For the past few weeks, I’ve been peddling a conspiracy theory I recently made up to anyone who’ll listen. In common with all other conspiracy theories, it has no basis in fact, but I won’t let that hold me back from sharing it.
Imagine there’s this megalomaniac despot who, like many of his kind, makes the fundamental error of surrendering ruthlessness to sentimentality and vanity, and so promotes his family and his lackeys. Imagine that the prime motivation of the family members and lackeys is to win and maintain the approval of the megalomaniac despot whatever the cost. Imagine that this necessarily requires certain amounts of illegality on top of many other dubious and unsavoury practices. Imagine, finally, that the family members and lackeys hit upon a way of cementing the megalomaniac despot’s undying approval, by handing him his Heart’s Desire on a plate – a feat that is worth doing absolutely anything to achieve. This is because it will result in the megalomaniac despot crowning his brilliant career by acquiring what is, to all intents and purposes, The Money Accelerator, a magical media machine that will generate so much money that the megalomaniac despot will be able, literally, to buy everything and everyone before eventually ascending into heaven, which he will also own.
This would prove the final vindication of his worth, in the eyes of his long-dead father or the Pommie snobs who sneered at his Melbourne Strine 60 years before at Oxford or whatever else it could possibly be that motivates his megalomaniac despotism. Bringing that comfort to the megalomaniac despot in itself is enough to compel the family members and lackeys to go to any lengths, to plumb any depths to ensure it comes to pass. So, having already bought up the best police force money can buy to kick over the traces of their previous crimes committed to win the megalomaniac tyrant’s approval, and having terrorised into anxious compliance one wing of the Permanent Institutionalised Neo-Liberal Revolutionary Party that constitutes the illusion of politics throughout the megalomaniac despot’s realms, they now move on to clinch the deal.
Now here’s the clever part. Despite the fact that the megalomaniac despot has spurned them for years in order to further enrich himself, the opposing wing of the Permanent Institutionalised Neo-Liberal Revolutionary Party is as needy of approval as the family members or the lackeys, and so is pathetically grateful at even the prospect of some glimmer of a sign of approval from above. So the family members and the lackeys start to nurture this wing of the PIN-LRP, including its candidate for the office of prime minister. And to be on the safe side, one of the lackeys even goes so far as to marry into the potential prime minister’s social circle so she can sacrifice herself whiling away weekends of unutterable ghastliness in the Cotswolds with as dreary a bunch of Sloanes and Hoorays as ever darkened the earth, just so he’ll think she’s his friend. And it never occurs to him for a single second that there might be anything slightly fishy about any of this.
This is because the family members and the lackeys are cunning. They understand the nature of the British establishment, just like the megalomaniac despot himself. They recognise that the British Establishment is so wholly craven and instinctively corrupt that it doesn’t even need money for it to do your bidding. All it needs is someone it perceives as more powerful than itself to worship to make it happy to its rotten, complacent core.
They very nearly succeed, without much effort beyond a few patted heads. The prime minister, carefully programmed with his one simple role once in power, is primed to give the megalomaniac despot his Heart’s Desire, as a present. After which, as he will by now have fulfilled his historical function, the prime minister will be of no further consequence to the narrative and can be free to close down the state or do whatever leaps, barely formed, into his mind, or simply be discarded like a used condom. It really doesn’t matter at all, as in the greater scheme of things, prime ministers are little more than balloons tied to sticks anyway.
Well, that’s the conspiracy theory and it’s clearly rubbish, isn’t it? Time to move on, everyone. But before we do, one little observation which might prove useful in a pub quiz. Falling over itself to seek out parallels for Rupert Murdoch, the media has been thrashing around from The Mob to the Caesars. A favourite, of course, is to cite Citizen Kane and fill column inches wondering what Rupe’s own “Rosebud” might ultimately prove to be. But Orson Welles was smarter than that: “Rosebud” was, for the record, William Randolph Hearst’s pet name for his mistress Marion Davies’ clitoris, which goes a long way to explain the ferocity of Hearst’s reaction to Welles’ movie. Maybe if our leaders had shown a bit more of that kind of lèse majesté over the past few decades, we wouldn’t be where we are now.
