s egotistical universe of Walter Mittyish promises and exaggerated claims). Eric suggests that maybe Previn could make the musical introduction “about a yard shorter” to give him time to get to the piano in time to hit his cue. In his twisted imagination, this is how music works and this is how you deal with the problem (think Boris’s boosterish behaviour shaking hands with anyone and everyone in some sort of parallel universe attempt to show the disease who was boss). Eric then decides to sit at the piano rather than make an entrance (think Boris getting the disease and rethinking his original flamboyant approach) then misses his cue again because he is seated and cannot see the conductor cue him in over the piano lid (think Boris failing to spot a glaringly obvious problem with his “plan”).

The sketch goes on and Previn attempts to get the concerto underway. Eventually, the introductory bars build back to the dramatic moment when the piano solo starts. Eric gets his cue but starts playing, very badly and out of tune (think Boris striking precisely the wrong tone with his own discordant plonking notes when what is called for is gravitas and realism). Previn stops the orchestra. Dumbstruck with horror, he stalks over to the piano and says to Eric: “You’re playing all the wrong notes!”. To which Eric replies with Boris-like bravado: “I’m playing all the right notes…just not necessarily in the right order”.

That’s Boris. Playing all the wrong notes. Out of time. And not necessarily in the right order. And, instead of laughing, we are crying. Crying with frustration at the hopeless ineptitude of the whole show. It has ceased to be funny. History may well be tragic at the start, progress to farce and then to pure comedy, but eventually, when repeated over and over with no apparent lessons being drawn, it turns full circle to tragedy again. It shouldn’t happen, but it does – over and over again.

Eventually, Previn takes to the keyboard himself and shows how it should be done. Shown up for the hopeless imposter he is, Eric covers his embarrassment by trying to dismiss the virtuoso performance as “rubbish”. Boris is trying to pull off the same trick. When it comes time again to pass verdict on his Covid “show”, the people of Britain will not be laughing. And Boris will be starring in his very own, self-imposed, self-regarding ‘tragedy’. But the real tragedy is the unnecessary suffering his incompetence has imposed on everyone else. It is beyond farcical.

Blog written by Tanya Khandurova

This Christmas, in our household, we took it in turns to read ‘The wind in the willows’. The Edwardian language is in keeping with the spirit of a traditional English festive season and it is a lovely story. As we were reading it, it occurred to me how similar the character of Toad is to our own dear Prime Minister. The tom-foolery, the careless disregard for others’ safety or wellbeing, the utter lack of foresight, the headlong pursuit of his own agenda regardless of reason or common sense, the empty bluster, the showing off, the barefaced lies, the scheming for personal advantage. Toad, in case you have forgotten, ends up in gaol. His vanity, selfishness, criminal behaviour and headstrong egoism land him there. By playing on the sympathies of a kind hearted woman who brings him food to the cell, he escapes and goes on the run. Toad is irredeemable. Incorrigible. Corrupt. Crass. Bragging, deceitful and vainglorious. He is, in many ways, one of the most abhorrent characters in fiction. On paper. But he is also naughty. Naughty and childish. Naughty and very funny. And in this miscreant demeanour lies his charm. We like Toad. Very much. In spite of himself and in spite of our better judgement.

But Toad is only bearable because he is surrounded by wise friends and sage counsel. Boris – Mr. Toad at Number 10 – isn’t. He is surrounded by political idealogues as blunderingly incompetent as they are insensitive. ‘The wind in the willows’ wouldn’t be a story with a happy outcome if all the characters were like Toad. It would be an anarchy of selfishness where many characters end up getting hurt or, even worse, dying. Mercifully, there is only one Toad. And there is common sense, practical Ratty; there is dependable, compassionate Moley; and there is soundly logical, fierce Badger. Together, they prevent the worst excesses of Toad from getting out of control and they surround him with discipline and clear thinking. And they have a plan to win back Toad Hall from the marauding Wild Wooders who have taken advantage of Toad’s absence. A plan which takes courage to implement against superior numbers – a plan which is clever, thought-through and executed quickly and effectively.

The parallel with our current Covid crisis is startling. Our government lacks the alliance of brains and competence that restored the world of the riverbank back to order. This government’s strategy is a Mr. Toad strategy of immediate self-gratification. Its execution, ramshackle, last minute, zig-zagging chaos. Result: unnecessary deaths, societal confusion, disarray and a country that has become a laughing stock. This is what happens when you put Toad in the driving seat. In a children’s story, it’s funny. In real life, it’s deadly.

I don’t want to be ruled by Prime Minister Toad. I love Toad deeply as a character – the story would be the poorer without him, certainly tamer and less dramatic. But drama is the last thing we want from our leaders. We want the characteristics of Rat, Mole and Badger. We don’t want erraticism, buffoonery, grandstanding. Please God, at this Holy time of year, deliver us from Mr. Toad. This administration is a car crash of ineptitude. If we are really to come out of the last few years of psycho-drama – first Brexit then the pandemic – and forge a new path in the world, let us be done with fools. Let’s evict the cast of the Wild Wooders – weasels such as the bombastic Nigel Farage, the oleaginous Michael Gove and the thuggish Priti Patel – and put Boris in an asylum where he can entertain himself pretending to drive cars with the accompanying ‘poop poop’ noises that pass for policy initiatives. We are done with incompetents.

So this 31 December, when we are prisoners in our homes for the third time in 9 months, when the celebrations are there but the family are not, when we are all paying the price of Boris’ last minute-itis and propensity to please rather than to lead, let’s resolve not to fall for bread and circuses ever again. Let’s settle for bread. Without the clowns. Let’s look to the dawn of a new year, rising in the East, get some normality back into our lives, rebuild and re-vitalise. And let’s start the fightback that will re-take this country back from the Toads and weasels that have taken up residence for far too long. They did it in America this last November when they evicted their own Mr. Toad from The White House. I’m aiming at 2024 as a new beginning when we chuck them all out here in Britain. But it will take a clever plan which will take courage to implement and against – at the moment – superior numbers. Step up all the Rattys, Moleys and Badgers. Your country needs you.

Hoile had a penchant for winding up an audience (especially one hostile to him) and a brawl. In student union meetings he could always get the desired howls of anger from ‘Trots’ by referring to black students as “Third world radicals” and was occasionally rewarded with being physically attacked. He was portly – though physically handy due to military training in the Rhodesian military – and a white Matabele. He delighted in telling us tales from his exploits in the army (the Selous Scouts?), and a little chuckle, half-suppressed, sounded from his throat at the memories.

Hoile was a notorious figure on campus. An atmosphere of conspiracy hung around him like a shroud. He was somewhat older than us, a slight accent, quietly spoken. Vaguely threatening. Always looking furtive and as if he were up to no good. He was the eminence grise of our coterie of politicos. He befriended us. We went along with it – the mystique was naughty, but, in truth, it was more sinister than naughty. I am sure the invitation to the South African Embassy came via him.

The reception was in the basement of the Embassy. We were shown a propagandised film about how jolly life in the modern RSA was for coloured families – I remember a black man rowing over a lake – and then there was a speech by the Ambassador, welcoming “friends”. We found it blatant and sickening. We were behind a pillar. We began heckling. Quickly, we were ushered out by a couple of large Afrikaans. There was a tussle on the lion skin rug in the entrance hallway and then we were ejected out in to Trafalgar Square. Right into the 24 hour picket that stood vigil for the long imprisoned Mandela. They presumed we were lickspittle whites supporting the regime. I think we were derided and maybe spat upon. Attacked twice in one night by members of opposing sides. Ironic.

Politics at university was a game. It was fun playing and it gave you a small taste of danger being a conservative in a left wing campus. I was attacked several times – once singing anti-IRA songs in the Republican Cholo Bar, my car was vandalised driving through an anti-Keith Joseph picket line and I escaped a bottling at a party due to the vigilance of my guardian angel, an old fashioned labour politico. I was part of the so called “riot” at the FCS Annual conference at Loughborough University in 1985 (total bill for damage, £20), last seen shouting “kill the wets” – hence the T-shirt in the picture above. It was heady. We believed we were the vanguard of an economic experiment called Thatcherism and we felt the excitement of being in an idealogical battle.

We were constantly under threat of being ‘no platformed’ and we railed against the Greenham Women; we had Enoch Powell to speak off campus and under great secrecy, talking about, well, the importance of secrets. We had a stripper who blew fire in the Student’s Union, in blatant disregard of the union’s non-sexist policy. We used to wheel out the a-political but naturally conservative Athletics Union to vote when we really needed to defeat an extremist left wing Union motion. We invited Tim Page, the hippy photographer immortalised in the film Apocalypse Now (played by Dennis Hopper), to come and stay with us (he camped on my floor). We were entranced by anything to do with renegade military and Colonel Kurtz’s commitment chimed with our ideologically twisted vision of the world. We liked to provoke, so we did and we revelled in the notoriety.

It was just a game.

Page had lived through the Vietnam conflict, had had the back of his skull blown off when he stepped on a landmine. The stripper was a woman just trying to earn a living. When we escorted Enoch Powell to say goodbye after the dinner, we were sobered by him taking our a mirror on a telescopic rod to inspect for possible bombs under his car – he was then a sitting MP as an Ulster Unionist for South Down and the IRA was still on active service. He lived in very real threat of being assassinated. All these people paid consequences for their beliefs. They weren’t playing a game. Neither was Mandela. And neither was Hoile.

Years later, when I was in Cape town on business, I made the pilgrimage to Robben Island to visit the prison where Nelson Mandela was detained so brutally during his long walk to freedom. I mouthed my personal apologies to his image on the wall as I waited to embark on the boat that would take us over the icy cold water to the place of his incarceration and where he evidently exhibited such nobility in his conduct despite atrocious provocation. I felt truly humbled by his example and ashamed of some of our antics and the protestations that we unthinkingly articulated in our FCS zeal. When you come face to face with history, it is a sickening feeling to realise you were on the wrong side of it. History is not playing and we should not play with history. It is too important to trifle with and too deadly to disown.

My sixth sense was triggered the moment the man moved towards the edge of the platform. As he casually hopped down onto the track another man tried to grasp for his arm and shouted something in Russian. I buried my wife’s face in my shoulder and ushered her round the pillar and out of sight from the carnage that was a second and a half away. “It’s a suicide”, I said, as we hurriedly made for the up escalator. Once these events happen there is the bland bureaucracy of delay as the station is shut down, the remains of the body are retrieved from underneath the train like instalments in a horror story and witnesses are interviewed. We made for the open air and street level. No one down there on the Metro was going anywhere soon.

The Moscow Metro. It is deep. It is magnificent. It is scary to navigate. It is a museum underground. The oldest stations on the Ring are monuments to Sovietism. Each one is unique. They are all testament to the boast that nothing is too good for the Proletariat. In winter, the warmth provides comfort to the homeless and the police tend to leave them alone to ride, hunched in their seats but comfortable and safe against the minus temperatures above ground. The police patrol most stations, often with dogs and always in groups, but there were none in evidence on the day of the suicide.

Suicide is a problem for all major city underground systems. And overground systems, too. As a regular train user, I have several times experienced my intercity express train screech to an abrupt stop, usually near a crossing. The passengers know something is awry and there are usually three doleful notes played over the intercom asking for the Train Manager to contact the driver. The passenger announcement that ensues is replete with euphemism, usually along the lines of “an incident involving a pedestrian”. We the passengers, all know that a passenger versus a locomotive travelling at 125mph is a one sided contest. Somewhere underneath our seats will be the scraped remains of a fellow human being. Instead of dwelling collectively on the tragic sequence of perceptions on life’s events that drove the person now prone along the underside of the train, we tut and shake our heads at the inconvenience. A suicide, in my experience, delays a service by at least a couple of hours. Regular train goers know this and settle in for the duration in a resigned silence whilst the emergency services attend to the scene, the driver is interviewed and then offered counselling for the post traumatic shock and the appeal for witnesses goes out. A suicide is a selfish act – it inconveniences so many people. It has consequences for others: missed meetings, worried loved ones waiting on platforms for people who don’t arrive; the knock on effect of the line being blocked and other trains being delayed or re-routed. This is possibly the most amount of attention the suicide will have been paid in their miserable state. And here is the tragedy. In dying so flamboyantly, in choosing the certainty of an almost instantaneous death offered by an eight or 12 carriage train colliding brutally with a flimsy human body, the suicide is at once negating her own existence and also bringing it to the world’s attention more forcibly than in an entire lifetime of endeavour. Is this calculation a factor in the choice of despatch chosen by the suicide or are they so beyond reason and so plunged into despair that none of this plays through their mind?

All I know for sure is that anyone placing themselves in the way of some two thousand tons of train travelling at speed is serious about committing suicide. This is not a cry for help. There is precious little left of the person to help. This method is the choice of those who mean it. That it is so inconvenient for all those of us just getting on with the day to day business of living, those for whom life still has at least some flavour and interest, is a side effect. We are but extras in the fleeting moment when another life had brief meaning to us all. Though it is often quickly forgotten as we move along. Train suicides do not go gentle into that good night. They burn brightest when they are at the end, brighter than magnesium as their souls are released at last from whatever torment they have endured here on Earth.

I remember the man on the tracks in the Metro station back in Moscow. I could not bear to look. But I bear witness to another human’s existence and am sad that he was so sad he chose such a means of self-execution.

But thank the Lord, he is not calculating. Rafael Behr writes in The Guardian: “He has the personality of a tyrant , but not the premeditated programme of a dictator. His thirst for power has always been deep, but it is the impulsive craving of a man addicted to attention for its own sake, without the mechanical drive to rearrange society and fashion other people’s destinies in the mould of a Hitler or Stalin. ” In this respect, the damage Trump has inflicted on America’s democracy, though significant, has been more accidental than deliberate – the result of theatricality, self-absorption and capriciousness. This time, America has been lucky and it has survived a four year, highly damaging and exposing assault on its institutions. This time, America got away with it. This time, the fragility of its democracy and the fact that the whole edifice relies on the complicity of well meaning, well behaved and law abiding leaders has been saved. If it tangles with a cleverer, more methodical tyrant-tendencied President, America as we know it will crumble. Trump was a warning shot to reinforce the Constitution.

There are other pillars of the US system exposed by Trump that need overhaul. No one landed a punch on him these last four years. No one. He did appalling things, things which offend all norms of decency – the list of his crimes, misdemeanours, actions, behaviour, spite, barefaced lies, accusations, gaslighting, hounding, incitements, vitriol and dog-whistling, law breaking, tax evading, scapegoating, groping, objectifying, insulting, showboating, brazen bribery – and nothing happened to him. He didn’t suffer even a scratch. The toothless White House lobby was cowed. The Senate, obedient, spineless. Congress, frustrated, impotent. Investigations, inconclusive or unable to find the smoking gun. Doctors and the legal officers of America – people everyone needs to trust – compliant. All those sacked members of his administration, too numerous to list, fired brickbats – all of them bounced off Trump. His justifiably bitter lawyer – all wind and no fire. The ex-heads of communication, campaign leaders, heads of the intelligence services, Secretaries of State, Defence, Chiefs of Staff, chief strategists, even his niece – all published books, exposes and gave briefings of life behind the scenes in the Trump White House. Whatever was exposed, whoever was saying it and however close they had been to the Child in Chief, not one punch landed. Nothing hurt him. Not even Covid-19. Not even Bob Woodward, slayer of evil Presidents past or the New York Times’ expose of Trump’s tax affairs cut through the teflon. How can so many people have missed so many open goals? The conventional weaponry of American democracy has been found woefully wanting, unable to stand against irrationality, shamelessness, disregard for decency or a political party which sells its soul for expediency rather than plays the long game on priciple. Legal recourse and the checks and balances on despotism are flaccid and withered and have been out manoeuvred. They are in severe need of root and branch reinvention. If they go unreformed and they face an even more menacing threat – a Trump-like figure bereft of buffoonishness, a real, bona fide demagogue with a plan – we will all be in real peril.

There is another lesson to be learned from the last four years. Trump has spent a lifetime conjuring the image of being a smart businessman. A smart businessman that speaks like the silent majority. That suffers like the silent majority as the plaything of the professional politicians of the “swamp” (Washington DC). That distrusts the establishment and all its on-the-surface polite but hypocritical shibboleths, conventions and protocols. He is the little guy, but with big money and a big mouth. He cries ‘foul’ on the chattering classes’ consensus that has defined the post war political era. He represents all the people who don’t drive BMWs, who feel overwhelmed by outsiders, who hate seeing their jobs disappear offshore, who lose loved ones in needless and endless wars overseas, who see the inhabitants of coastal America more focused on the affairs and wellbeing of citizens of other countries than those of their own hinterland.

To these people he gave a voice. To these people he appears more competent at running America and at taking care of America’s business than all those professional politicians – a vital advantage when the main issue dominating the election was not Covid or race but the economy. Those professional politicians who subsidise the Rest Of The World with handouts and contributions from hard earned tax dollars to international bodies such as the UN and WHO, who undermine American industry’s competitiveness with trade deals that favour other nations in the name of free trade, who grandstand with their ethics to keep relations frigid with unsavoury regimes whilst demanding the people pay the price of such moral superiority with their children’s lives on the battlefield. The political, liberal elite who ignore their own people and favour every minority under the sun over John Doe. For them, Trump speaks. He represents their rage at being ignored for decades.

Like I say, I ain’t a fan. Trump comes over as the manure-mouthed, self-proclaimed Messiah of Mid-America, spewing policy sewage into every pool of modern life. He is a vile and verbally violent poseur, a posturist, a panderer to base instincts and fury. He is the toilet – albeit gold plated – into which all the pent up effluent of an angry and dispossessed America pours and overflows. He is no friend of civilised discourse or normal societal decency, tolerance and compassion. And I am for those things. But such values have delivered nothing for many people. They have been empty virtue signalling for much of America – turned outwards to everyone but Americans. For the silent majority, these publicly espoused values have meant suffering, ineffectuality, empty promises, joblessness – the mirage of a new Camelot which only the well educated, monied and privileged can actually participate in and enjoy.

So whilst I hate the messenger and I disagree with the answers delivered as alternatives to the liberal way, I do not hate the people who have found the voice that vents their frustrations. In this chink of commonality, in this empathy with those who have never been asked to sup at the table, might lie the possibility of a new way. And a new way is what’s called for. If everything just returns to normal with Biden and all we liberals just breathe a sigh of relief and say “phew, thank the Lord that’s over”, an even more gold plated, vulgarian version of him, will arise. And this one will be here for good because we liberals will never be trusted again and this time, he or she will have a plan.

When you are 55, and male, at some point in the following year after your birthday you will receive a letter from the NHS. It is not a birthday card. This letter offers you a screening to check for bowel cancer. About 47% of men don’t take up that offer. But I did. Well, best to know, I figured. The appointment was offered and I duly noted the time and date to attend the Royal Sussex Hospital in my diary.

The due date arrived for my bowel cancer screening. I parked in the NCP at the Royal Sussex having performed the necessary self-enema an hour previous with the kit that had ominously arrived in the post two weeks earlier. The warren of corridors and lifts and several dead ends eventually yielded the antiseptic waiting area for the screening. There was one other man waiting. The only other human being in evidence was a camp, northern, slightly porky orderly, who did his best to alleviate any nervousness he presumed we both had by repeating, in his high, sing-songy voice, the warning that the procedure would be ‘a little bit windy, a little bit farty’. If I wasn’t nervous before, I was now.

This nauseating phrase echoed between the cubicles where we two patients had been parked. It was his standard patter, delivered with all the loud, unfeeling insensitivity of officials the world over who have forgotten the meaning of what they are saying and for whom the words have become a sort of automatic incantation – more for their benefit than ours. He reminded me of the Michael Palin character in the film Life of Brian who ticked off the names of people scheduled for execution: “Crucifixion? Yes? Line on the left. One cross each.” The pretence of empathy was there but the reality was more brutal – there’s a job to be done. The orderly took a few details and got me to sign a disclaimer in case, during the procedure, they managed to cut the lining of my intestine and I bled to death with internal haemorrhage. I signed and put my pen back in my pocket with a slightly shaking hand. Now I was really nervous.

My turn came. I was escorted into the room. There were four people in there. Four. One junior doctor learner driver (who showed me in – we all have to start somewhere); the Head Honcho, gowned, bespectacled, grey haired; the chief torturer; and the one watching the telly. I was ushered in and told to lie on the gurney. Was it only four hours ago that the Revenue and Customs had fucked me up the arse to the tune of thousands? Was it a mere four hours since their bank account had syphoned mine and left it depleted, feeling used and sore? Yet here I was again, lying down, on my side, knees up to my chest and naked from the waist down, about to undergo the same, debilitating, impoverishing process. This time, the instrument of torment was not an anodyne binary bank code sequence but a 30 foot long black mamba coil of antiseptic tubing, replete with a miniature set of pincers, a camera and halogen headlight. Like some ravenous Sarlacc sandworm from your Return of the Jedi nightmare, it eyed me threateningly. We both knew who was the prey and who was the predator in this encounter. I swallowed hard as it began its cruel ascent. How many other men’s arses had this monster explored?

As I lay there, smothered in more lube than a Tory MP’s rent boy, the black mamba began its curious journey into the unknown. They had offered me a ringside view – sorry, you can’t avoid puns when it comes to bums. “Would you like to see it all on the TV monitor?” They wheeled a large screen atop a tall stand over to me. “No”, I replied firmly. (They say that you need to demonstrate to yourself that you are at least in charge of some aspect of your life in such situations, and I did.) This was my “here I stand, I can do no other” Martin Luther moment. I would not watch ARSE TV Channel O. There was nothing on it I wanted to watch. They looked a bit deflated. Clearly most people leap at the chance to ogle their innards. Not me. I would be all Bridge-over-the-river-Kwai-Alec-Guinness about it. Stoic. Quietly taking my punishment in the hot box (you see? Puns again.)

“Ooh. That looks sinister.” The voice comes from behind me. It is the black-mamba-monitoring telly addict glued to the images of my lower intestine. I stiffen slightly, the only physical sign of my reaction to this exclamation – apart from my eyes, which are now bulging. My brain is working at the speed of light. What is sinister? What do you mean by ‘sinister’? Immediately all my neurons are on red alert. But it’s funny – my years of training people how to communicate with others immediately kick in and instead of jumping off the table in a panicked dash for freedom, I find myself thinking: “You really should be trained to know not to say things like that out loud”. My mind jumps to what, at the time, seems an appropriate analogy: the British Airways pilots who calmly, amusedly, refer to the most vicious of turbulence as “we’re just experiencing a few lumps and bumps” – balm to troubled passengers. A black mamba monitor (I am sure she must have had a more scientific job title) saying out loud “Ooh, that looks sinister” is akin to the pilot shouting in to the intercom “WE’RE GOING DOWN!”. Training needed here.

I let this inner dialogue slide.

“Er, what does that mean?”, I enquire with my best British insouciance. The most senior person in the room, the doctor, says that thy have found a polyp – an abnormal tissue growth – in my intestine and it will need to be snipped off and sent to the labs for analysis. Great, I think. I’ve got cancer. It’s all over. “So I’m on Death Row?”. “Not quite”, soothes the doc. “Most polyps are benign. Let’s wait and see, shall we. (Was he a BA pilot in a former life?) We’ll know in 10 days.” Brilliant. I only came in here for a quick shufti and a nose about (no one’s nose was involved, obviously – that would be a very different story). I didn’t expect a death sentence..

There’s a bit more intestine that hasn’t been fully sodomised yet so they carry on in search of more polyps but find none. The snake slithers back into the daylight, limp and sated . Although I haven’t been cut and bled to death on the gurney, I feel defiled and violated nonetheless. It has been a shocking invasion. “You can tidy yourself up now”, the doctor invites, like a Commandant who has had his non consensual way with an inmate. I wipe myself, feeling sticky and dirty. He shows me the photo of the thing they will send to the lab and gives me a piece of paper with the description. I just want to get out of there. As I make my way back through the ward, I can hear “a little bit windy, a little bit farty” wafting around the cubicles to a new set of patients. Poor buggers. I slink out and return home.

Four hours later, as my sphincter starts to trust me again, Britain leaves the EU. I am bereft. Resignedly, I accept it in the same way earlier in the day I had surrendered my wealth to the Inland Revenue and that evening accepted someone sticking three metres of two centimetre diameter plastic coated industrial strength cable into my most intimate orifice. Brexit feels the same – very uncomfortable at the time, depressingly not what I want to happen and with potentially awful consequences in the long run. I go to bed exhausted, unable and unwilling to join in the celebrations – such as they are in Brighton. I heard one firework. Whoopee.

All three events happened on the same, awful day – the 31 January 2020. It was a very bad day at the office. Fucked up the arse by HMRC. Fucked up the arse by the NHS and fucked up the arse by Brexit. Three strikes. I’m out. (And so, apparently, is Britain.) At least the worst is over. I am sure that from now on 2020 can only get better…oh.

Our world is in chaos. As I say, we have tried to stop watching the news, but it has us hooked. Nightly we turn it on to see if anything – anything – has got better. Instead, the familiar faces auto-cue crisis to every camera in the studio. The TV anchor men and women shake their heads at having to read out such depressing news. They think that serious stories need serious faces and sombre voices. That such times call for sobriety. They are wrong. What we need in such times is a latter day Reggie Bosanquet to make it all seem better. Reggie Bosanquet, the less than secure anchor on ITN News at Ten back in the day. We need on our air waves his charmingly lazy brand of insouciance brought on by a slight excess of insobriety. Something the poet prince of depressing times, Leonard Cohen, understood brilliantly: I – we – need someone to ‘dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in’. Gathered in one way or the other.

Reggie Bosanquet. Just the name makes me smile. Watching him present the ITN Ten o’clock news was entertaining – my parents would tune in just to see how far the wrong side of a bottle of red he was. His inebriation was an open secret and in those days, there was no shame in it. It just endeared him to the nation. He covered news just as depressing as any we get today. On ITN News at Ten from 1967 to 1979, his watch included some of history’s most tragic stories: the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Bloody Sunday, IRA bombings, Apollo 13, Biafra, the Killing Fields, the Iranian revolution, the Beatles disbanding. He made the uncertainty of existence bearable in a way that looking through the bottom of a glass filled with wine usually does.

When Reggie was on air, he kept two goblets of wine on a shelf just beneath the news desk, which he guzzled during the pre-filmed reports. If the world was going to end, you wouldn’t mind hearing it slurred from the side of his mouth. I’d rather go in the company of a man who drank his way through the news. I would rather spend my last few moments on Earth with the man who entitled his autobiography “Let’s get through Wednesday” than with the prim Fiona Bruce – the icy, charmless Head girl – or Mogadon Man, Huw Edwards, which would be like living out your last moments with that rather tedious, dull colleague from accounts. I’d just prefer a party and to go out with a smile than a scold or a yawn. Purely a matter of style. News readers should be chosen by this criterion rather than journalistic integrity or gravitas. Preferably all three: old school style.

Let’s face it, nowadays the Reggie B method would be the only sensible defence mechanism given the unending list of dreadfulness today’s news anchors have to read out. I would have nothing but respect for them if they parked a heavy glass tumbler and a full decanter of Lagavulin on the desk, ready for action, as Big Ben chimed. At least it would be an honest reflection of the unpalatability of their job. Which, right now, is not much different from Tom Hagen’s role in The Godfather, having to go upstairs and tell Don Corleone, his mafia boss, bed ridden and recovering from being gunned down in the street in a failed assassination attempt, that the Don’s eldest son, Sonny, has just been riddled with hundreds of bullets and killed. Hagen has to have a stiff drink in order to face the Don and tell him the sad news. Imagine having to do that on a nightly basis. Hell, if I had to do their job, the studio would need to set up an intravenous drip filled with a litre of 80 per cent proof just to get me to face the camera.

In this news cycle, for the whole of 2020, you’d need a survival strategy just to go on air. The nearest to perfecting such a survival strategy – but clearly sober – is Tom Bradby. He has eschewed any pretence at impartiality or resisting the temptation to express a personal view on the headlines. Every item of news ends with a sardonic raised eyebrow and a fatalistic comment. A bit like the fabulous comedienne Caroline Aherne’s nosy supermarket cashier, who commented rudely on every item she rang up as they made their way down the conveyor belt – “Tampons? Thought you looked a bit grouchy this mornin'” – much to the embarrassment of her hapless customers.

Bradby and Peston. The Two Ronnies of news broadcasting. One, the straight faced deliverer of acid put downs and muttered asides; the other, the erratic cadence and windmilling actions of a Vaudeville performer. Together they just about add up to a single malt Reggie. Thank God you can still get bad news delivered with a decent bedside manner. It may not be what you want to hear but at least it’s palatable.

I have done some maths. Andrex Classic Clean 12 roll multipack – £6.95. (And yes, I must have Andrex.) To buy enough to last me until Christmas, in case there’s a run on it (forgive the pun), I reckon on a roll a day at current rates of consumption in our household of four. Give or take. That means 91 rolls or 8 multipacks (with a few sheets left over for the week between Christmas and New Year), which is an investment of £55.60. (Who says Christmas is cancelled when you’ve got that bulk of paper under your Christmas tree, eh?) If I buy them at Waitrose, it will save me 10p per pack. (But, as you will see below, the people who are genuinely doing this do not need to clip coupons.) If I buy them at Tesco online, oh, too late. They have sold out, according to the website just now. (Are Tesco customers more likely to panic buy?)

A roll is 200 sheets, about 302 feet. That means that 17 and a half rolls make a mile. My 91 rolls would run to a tad over 5 miles. Five miles of wiping. At a consumption rate of £11.12 per mile. That mileage shames even a 3.7 litre SUV Hummer which comes in at 27.2p per mile – about 41 times cheaper. (But a Hummer might be a bit big, unwieldy and tough for this job.) So to stockpile that amount of Andrex at that price per mile, well, it would be cheaper to use dollar bills when I pay a visit. No one could possibly afford that ruinous fuel economy. By way of comparison, I could buy a very nice secondhand 2003 28 metre Sunseeker yacht and get about £15.60 per mile out of it. I must be loaded. Like I said, these types clearly don’t nickel and dime about such paltry sums. Nor worry about their carbon footprint.

So what can we conclude from this piece of entirely legitimate mathematics? We can conclude that all loo roll hoarders are not only big arseholes – in fact, mainly made up of arsehole – they must also be extraordinarily rich. In the super yacht class of rich. And they must also live in big houses – big enough to store 20kg of toilet tissue without having to navigate over it in the hall every time you want to leave the building. What I can’t work out, though, is how they get eight 12 multipacks in to the tiny boot of their Lambourghinis. Or why we aren’t spotting them as they monopolise the ‘Shoppers with children’ parking spaces. Or why they are shopping at Tesco. Maybe they need the Club Card points for their peeled grapes (the hemorrhoids variety, I’m hoping).

Whoever you are, panic buying loo roll and other stuff: just stop it.