I can make you hate (44 page)

Not all the respondents were stupid. Some were merely deluded. Someone calling themselves ‘Hillside’ from Sydney claimed: ‘I have an IQ over 200, have six degrees and diplomas and am “right-wing”, as are others I know at this higher level of intelligence.’ His IQ score is particularly impressive considering the maximum possible score on Mensa’s preferred IQ test is 161.

Whatever the numbers: intellectual dick-measuring isn’t to everyone’s tastes anyway. Simply by highlighting his own
intelligence
‘Hillside’ alienated several of his commentbox brethren.

‘If there is one person I can not stand and that is a snob who thinks they are intelligent because if they were intelligent and educated they wouldn’t be snobs,’ argued Liz from London. Once you’ve clambered over the broken grammar, deliberately placed at the start of the sentence like a rudimentary barricade of
piled-up
chairs, there’s a tragic conundrum at work here. She claims intellectual snootiness is ugly, which it is, but unfortunately she says it in such a stupid way it’s impossible for anyone smarter than a steak-and-ale pie not to look down on her. Thus, for Liz, the crushing cycle of snobbery continues.

On and on the comments went, turning a rather stark
write-up
of a daft-sounding study into a sublime piece of live online performance art. A chimps’ tea party of the damned. The
Mail
has long been a master at trolling lefties; now it’s mischievously turned on its own readers, and the results could only be funnier if the website came with free plastic lawn furniture for them to lob at the screen. You couldn’t make it up.

I’m no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is and I’ll emit an unbroken ten-minute ‘um’ through the clueless face of a broken puppet.
You might as well ask a pantomime horse. But even an idiot such as me can see that money, as a whole, doesn’t really seem to be working any more.

Money is broken, and until we admit that, any attempts to fix the economy seem doomed to fail. We’re like passengers on a nosediving plane thinking if we all fart hard enough, we can lift it back into the sky. So should we be storming the cockpit or hunting for parachutes instead? I don’t know: I ran out of metaphor after the fart gag. You’re on your own from here on in.

Banknotes aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. If they were, they’d all have identical value. Money’s only worth what the City thinks it’s worth. Or, perhaps more accurately, hopes it’s worth. Coins should really be called ‘wish-discs’ instead. That name alone would give a truer sense of their value than the speculative number embossed on them.

The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story, or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of
SpongeBob SquarePants
. It’s certainly nowhere near as well thought-out and executed.

No one really understands how it all works: if they did, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Banking, as far as I can tell, seems to be almost as precise a science as using a slot machine. You either blindly hope for the best, delude yourself into thinking you’ve worked out a system, or open it up when no one’s looking and rig the settings so it’ll pay out illegally.

The chief difference is that slot machines are more familiar and graspable to most of us. When you hear a jackpot being paid out to a gambler, the robotic clunk-clunk-clunk of coin-on-tray, you’re aware that he had to go to some kind of effort to get his reward. You know he stood there pushing buttons for hours. You can picture that.

The recent outrage over City bonuses stems from a combination
of two factors: the sheer size of the numbers involved, coupled with a lack of respect for the work involved in earning them. Like bankers, top footballers are massively overpaid, but at least you comprehend what they’re doing for the money. If Wayne Rooney got paid millions to play lacrosse in a closed room in pitch darkness, people would begrudge him his millions far more than they already do. Instead there he is, on live television: he’s skilled, no doubt about it.

Similarly, it may be tasteless when a rapper pops up on MTV wearing so much bling he might as well have dipped himself in glue and jumped into a treasure chest full of vajazzling crystals, but at least you understand how he earned it.

RBS boss Stephen Hester, meanwhile, earns more than a million pounds for performing enigmatic actions behind the scenes at a publicly owned bank. And on top of his huge wage, he was in line for a massive bonus. To most people, that’s downright cheeky: like a man getting a blowjob from your spouse while asking you to make him a cup of tea.

But Hester earned his wage, we’re told, because he does an incredibly difficult job. And maybe he does. Trouble is, no one outside the City understands what his job actually consists of. I find it almost impossible to picture a day in Hester’s life, and I once wrote a short story about a pint-sized toy Womble that ran around killing dogs with its dick, so I know I don’t lack imagination. Class, yes: imagination, no. If I strain my mind’s eye, I can just about picture Hester arriving at work, picture him thanking his driver, picture the receptionist saying ‘Hello, Mr Hester’, and picture him striding confidently into his office – but the moment the door shuts, my feed breaks up and goes fuzzy. What does he do in there? Pull levers? Chase numbers round the room with a broom? God knows.

Maybe if all bankers were forced to work in public, on the pavement, it would help us understand what they actually do. Of course, you’d have to encase them in a Perspex box so they
wouldn’t be attacked. In fact, if the experience of David Blaine is anything to go by, you’d have to quickly move that Perspex box to somewhere impossibly high up, where people can’t pelt it with golf balls and tangerines. On top of the Gherkin, say. If Hester did his job inside a Perspex box on top of the Gherkin for a year, this entire argument might never have happened.

The row over bonuses has led some to mutter darkly about mob rule and the rise of anti-business sentiment. Complain about mobs all you like, but you can’t control gut reactions, and you can’t dictate the mood. And when you try to fart a crashing plane back into the sky, you only succeed in making the atmosphere unpleasant for everyone. And spoiling the in-flight movie. And making the stewardess cry. Looks like I’m all out of metaphor again. Time to end the article. Article ends.

CB is seated at the desk.

CHARLIE
: Ever since last July’s phone-hacking revelations, the press has been in the hotseat, most notably with the long-running Leveson Inquiry into Media Ethics, an event so star-studded it resembled a kind of anti-BAFTAs, featuring glamorous actress Sienna Miller, seething funnyman Steve Coogan, dreamy-eyed whorefucker Hugh Grant, and seedy tabloid un-bassador Paul McMullan, better known as TV’s Roland Rat.

They were there, as was voice-of-an-angel Charlotte Church and voice-of-one-ankle Heather Mills, all swapping light and often harrowing anecdotes with your host: cuddly faced Lord Leveson, Chatty Man.

The major draw was the scrap between Hugh Grant and shadowy
Daily Mail
editor Paul Dacre, who isn’t shown on TV very often, because of fears he might slither through the screen
and stop your heart by whispering in Latin. But nevertheless
here
he is …

CB talks over VT of Paul Dacre arriving at Leveson.

CHARLIE
: … temporarily adopting human form to pass through our realm. Look, there’s a rare sight: he’s touching a bible without it bursting into flames. And
there
he is sitting down to fume about Hugh Grant.

Comparative stills of Hugh Grant and Paul Dacre appear in split-screen.

CHARLIE
: I don’t know what it is about witty, handsome, sex symbol Hugh Grant that annoys purple-headed fuming
pepper-pot
Paul Dacre so much, but they’ve been trading insults for weeks, after Grant implied the
Mail
hacked his phone and Dacre said that was a ‘mendacious smear’.

ON SCREEN
:
Mock up of ‘Love Hacktually’ movie poster.

CHARLIE
: Things seem a bit tense between them really, although I’ve seen enough Hugh Grant films to know how it’ll turn out: they don’t get on at first, but by the end they’ll be hungrily kissing to the sound of Wet Wet Wet – until Rhys Ifans walks in wearing a pair of funny pants with a mendacious smear down the arsecrack.

As well as the Leveson chatshow, there are three separate police investigations into the press, and on Saturday five
Sun
journalists were arrested …

CB talks over VT of Rupert Murdoch.

CHARLIE
: … raising fears that Rupert Murdoch, seen here looking like the Emperor from
Star Wars
on a golfing holiday, might swoop in and destroy the
Sun
, like a demon from a Mayan prophecy.

Amongst the usual hate and tits, Monday’s
Sun
also included a powerful column by Fleet Street legend Trevor Kavanagh in
which he thundered that
Sun
journalists were being subjected to a ‘witch hunt’.

Some say it’s hypocritical of the
Sun
to complain about
witch-hunts
because it’s conducted plenty of those itself. But that’s not fair: the
Sun
has
never once
conducted a witch-hunt against actual witches.

I mean okay, it
has
picked on one or two other groups, like:

Social workers,

Women in burqas,

Left-wingers,

Suburban swingers,

Binge drinkers,

Forward-thinkers,

Gypsies,

Shirkers,

Public sector workers,

Underage mums,

Overage mums,

Spongers who sit around twiddling their thumbs,

Anyone who’s had a fight,

Anyone with cellulite,

Looters,

Saggy hooters,

Feminists,

Leninists,

Satanists who take the piss,

So-called expert ‘boffins’,

The escorts who let Frank Bough in,

Anyone caught cheat’n,

Angus Deayton,

The England squad,

The goalie’s hands,

The manager,

The Hillsborough fans …

Speed cameras,

Reckless drivers,

Snotty jobsworths,

Feckless skivers,

Trendy vicars wearing knickers,

Lezzers,

Benders,

The cast of
EastEnders
,

Leslie Grantham,

Foreigners who can’t sing our national anthem,

The French,

The Portuguese,

The Krauts,

The MEPs,

Argentina,

Polish cleaners,

Anyone who lives in Spain (or starts a human rights campaign),

Geeks,

Freaks,

Crackers,

Hackers,

Killjoys,

Pillocks,

Toy-boys,

Kinnocks …

Moaners,

Miners,

Former men with new vaginas,

The local hoodie,

Jade Goody,

Jailbirds,

Nerds,

Troubled songbirds,

Long words,

And cheating turds on disability benefits who don’t seem
quite
disabled enough for their liking …

And
Chris Jeffries,

Russell Harty,

Members of the Green Party,

Anyone who says, ‘recycle!’

Wayward superstar George Michael,

Channel Four,

ITV,

Channel Five,

The BBC,

Over-eaters,

Asylum seekers – especially if they snuck into Britain using any kind of vessel.

Katie Waissel,

Katie Waissel’s ‘prozzie’ gran,

Iran,

Emperor Hirohito of Japan,

Zealous coppers,

Wife-swappers,

Bureaucrats,

Eurocrats,

Non-existent feral cats,

An innocent man called Robert Murat,

The cast of
The Only Way
is Essex
,

The Leveson Inquiry into Media Ethics,

And the occasional supermodel bitches

– but never, ever
witches
.

Oh. Apart from all the times they’ve had a go at witches.

STILL
: Sun
headlines in which they’ve had a go at actual witches [of which there are more than you might think].

So then, witch-hunted tip-top soaraway tabloid the
Sun
will soon be available in a sizzling Sunday edition. Turns out the
soothsayers
were mistaken: the
Sun
isn’t dying, it’s expanding. Which, ironically, is precisely what an actual sun does when it dies.

Yes, during its death throes, our sun will swell, boiling the oceans and turning the ice caps to steam. All life on the planet will perish, and your copy of the
Sun
will burst into flames in your hands. I say hands. I mean ‘carbonised stumps’. What I’m saying is it’ll be hot out that day, so I wouldn’t bother with a coat if I were you.