What would a coup d’état look like? Would you even notice if one was happening all around you? Should we even be allowed to use the phrase coup d’état, now that we are leaving the EU? Should we return the very words themselves to the vile continent whence they came, and accept back in turn le weekend, le camping, and loads of leather-skinned racist pensioners currently dwelling in Spanish retirement complexes, to drain the resources of our imminently even more understaffed NHS?
My late father used to have a drinking buddy, Krtek, nicknamed the Mole, who claimed to have been caught in the crossfire of a hostile 50s coup in his east European homeland. Apparently the Mole had been shot in the face in a street battle, leaving him with a permanent slit in his cheek which he could open and close at will, like the oily perineal gland through which Michael Gove periodically oozes translucent globs of sincerity.
The Mole first made my father aware of his face skill in the late 70s, at a family-run Italian restaurant, Da Corrado, on the then rural outskirts of south-east Birmingham. During dinner, in an argument about the veracity of the Dr Hook song When You’re in Love With a Beautiful Woman (It’s Hard), The Mole deliberately shot a compressed jet of masticated cannelloni out of the portal of his cheek wound into my father’s hair, leading to a lifetime Da Corrado ban for the pair of them. This was particularly egregious for my father, who maintained that Da Corrado’s deep fried squid was the best in the immediate Cheswick Green area, if not the West Midlands generally.
Nonetheless, as a child, the Mole’s punctured face, and the exotic fables of street fighting that accompanied it, defined my idea of a coup d’état. There’d be tanks, wouldn’t there, rolling through redbrick squares, beautiful Slavic blond girls putting hopeless blooms into gun barrels, and orders barked through megaphones by men with Nazi moustaches? And there’d be psychedelic bands, playing acid-polka music in mail-order Carnaby Street threads, driven underground by the military, awaiting respectable roles in the revolutionary government’s Ministry of Culture, three decades later. Wouldn’t there?
Well, roll over grandma, and tell Robert Peston the news. This is not your mother’s seizure of political power. I suspect we western liberal democracies may be in the middle of a very modern type of coup, namely an alt-coup. Look! I’ve used the hipster prefix ‘alt’, but in relation to reactionary politics, rather than in a phrase like “alt-country”, “alt-porn”, or “alt-crochet”. How thrillingly 21st-century! This is what it must have felt like to be Milo Yiannopoulos!!
(Sadly, it was only last month I even learned of the existence of Trump-endorsed uber-troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who looked like a Tom of Finland pencil drawing of his Breitbart colleague James Delingpole. And already the boy has been dissolved in acid by his own suddenly squeamish paymasters. The news cycle moves so fast it’s hardly worth finding out about anything any more as it’s all sure to be irrelevant a week later. Note to self: That’s what “they” want you to think.)
An American dictionary definition of coup d’état I found online calls it “a quick and decisive seizure of governmental power by a strong military or political group…. (which) arrests the incumbent leaders, seizes the national radio and television services, and proclaims itself in power”. So does our homegrown alt-coup fit the bill?
Well, undoubtedly, a coterie of far-right conservatives are using the supposed Brexit mandate as an opportunity to pursue their extremist agenda, but incumbent leaders weren’t arrested, they just ran away. And the leader of our current opposition, if you’ll permit me some Daily Telegraph-blogger-type schadenfreude, probably couldn’t get himself arrested if he tried! (This stuff’s easy! I’d be looking at a £250,000 book deal if only I hadn’t been such a careless and vocal advocate of non-consensual human-insect sexual relations.)
Unlike the classic coup, the new government haven’t seized the national radio and television services, as there has been no need to do so, Laura Kuenssberg in particular being essentially just a state-sponsored town crier, who runs around the filthy lanes in a Theresa May tabard blowing a heraldic trumpet in celebration of every government pronouncement. Snitch!
Indeed, earlier this week, the BBC chose to run a coincidentally timed documentary about the senile freeloaders in the irrelevant House of Lords, just as the honourable checks and balances were debating Brexit, the unelected peers intimidated from the sidelines by the unelected prime minister, sporting the face of a vicar’s daughter who had eaten a whole bucket of spicy huevos de toro before being told which part of the toro they were made from.
Surely there must be at least a peerage in waiting for the head of BBC scheduling, if the House of Lords isn’t abolished? Here’s hoping for an equally well-timed reappraisal of the professional/personal irregularities that led to expense-muddling Brexiter and disgraced former defence secretary Liam Fox’s now forgotten 2011 resignation.
Sadly the newspapers aren’t up to policing the coup either. When he interviewed Donald Trump for the Times, Michael Gove didn’t even notice that Rupert Murdoch was in the room. I’m not a respected journalist like Michael, I’m just a comedian, but to me Murdoch’s presence changes the whole story, and makes it look as if the far-right coup is part of an international network of corrupt self-interested parties, a massive scoop for Gove to miss.
Unlike the coup that punctured the Mole’s face, in our alt-coup not a shot was fired in anger. And yes, I am ignoring the shooting of Jo Cox as Remainers have been asked not to “politicise” it. And anyway the gunman who shouted out “Britain first” during the killing has got the politicisation of that murder pretty much covered anyway.
Thirty years later, I wonder if the story of the Mole and his squirty face-hole, like so many of my father’s tall tales, was true at all. It doesn’t matter. It made me happy. My father had also claimed, repeatedly, to be a member of a secret society of European packaging company reps, whose members met in various continental sales-conference venues, where they dared each other to place bets on how many small white plastic sticks were concealed in their clenched fists. I don’t care whether this club existed. Either way, it is now a useful metaphor for Theresa May’s Brexit negotiating strategy. Thanks Dad.
Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is now touring; see stewartlee.co.uk for details