prediction of our current reality. In Brave New World people are complicit in their own enslavement; they’re into it. I think we can go further. It’s not just that people are controlled by propaganda, or even that they enjoy being controlled. I think that people are now propaganda. People are no longer the things being controlled, they are the method of control, both of themselves and others. Of course, I’ve written this little serious passage here to advance my own status.
I’ve tried to structure this book as simply as possible since it’s supposed to have the energy and flow of a good stand-up show. Hopefully, everything is done here as I’d do it on stage – a dip for you to regroup in the middle, a closing peroration, and even this little bit where I just kind of tail off mid-sentence as I realise that I already have your money . . .
One of the great tricks the British royals have managed to pull off is to have convinced everybody of their own irrelevance. They behave much like any big company, downplaying their influence, externalising their expenses, meeting with dictators, watching themselves sexually savaging hypnotised victims in the mirrored Aviators of their bodyguards, reporting back to superiors in other dimensions who appear to them suddenly in famous paintings, bad news causing their enraged overlord’s face to seethe like a nest of startled snakes.
What’s called pageantry and tradition – public events that only serve to highlight the relative charm of North Korea and the buying up of any golden sheds/tennis rackets that got missed by Michael Jackson – is just misdirection. It’s the simple misdirection employed by a category of human being pitied by even the most denigrated monster of showbusiness, the stage magician. And that’s all the royal family are. Entertainers who’ve enjoyed the ultimate success by the most tried-and-tested route: aiming low.
Kate’s pregnancy really brought the nation together. It was no longer just me thinking about her vagina 24/7. And call me old fashioned, but I thought it was nice to see a pregnancy announced – for most women in this country you only know they’re with child because they’ve switched to menthol fags. Still, a lot of pressure for William. I suppose he’s just hoping that he can be as good a father as his nanny was.
The birth was announced by putting a notice on headed notepaper on a wooden easel at the gates of Buckingham Palace – it’s the royal equivalent of sticking a congratulations bed sheet on a roundabout. The law was changed because it was ‘a historical anomaly that prevents the eldest child of the monarch from becoming the head of state simply because of their gender’. Unlike the historical anomaly that makes someone the head of state simply because they are born into a particular family.
Kate was a patient at the exclusive King Edward VII’s Hospital. Aren’t the royals wonderful? Even at their roughest they refuse to be a burden on the NHS. Kate had to endure eleven hours of labour. Which is more than the combined total the rest of the family has managed in the last twenty years. Being named George, her son will join six out of the past ten kings, exhibiting the imagination you’d expect from a family who have to be trained how to wave. Why think of a name at all? You won’t get anything funkier than Prince.
Fifty armed police officers are to guard the new prince. Wow, in The Omen he only had that weird nanny with the Rottweiler. There were few volunteers. Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to employ decoys? He’s a baby – that’s pretty much the only time any lookalike has ever actually looked alike. The police will have to hand back their firearms once the baby boy becomes fully sentient, just in case a perceived slight leads him to lock their eyes with a haunting gaze, before causing them to vacantly push the barrel into their mouths and squeeze the trigger.
A Swedish magazine published eleven topless shots of the Duchess of Cambridge. It was the least erotic thing to have ever happened in Sweden. Why can’t she just sunbathe topless on the balcony of Lord Linley’s £15 million château in Provence like normal people? The British press will never publish pictures of Kate’s tits. Due to the lack of space left after printing ones of her sister’s arse.
The royal couple made a criminal complaint when the topless photos were published in a French magazine, and a French court prevented their further publication. The ban was soon extended to Italy and the rest of Europe, meaning the pictures were then only available to be seen on something called the internet. I sympathise with Kate feeling under constant surveillance. Thanks to my Catholic education I often can’t shake off the idea my dead relatives are watching me. To be honest, I only ever feel comfortable masturbating while wearing a sombrero.
Maybe we should be glad that other countries take such an interest in our royal family – even if it’s in this weirdly specialist porn way. Apparently, the Palace is so worried about Kate being papped that for the next few years she’s to be permanently blurred during daylight hours by being shaken at high frequency by ladies-in-waiting.
The Palace was furious at the paparazzi hounding her like Diana, as royal protocol dictates that they wait till Prince Philip gives the nod. Surely the quickest way to stop the demand for these pictures is for the royals to finally go nude. I know what you’re thinking. How about the etiquette of them breaking wind in public? Easy. Those dishwasher liquitabs with the dissolvable coating and detergent inside? Use them as suppositories and if it does happen it’ll just come out as bubbles. At the moment protocol forces Her Majesty to hold farts in for years, only letting them out when the RAF do a fly-past over the Palace.
The supply of bland, feigned outrage about things like this seems endless. Eamonn Holmes on This Morning accidentally broadcast a photograph of Kate in a bikini. The programme had to apologise, as obviously the image should have been obscured by a list of suspected paedophiles. In fact, This Morning should really have had to apologise for showing an unblurred image of Eamonn Holmes. Eamonn’s terrified the incident could prove yet another blow to his chance of a knighthood, a dream first dented in 2006 when the Queen accidentally pricked his casing with her sword and he whizzed about the room screeching like a punctured lilo.
In 2012 we had the disgraceful spectacle of the Diamond Jubilee. I’ve got to admit I was out on the streets cheering her on, although I’m not sure she fully appreciated my chant: ‘Sixty years since your dad died, do dah, do dah!’
Michael Gove suggested celebrating the Jubilee by building a royal yacht. To be honest, I was just going to get her bath bombs or a book token but it was typical of Gove to try to show me up. I hate him, the unctuous, wet-lipped, Dickensian freak. If you asked a football stadium full of people if they’d like to see him kicked to death by a minotaur wearing plimsoles – so it would last longer – you wouldn’t find a single person who wouldn’t masturbate while it was happening.
I suppose a boat would be immune from a below-the-waterline al-Qaeda attack, as it’s nearly impossible to get a watertight seal on your mask with a big, bushy beard. That’s why the kids in Atlantis never get Christmas presents . . . but they don’t cry about it. It’s under the sea, so crying would be pointless.
A barge is totally in keeping with the royal tradition as typified by Liz and Phil. Engineering and shipping – you can’t get much more German and Greek than those. And nothing says recession solidarity more than waving from a throne atop a golden barge. It looked like something Liberace would have rented if he’d taken a break on the Norfolk Broads. The whole thing was car-crash television, which made it strangely apt for a royal occasion.
Actually, I didn’t go to see the flotilla as I failed to find a pair of clear-plastic water-skis to add a ghostly ‘walk-on-water’ quality to my Princess Diana outfit. Still, congratulations, Ma’am, on sixty years of feigning
