Downing Street – a haven for weirdos, misfits and comic-book villains
TThe Hate-Monger is a minor Marvel comics villain, first documented by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in December 1963, who is a clone of Hitler and wears a purple Ku Klux Klan robe. In Fantastic Four issue 21, The Hate-Monger bounces his Hate-Ray off the moon, amplifying people’s feelings of dread, fear and anxiety, inflaming their prejudices and turning humanity against itself. And yet somehow, last week, The Hate-Monger himself was given a job at the very heart of Dominic Cumming’s government. And this despite his saying the “underclass” should undergo enforced contraception, women’s sport is like the paralympics, wives should provide sex on demand and black people were more stupid than white people. And all while bouncing a Hate-Ray off the moon and wearing a purple Ku Klux Klan robe. And being a clone of Hitler.
“We should prevent racists coming into No 10 or wherever The Hate-Monger was working,” said Kwasi Alfred Addo Kwarteng, MP for Spelthorne, former undersecretary of state for the Department for Exiting the European Union and current minister of state for business, energy and clean growth, “and I think that we do need to look at these processes.” What will it take for black Conservatives to disavow the Cumming government they facilitate? Didn’t the fact that The Hate-Monger was wearing a purple Ku Klux Klan robe while bouncing a Hate-Ray off the moon and being a clone of Hitler set off some alarm bells? Views such as The Hate-Monger’s define Cumming’s government. The assertion last November, by the resentful foundling and reformed coke-face Michael Gove, that Stormzy should stick to rapping and stay out of politics, assumes black folk are made for singing, dancing and running, while white people are better suited to white people’s activities – such as Latin, crown green bowls and the clarinet. And the now muzzled Jacob Rees-Mogg blamed the Grenfell victims’ stupidity for their misfortune.
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 Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Johnson is the rarely visible public face of the Cumming government that hired The Hate-Monger.
PM Turds’s spokesperson refused to clarify PM Turds’s position on eugenics 32 actual genuine times in succession during a press briefing on Monday. “The prime minister’s views are well documented,” said the spokesperson repeatedly. And they are. In 2013 Turds, born into incredible privilege, said: “I am afraid that a violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth… for one reason or another – boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and God-given talent of boardroom inhabitants – the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever.”
This was a not especially coded message, a Eugenics for Dummies, to Turds’s privileged audience, at the opaquely funded Centre for Policy Studies thinktank at 57 Tufton Street, that their privilege was a result of their “natural and God-given talent”, innate “raw ability” and superiority to the poor, rather than of fortuitous accidents of birth. How comforting for everyone involved. Bastards. Bastards. Bastards.
I didn’t grow up in a house full of books. I fumbled my way via a charity bung and a scholarship into the educational privilege I now benefit from at others’ expense. Old Marvel comics were the holy scrolls that made me. “With great power comes great responsibility”: it is because of Spider-Man’s unequivocal moral system that I won’t perform my multiple-award-winning standup shows in venues that work with the immoral secondary ticketing agencies Sajid Javid described as “classic entrepreneurs”. It is because of Howard the Duck’s studied cynicism that I have a healthy disdain for the absurdity of the world I never made, and it is because of Ant-Man that I have made slaves of dozens of ants, with which I will fight our own enslavement by the far right. My ants shall not sleep in my hand till we have built Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land.
The radical socialist principles of Christ are still almost visible through the curtain-twitching windowpane of the modern Church of England; at the start of this month, Dave Hill sacked Don Powell from Slade, leaving Hill the sole original member, but the group carries with it the spirit of Noddy Holder in a tartan romper suit with Christmas faggot juice all round his mouth; and likewise the original values of those psychedelic 60s and progressive 70s Marvel comics, flowing from the mushy pens of working-class, liberal Jewish autodidacts and acid-casualty, space-travelling college dropouts respectively, still haunt the dimmer recesses of their cinematic blockbuster manifestations, like the starving ghosts of early Christian saints in Pope Benedict’s Prada slipper chamber.
Marvel’s chairman is now the Trump-donor Ike Perlmutter, who reportedly said it didn’t matter which black actor played Iron Man’s pal James Rhodes as all black people “look the same”, but its original four-colour countercultural pointillist visions continue to liquefy into damning prophesies of the populist age. In the 2011 Marvel comic Fear Itself, The Hate-Monger returns to a world where many of the cartoon Nazi values his former purple-robed form embodied half a century ago have now nudged into mainstream politics. But the modern Marvel Hate-Monger isn’t a clone of Hitler who uses a Hate-Ray to transmit hate to Earth from the moon. He’s an everyday guy who thinks his opportunities are being taken by immigrants and he spreads his hate with internet forums and conspiracy theory websites. He’s just the kind of weirdo misfit Dominic Cumming is looking for. He may need to lose the purple Ku Klux Klan robe, however. We’re not quite ready for that. Yet. I give it a matter of months. There are some very fine people on both sides.
