Tea with the Trumps – a red leicester nightmare
Last Monday I attended the worst family dinner I have ever experienced. It honoured a visiting American with whom we were barely acquainted, but were somehow obliged to entertain.
A few years previously our guest had suggested on a radio show that, despite thinking she was “crazy”, he could have “nailed” my late mother. She feared he was “stalking” her. Our guest had then clarified that he would only have had sex with my mother if she had an Aids test, perhaps because she had shaken hands with Aids sufferers.
Our guest had also called my own wife “nasty”, and dismissed climate change, a cause close to my green father’s heart, as a hoax. We made uneasy small talk with the American’s wife, whom we all knew he had cheated on with an adult film actress. It was a dreadful, awkward evening.
And then I woke up. I was not Prince Harry. And I was not having dinner with Donald Trump. I had merely fallen asleep in front of coverage of Trump’s state banquet after eating a red leicester.
In reality, selfless Prince Harry sucked up his humiliation, and the insults to his wife and dead mother, and did his royal best to secure the buccaneering post-Brexit trade future already guaranteed by his fellow diner Long John Liam Fox. But the reality of Trump’s visit was arguably more bewildering than any cheesy dream.
At the banquet held in his honour, Trump praised the allies’ joint wartime effort against the tyranny of the Nazis,
whom he seemed to view as uniformly bad. And yet, in 2017, Trump had said the neo-Nazi groups at Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally, where an anti-fascist protester was murdered, contained “some very fine people”.
American Nazis, of course, are likely to be “very fine”, reflecting as they do the understandable anxieties of the ordinary American voter. But second world war European Nazis were just bad, period.
Trump tweeted that he had been welcomed to the UK by thousands of well-wishers, but he demonstrably wasn’t, to our national shame. Trump was welcomed, instead, by a pathetic statue of him sitting trouserless on a toilet, and a childish Trump-baby shaped barrage balloon, later burst by a woman who is forbidden by law to approach water.
And in a field below Trump’s incoming flight, an infantile student had mown a frankly immature massive penis into the grass which, though it lacked the flecks of ejaculate and hairy testicular sack normally present on such images, was nonetheless utterly puerile. The anti-Trump demonstrators need to learn that, though they were entitled to dislike Donald Trump himself, it was wrong to disrespect the institution of the American presidency, which existed as an entity entirely separate from its incumbent.
In a similar fashion, Rick Jones, Monica Rambeau and Carol Danvers have all been Captain Marvel at different times, dumbass. Given the medical inaccuracy of their mown penises, it is not surprising that none of the stone-cold losers in Parliament Square on Tuesday understood this.
As Trump touched down on Monday, foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt described the decision by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, to boycott Trump’s banquet as “virtue signalling of the worst kind”.
Previously, the phrase “virtue signalling” had been confined to the sticky pages of Spiked, or angry YouTube rants posted by involuntarily celibate 33-year-old men still living in their mothers’ basements until Steve Bannon recognises their talents and gives them a job at Breitbart.
It was good to see Jeremy Hunt introduce the phrase “virtue signalling” into the mainstream, as it can only help elevate a national political discourse that is rapidly becoming unhelpfully polarised and terminally toxic. Perhaps Hunt can heal broken Britain.
At his royal banquet, Trump paid tribute to the 24,000 British, American and Canadian troops that fought the Nazis in the D-day landings. But, having listened to the rhetoric of the preceding days, I had begun to wonder if the allied troops that plunged into those cold and foreboding French waters weren’t just virtue-signallers of the worst kind themselves. They seem rather too keen to let us all know how much they disliked fascism.
Led astray by that Marxist liberal elitist Winston Churchill, the allied troops of the D-day landings were unable to distinguish their dislike of Adolf Hitler from the institution of the chancellorship of Germany, which existed as an entity entirely separate from its incumbent, and deserved their respect. And there were, after all, probably “some very fine people” in the Nazi ranks.
I am joking of course, and attempting to turn the values of Trump’s apologists back on themselves, though one has to make this explicit in these ironyfree days, where all comment is shorn of context and shat out into the shitosphere. But, I confess, I did look in on Tuesday’s anti-Trump protest.
On The Mall, I fell into step behind a trio of middle-aged men in purple Harringtons, loudly looking for trouble. When they got to Parliament Square they targeted elderly protesters and phone-filmed themselves accusing them of disrespecting “our boys”, though there was no anti-armed forces angle evident.
I thought about Prince Harry, one of “our boys”, who fought on the frontline in Afghanistan as a helicopter gunner; who flew towards fate and did not dodge duty, despite the Taliban’s declared intent to kill him.
And I thought of Harry at Monday’s events, hugging the tail end of Trump’s train, like a dishonoured cuck, as the alt-right would say, absorbing the humiliation of his wife and mother, rained down by the visiting alpha male in a stinging golden shower.
The prince, whose family has been forced to dine on the wrong side of history’s table, was obediently impotent in service of the national interest, and a compliant pawn in Trump’s re-election campaign. We owe our war heroes more than this sorry capitulation. Don’t we?
Stewart Lee’s new standup show, Snowflake/Tornado, is at the Leicester Square theatre, London,29 October-5 January, with national dates to follow