Issue 235 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published November 1999 Copyright © Socialist Review
It was the Conservative Party conference fringe meeting every self respecting journalist wanted to be at. Stack on the Back was fortunate in being able to attend.
The meeting was entitled 'Random prejudices--why they're vital and how to cultivate them'. On the platform were two of the brightest stars of today's Conservative Party, William Hague and Ann Widdecombe, and two colossuses of the Tory past, Norman Tebbit and the greatest of them all, Bedlam's very own baroness, Margaret Thatcher.
Widdecombe was the first to speak. She had worried some during her conference speech by talking about prisons helping to rehabilitate wrongdoers. She needed to ensure that not a hint of liberalism was allowed to peek through at this meeting. So while waving a set of manacles about the place she proceeded to recite a poem she had written for the occasion:
By the time she'd finished 32 verses of this doggerel, her audience was near-orgasmic--all, that is, bar Hague, who recognises a future leadership challenge when he hears one.
He spoke next, struggling to match her level of crude lunacy but having a good attempt at it. Putting on his 'I'm an ordinary Yorkshire man, me' voice, he proceeded to slag off Tony Blair a bit and foreigners a lot. Indeed, Blair's main crime seemed to be that he took holidays abroad rather than on dales or fens or lakes or lochs or moors or village greens.
He then proceeded to denounce foreign food: 'They won't let us sell good British beef to them just because some of our cows are mad, but they expect us to eat their tagliatelle vindaloo which could consist of a golden retriever in hot pasta gravy for all we know. They criticise our lamb but they expect us to eat their moulin rouge chop suey and other stuff you can't put ketchup on.'
He didn't like their cars: 'They've got a tinny sound to 'em'; their clothes: 'They're all in funny foreign sizes'; or public transport systems: 'Nationalised symbols of Communist authoritarianism.' He also attacked their languages: 'Too many words, most of them incomprehensible'; and their cultures: 'Too bloody foreign'.
The audience response was politely enthusiastic, but nothing compared to the roar as Tebbit got to his feet. Norm painted a nightmare future scenario under Blair's Bolshevik dictatorship.
This vision included: one legged black lesbian single mothers flying fighter bombers in a future military conflict; no legged bigamist mothers with hairy bottoms selling ice cream outside school playgrounds; partially sighted mulatto dwarfs hosting the national lottery draw; overweight hard of hearing lame three breasted bisexuals becoming Church of England bishops; and the gay son of a lefty Spanish immigrant leading the Conservative Party. This was the future we all had to be saved from, said Tebbit. How good it is to see that the Brighton bomb didn't cause him any permanent brain damage!
Needless to say, the audience loved it, but now it was time for the star attraction. Unfortunately she had only been half listening to the other three speakers. Each time they earned applause she had taken a hefty slug out of a bottle discreetly obscured in a brown paper bag.
This was Thatcher at her finest--angry, emotional, bigoted, bombastic, and as drunk as a drayman's horse.
'Mainland Europe.' she bellowed 'Everything evil in my lifetime has come from mainland Europe. Saddam Hussein, Colonel Gadaffi, driving on the wrong side of the road, afro hairdos, Elvis Presley, the twist, the Rolling Stones, Gerry Adams and Harley Davidson motor bikes--these all are products of mainland Europe. All are destroying our way of life and the things we hold dear.'
All the good things in life, she went on to explain, are 'the products of the English speaking world--Lord Haw Haw, whisky, 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland, whisky, Ronald Reagan, Mozart, whisky, Rembrandt, Christmas trees, the cuckoo clock, whisky of course, nuclear bombs, germ warfare, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack the Ripper, whisky and the Volkswagen.'
'But, friends, tonight I want to honour a hero of all the English speaking world, a friend suffering under the jackboot of democracy and due legal process, the wonderful General Pinochet. He saved the English speaking world from Communism. He showed us how to dictate, how to murder, how to torture. I propose a toast to General Pinochet. Free him in the name of god, queen, country and race. Let him walk once more among the tall poppies.'
So saying, she took a huge slug from the bottle, and as she threw her head back to greet the golden nectar her body followed suit and she crashed to the ground. 'Ten more years!' her audience began shouting, but by then she was well and truly in the land of English speaking pink elephants.
As I was leaving I spotted two well known New labour spin doctors handing over a very large amount of cash to a leading Tory right winger. 'Keep up the good work,' they said to him, 'People might be beginning to hate the sight of us, but as long as you lot keep this pantomime of the insane up, I reckon our jobs are safe.'