The American businessperson Jennifer Arcuri was a beneficiary of more than £126,000 in public money, £11,500 of which came from a City Hall-funded agency during Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug French-Turds Johnson’s tenure as mayor of London.
On 24 September, a friend of Arcuri vouchsafed to the Daily Mail that Turds had visited the webmistress’s pole-encrusted flat in the afternoons, appointments that remain pointedly undeclared in Turds’s diplomatically redacted mayoral diary, but only for “technology lessons”. Ah! I remember my first technology lesson as if it were yesterday. I had saved up to visit the Paris rep cinema that had been screening, for the previous 17 years, the full-length cut of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Otherwise unviewable in those pre-digital days, it was venerated rightly by spaghetti cineastes as a holy relic and I thought I needed, more than anything on Earth, to see it.
I made my way south from the Gare du Nord along the Rue St-Denis, where, a revelation to my innocent eyes, freelance technological instruction was openly available everywhere. The tutors draped themselves over elegantly distressed ironwork balconies, taunting potential customers with Commodore Amiga 1000 manuals and disconnected Hewlett-Packard Vectra keyboards. It was, in 1985, the most decadent sight I had ever seen. My technological ignorance weighed heavily upon my adolescent mind and, I do declare, I pooled my summer savings and took some lessons there. Lie la lie! Lie la lie lie lie la lie!
It was not my finest technological experience, but it was my first. And a huge and terrible weight was lifted from me. In the end, I had to wait a further two decades to see that definitive Leone cut. And the delay, as I learned in the intervening years on my own terms, only made the experience sweeter.
As many have pointed out, whether our prime minister had a sexual relationship with a woman he then recommended for public funding isn’t the story here. Neither is the fact that Arcuri’s alleged “best friend”, the former Steve Bannon protege and disgraced alt-right agitator Milo Yiannopoulos, maintained to the Daily Mail last week that he had seen bruised evidence of the couple’s encounters. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Milo is $2m in debt and likes attention.
Neither is the story Arcuri’s claim, on 5 October, to the Daily Mirror, that she could “make men trip over their dicks”, and the attendant mystery of who these clumsy men might be, with their freakishly long, and yet hazardously flaccid, penises? The real story, and I say this as someone who is by no means Turds’s greatest fan, is that in abandoning his purported relationship with Arcuri, our obviously emotionally tortured prime minister may be throwing away his one true chance for happiness. Like the doorstepped passersby provoked by Turds’s name into uncharacteristic profanities – “That filthy piece of toerag!” – Turds’s uniformly betrayed ex-wives and unspecified child-rearing former mistresses can now barely mention him without vomiting into empty cradles.
And any moments of supposed tenderness we are encouraged to witness between Turds and his current partner are crudely stage-managed. The notorious garden furniture long-lens tableaux vivant, released the day after Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop-gate, saw Turds’s blond bob became mysteriously much longer overnight, like a magic cress tub sown with human hair.
But compare these dreary images to footage of joint public appearances by Turds and Arcuri, at various technology events. Observe the barely suppressed giggly hysteria and infatuated eye contact of two young people totally and undeniably head over heels in love. No footage of Turds with any other woman matches these stolen moments for pure untrammelled emotion. Even as a rampant Remainiac, would you allow your political prejudices to deny the restless Turds perhaps his only chance at such obvious and incalculable joy?
Love is like lightning. It burns everything it touches and it rarely strikes twice. What gnawing need is there in the void of Turds’s soul that drives his corrosive ambition, immolating his family, his friends and even the nation he purports to represent?
Satan, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, acknowledges “only in destroying I find ease” and releases Sin and Death into the world out of spite, just as Turds has unleased the forces of Brexit. Could the love of Arcuri plug the black hole in Turds’s heart that is sucking us all to our doom, and making our nation the most hated, and pitied, on Earth? Unless Turds steps back from the void he himself has opened, he will grow old to be remembered as the worst prime minister Britain ever had, a competition in which, at last, he will finally triumph over his old Etonian rival David Cameron, who is merely the second worst prime minister we ever had.
Like the lonely audio-diarist of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, will a defeated Turds, still in tragic denial, continue to resist the truth that Arcuri could, maybe, have been the one that saved him? “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.”
Like Edward VIII, another famous lover and sometime friend of fascists, Turds could walk away from the ambition that will never fulfil him, and may consume us all, and take instead eternal comfort in the arms of love. In time, the axe wounds of Brexit can and must heal. In the meantime, Turds would do well to reflect on the wise words of that undying romantic Philip Larkin: “What will survive of us is love.”
Genghis McKahn, Guardian.co.uk
Genghis McKahn, Guardian.co.uk
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