Bojo

TW: some strong language, brief mention of blood and execution

I often think about the teachers and the nurses and the parents that I abandoned. The ones who didn’t have a say in what happened to them when I held all the power. I thought I was king of the world, the one person who could take charge of this and milk this unfortunate situation for all it was worth. I could lie, say that I stole all that money for my children. But it isn’t true. The web just gets more and more tangled. I would say that I’m just about finished with lies. 

The 2019 election was a source of great pride to me. It kept me going, I’ve swindled them. They all think I’m lovable, goofy, but capable enough to keep the country going. It almost motivated me, knowing that this country was foolish enough to vote for someone who was a completely useless Foreign Secretary and had a horrendous track record of just blatant lies, but I suppose it’s just too easy to deceive people who have goldfish memories. 

I am sitting at my desk, looking out at a glorious sunset. Pink mingles subtly with streaks of gold and orange, and clouds filter slowly across the horizon. I take a sip of wine, only the cheap stuff from one of those big conglomerates I’m so fond of, only I can’t remember which, one of the serfs went out to get it for me. It really is strange how I’m still here in my beautiful flat which pretends to be modest, with my wine that pretends to be drinkable, with my wife who pretends to love me. 

It really is strange how even though I’m quite possibly the most hated man in England, I’m still pretending that everything’s fine.

Back at Balliol, the lads always joked about how I would be the worst Prime Minister to ever grip the country. That if I ever looked like I was coming close to getting it, they would get the hunting rifles out and take London by storm, but I knew deep down they were spurring me on. I was completely surrounded with people who were urging me to succeed, to be one of the greatest leaders who had ever had the privilege of commanding this country, but I knew that what they really wanted was money, power for themselves and suffering for everyone else. This is what they don’t tell you about Parliament. Everyone has their own secret goals, their own plans for world domination and they don’t give a damn about what you do unless it either helps them or hurts them. Then they give a shit. Then they show whether they really do support you or not. 

Of course, that’s only the white guys I’m supposed to be friendly with. The people that even I’m shocked by are not the straight white guys. They’re the race traitors. The homosexual homophobes. The misogynistic women. The ones who show up to the Pride parades and turn them into places of division, who even brave the correct verbal assaults hurled at them from the rest of the community to try to climb higher up, to become an engrained part of this doomed party I used to lead. They’re the ones who justify the abuse delivered to them and their sisters, they bear this unspeakable pain that might help them to crawl their way to the top. They’re the ones who spoke against their siblings, their badly suffering brethren, their own families at BLM protests and spat in the faces of those who were seeking justice. Those who forsook people with the same colour skin as them. 

I don’t think I will ever forget that look that they shared, that inner pain, because they knew that they genuinely held some of the power needed to heal their people, but instead they ignored their desperation to promote their own, to be reluctantly recognised by a hetero white guy, to toss away their chance to change the system and remove the need to suck up to the traditionally privileged. Instead they perpetuate the cycle. They encourage hatred against themselves. And that is what I don’t understand. How they can hurt others, even including themselves, so irreversibly that they’re responsible for millions of deaths, stretching deep into the future.

But that is also exactly what I did. It really does surprise me how I got elected. I’m a hypocrite even when criticising what used to be my own party. 

I tell myself that I’m almost glad that I’m fading into the background. That if I had any more attention on me, I’d probably be dragged through the streets or locked into the Tower of London to rot. That or be hanged, drawn and quartered, a true English execution. But I miss the attention, the scandals, the debate. Sometimes I really can’t tell whether I’m playing devil’s advocate or not, if I truly believe what I’m saying or if I’m in fact an alright person. I blunder my way through words for the hell of it, to feel alive, to make it all seem a bit fun. I never really expected to become Prime Minister, never really believed it, although everyone I’d talked to had built it up to be the greatest role you could have in this country. I forced myself to think that this is what I wanted, and maybe I would have done some other truly terrible things to this country if the pandemic hadn’t stopped me. But, alas, it did, and instead, I managed to wreck the place more efficiently than I would have without the globe collapsing in on itself. I’m proud of the carnage we caused. We continue to wreck the world even now. This pandemic will not go away because of our actions. I genuinely share a legacy that will continue to affect billions of lives. My government did not prepare for a pandemic and when it hit, I lied. When I only eventually told everyone to wear a mask. When I told us all to go into lockdown and then come out too early. When I refused to acknowledge the dripping blood on my hands. 

The sun has long disappeared. The night is an inky blue, the air is close and humid, the moon is staring at me and won’t stop.

I think they do haunt me. The people I’ve killed. Or maybe that’s another lie.

I think that the best thing to do now is slowly drift into irrelevance, like the moon when faced with the rising of the sun. But there will always be another of us. Another complete buffoon who cares only about accelerating themselves through this life. Be alert. Be guarded against us. Remember what we did. When the moon rises, don’t hunker down and stay hidden. Dance in the streets. Bring your own light and create your own day, fight tooth and nail against the tide of misogyny and ableism and racism and homophobia and stupidity and cruelty and instead yell so loud that we have no choice but to hear you. This is how to destroy us. This is how you make us pay for what we did.