Nigel Falange MP. He’s ditched the Gieves and Hawkes country squire Master of the Hunt outfit because that race has been won. The “man of the people” who’d far sooner drool spittle into a beggar’s open wound than share a pint with “the people” in a Clacton pub. His Revanchist Party goon coterie running to heel. All now taking their seats –their shiny once- in -a lifetime Ede and Ravenscroft trousers already gone slightly sweat- stale from farting arses fueled on proper ale and varicocele tightness at the crotch. Falange says they’re the new kids on the block. Falange as heartthrob Donny, side-swapping scab Lee as acting-hard Marky Mark, hanging tough with his wooden stick and shouting about Islamists and Travellers instead of slant-eyed gooks. The rest just faceless, lip-syncing, glad to be on stage.
Falange has sold Clacton his story that all its problems are caused by non-essential immigration. The boarded-up shops, the 5.1% unemployment. Falange can play a crowd as beautifully as Elly Ney played piano. Soon enough, the crowd of Londoners who retired to the sea air are muttering about woke ideology and immigrants stealing British jobs and those fuckin Muslims and their rejection of British values. Apparently, Sade lived in Clacton as a kid, but it’s these new kids on the block who know how to siren-sing the sweetest taboo. The cafes are all empty. The slot machines have no one to pay out to. Falange, Flashman at Dulwich and flash man on the trading floor, has played his shell game well. Clacton’s population is 95% white. “Where’s the ball? Where’s the ball? “He’ll double your money if you can find the ball.
Black sun rising over Salo-on-Sea and there’s all sorts of old shit rising up in the Colne as it crawls its way to Brightlingsea. Falange and his new party money men organizing charabancs full of pound shop Powellites to prowl the seafronts performatively gesturing and pointing, on the lookout for drowning children to mock, railing about gunboats and protecting borders, while coastal erosion drags Clacton into the sea. And Frangopoulos’s Haw Haws cheer on the Revanchist MPs as they work to turn a class-in-itself into a class against-itself. Falange wonders though how much time he has to waste breathing in the stale fish and chips and doughnut air before he can slime back to Mayfair pubs and a twilight wander through Shepherds Market. And somewhere a light aircraft engineer thinks aloud “We only have to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.”
