Chapter 9: Appointments
“My advice to everyone out there who's frustrated, sad, angry, pissed off: feel those emotions, go to a kickboxing class, have a margarita, do whatever you need to do this weekend, and then wake up on Monday morning, we gotta keep fighting…”
White House spokesmxn, Jenn Psaki on ABC’s ‘The View’
Tina Joemat-Pettersson as Minister of Energy in South Africa. Amber Rudd as Home Secretary in the United Kingdom. Anthony Blinken as Secretary of State and Alejandro Majorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security - both in the United States.
These are a microscopic fraction of appalling ministerial appointments from 3 countries in less 10 years - appointments that have resulted in incompetence, misery, almost certainly malfeasance and worst of all, the repulsive model of upward failure. It gets even worse: take Victoria ‘Toria” Nuland, a State Department Rasputin-esque profile who has been worm-tonguing the ears of impressionable psychopaths - from Dick Cheney to Joe Biden - since the turn of the century. You didn’t vote for her - but she’s there, at the heart of the chancelleries of power, wreaking havoc in Ukraine, making up for lost time since Iraq.
Maybe you’re one of these people who gets cross every time you switch on the Fox news channel on YouTube and see the President of the United States’ publicist, Karin-Jean Pierre, making another mess of a briefing, or twerking wildly with Rachel Levine (who was once called Richard - and used to wear baggy chinos with white New Balance sneakers on holiday with his family). You may ask yourself, in the manner of the post turtle paradigm: how did she get there? Of course, you know some of the answers already: she is black, a woman, reportedly the child of Haitians, who has recently split from her woman partner - a producer at CNN - with whom she adopted a child. So here is the cosmetic side of your answer: she is a black, lesbian, immigrant-ey single mum.
But there’s another side too. She annoys you. She annoys you because she articulates strategist talk - there’s no human there, just a lot of “let me be clear” and other statements just as tedious and desperate as Boris Johnson’s “get Brexit done” or “stay at home, protect the NHS, save lies”. She’s tetchy, childish, platitudinal, and deeply invested in agendas - none of which align with your own view of an ordered, fair society. She’s intolerant, looks out of place, and wears a mask in summer when running out for a coffee. If you take everything together, you’ve answered your question completely: she’s there to annoy, to demoralize you. As is everyone else.
*
Before the tragic events of August 2023, I was convinced I’d eventually retire to the island of Maui, but it came with a nightmare: one afternoon my wife and I would be drinking Casa Azul Ultra Extra on our deck overlooking the island of Lanai when we were overwhelmed by an odor not even Mexico’s finest tequila could arrest. We’d walk onto the small beach in front of our house to notice that everyone else is suffering too - the foul smell is penetrating everywhere, making grannies’ eyes water and children’s skin itch uncontrollably. It would continue into the night with the local ER, ordinarily used to Tiger shark scrapes, unable to cope - until a paper man wearing a gas mask rocks up in the morning to deliver the newspaper. Only then is the emergency mystery of the nauseating stinker - like death and wet towels and rotten guavas and meat stuck for weeks in meth teeth - solved: “CHELSEA CLINTON APPOINTED PRESIDENT”.
If it is to be that weaponized charges prevent Donald Trump from contesting 2024’s United States Presidential election, or that Mark Zuckerberg forks out even more money to, erm, “fortify” those elections thereby making it all but impossible for the Democrats to lose, Republicans may as well pack up shop. Forever. This, which is the objective, will set the stage for Chelsea Clinton to cream the DNC then just lounge about with Dr. Tedros whilst her fixers sort the campaign leading to her - yes - “appointment”.
She won’t meet many people, but those she does will be wearing Burkas, sitting in once what was Jamie Dimon’s office at JP Morgan or exiting Palm Beach’s newest mosque, built on the grounds of a property that was once called “Mar-a-Lago”. Included in her campaign paraphernalia will be videos of her reading bedtime stories to her young girls, her husband Marc sitting obediently nearby, with his yarmulka perfectly positioned and his back to the camera. Chelsea will have read him paragraphs of the riotous assemblies act just before: “You make one attempt to blink uncontrollably at the camera,” she’ll warn him, “and my mother will shoot you twice in the back of the head. Fuck around, find out.” In the commercial she will read in a soft, animated voice: “And then the little girl said: ‘I’m the boss now, and all you white, middle-aged cisgender men working on this stock exchange will have to report to me. And every time me and the other strong women in the office have our periods, you men will have to shove tampons up your asses…’”I made up that last bit obviously - but it will be something toilet: “She rose, and took off her burqa (obviously whilst Adnan or Hamdi wasn’t watching) and opened her wings and flew, was inspired, and she felt strong.” If you recall Ayn Rand’s final 500 or so words in “The Fountainhead” - Dominique Wynand travelling up the lift to meet Howard Roark - toilet like that, but actually more: like that scene in 1973’s “The Exorcist” when the girl reverse spider-walks down the stairs - only this time its a toilet, reverse spider-walking down the stairs with an upper-decker straining between the wires and pipes of its cistern.
From a young age, beautiful Chelsea was groomed by paragons of Sutenbastud. Her father, a megalomaniac, her mother - an apprentice megalomaniac who failed house training but, on the basis that her husband had shoved a cigar into an adult female cavity, believed she was entitled to one day run for President. As the only child of people who should have been sectioned (anti-social behavior, mental health act, etc) a long time ago, Chelsea was inevitably spoilt, despite protestations of near poverty by her parents when they left the White House. In 2005, at a, erm, “democrat retreat”, she met a fellow called Marc Mezvinsky, who parents were staunch democrats and knew Bill and Hillary. They started dating.
They were married in 2010, and to her wedding Chelsea invited a woman called Ghislaine Maxwell with whom she’d previously holidayed on a yacht. Marc, a Goldman Sachs alumni, founded Eaglevale Partners with two other former Goldman Sachs traders. Of course, because names like “SPQR” and “Precision Capital” and “Interstellar Money Shot” were already taken by other finance bro firms, Marc possibly chose “Eaglevale” presumably on account of the image that comes to mind: the mystery of a fierce but graceful hunter captured floating amongst the thermals in a valley. In December 2016, shortly after the election of Donald Trump, Marc closed the business down: someone had given the poor eagle puberty blockers, so the thing had flown from its hunting grounds of the vale, and was now looking to link up with roving band of PRIDE police dancers near Cardiff.
Chelsea’s best friend is a woman called Devi Shridar, who is a doctor, and in 2017 they authored a book together: “Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?” To launch the book, the two hopped aboard the intellectual spunk train, speaking at various events, liberal arts universities and women’s forums. In one photo, the not-unattractive Devi sits alongside Chelsea signing books. Now, if you were there, and you drank - quickly - 3 glasses of the standard, partially-condemned house wine they serve at those things, and looked at Devi and thought: “Well now, perhaps I will give this a flitter” - you’d be in for the high jump. You wouldn’t get within spitting distance without Chelsea’s parent’s thugs manhandling you. But say you did, and the next thing, you were sitting alongside her, trying to capture her eyes from behind the rectangular glasses favored by the sub-continent’s army of international business school scholars. You could literally be one of the greatest playboys in history - Porfirio Rubirosa, or a free-wheeling Hollywood stuntman - and you’d get nowhere. How is this? Programming, you see - her brain has been chipped with several academic functions, but no sex ones. You might elicit a smile, but it would be, at best, curious: “What is this strange person doing?” Her operating system is not familiar with this way of behaviour - it’s only: “KOMPUTA SAY NO.” Basically, Devi is an automaton - exactly the way the Clintons like.
So she’s in for a life of academia, punctuated with fleeting social encounters - the staff Christmas party for example, where the group of medical academics visit the local Indian restaurant and they all look to her to make recommendations - which will bemuse her because she doesn’t care for Indian cuisine. She is only the technocratic world’s latest product - big government, big corporation, work-from-home, subsidized, clever, ordered, meek with ample storage capacity for frequent updating - a life manufactured to appear as a reliable, mute marshal of large quantities of data and equations passed from one bureaucracy to the next.
Even with the litany of appalling appointments, and the culture of rewarding failure, you simply cannot have someone like this advising - of all things - a government on what the government describes a “public health emergency”. You cannot. Surely. Right?
*
In March 2020, Professor Neil Ferguson, supposedly the UK’s most talented science boffin, ran awkwardly into Downing Street with a pile of papers. Before this moment, Boris Johnson wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of a lockdown, but Neil burst in and managed to shove his “models” into the hands of two men who were completely unfit to handle any material - corrupted or not. These two were Boris’ special advisor, Dominic Cummings, and his press guy, Lee Cain. Dominic is an oddball. Allegedly autistic, he was regarded as the power center in Vote Leave’s successful campaign of 2016. Before that, he worked with Michael Gove when the latter was the Secretary of Education. By the time Neil burst into 10 Downing Street, Dominic had filled with boots with science books and made many peculiar remarks on his blog which he used to try and lure talent into the civil service in the hope of reforming it.
Cummings and Cain - as the story goes - agreed with Neil’s modeling, although revelations that would emerge later point to something of a misunderstanding here. His predictions of death and zombies were located in 13,000 lines of code - a rumor at the time suggested grounds for a scientific misconduct inquiry. Another rumor claimed that technicians from Microsoft were spirited out of Seattle to clean the thing up before it was subjected to more scrutiny. But that’s beside the point: Cummings, his head filled with Frank Herbert’s Dune or the complete works of Stephen Hawking, agreed with Neil, and began to sway Johnson’s view.
Ferguson is not the sort of person you should position on any body-making decisions that will impact financially on ordinary people. Why? It’s the same reason you shouldn’t have any of the SAGE - Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies - members, hastily assembled by who knows, appearing on any body: these people don’t know what they’re doing. We all know, with proof, that tacit experience is just as important as explicit knowledge - but SAGE, and people like Ferguson and “Stalin’s Nanny” Susan Michie, see the world, and subsequently economics, through the prism of academia only - accompanied, when they’re feeling generous, by “soft power” politics, the kind practiced by the Liberal Democrats (to see how easily “soft power” is manipulated, take what you knew of it when people like the Wallpaper founder Tyler Brule started writing about it - a decade ago - and then take the LibDem youth now encouraging its members to use pronouns. “Soft power” has been a stalking horse for some of the worst pathologies). Ferguson was a wet-fish Libdem-squealtard even before he ran into Downing Street; the fact that someone found tweets confirming he was a wet-fish Libdem-squealtard made no difference. He was bust corresponding with the comprehensively damaged Liberal Democrat domestic violence enthusiast Layla Moran, expressing hope that Britain wouldn’t have a “hard Brexit”.
For many March 2020 was the first time Ferguson erupted himself. It was immediately uncomfortable; it wasn’t clear what he did, but it was under his authority recommendation, made in March 2020, that we closed up shop and stayed indoors.
Sutenbastud loved it. During the first two weeks in March 2020, before Johnson announced the lockdown, LinkedIn was flush with boisterous statements supporting the theory of authoritarian lockdowns - the kind we were seeing from China. One South African businessman based in London, who has never been able to stop telling people, including those he doesn’t know, how much he admires the ANC at home or the LidDems in the UK, announced on the platform: “The UK government’s response is to the pandemic is immoral.” As if to announce its arrival before its time, the loudest voices on social media supporting the idea belonged to GEN Z: “lock us down NOW!”
Johnson did, and so came the political theatre of the BBC in the evenings and ITV in the mornings, where presenters and guests puffed out their chests, and spoke, with confidence and conviction, out their balloon knots. Rules were established, and enforced and the streets emptied. But the stench of suspicion was much harder to police: Ferguson, we all suddenly realized quickly, was off his rocker.
Then came May, well past the “two weeks to flatten the curve” threshold. In the days of proper newspapers, occasionally a story would arrive that was known as a “marmalade dropper”. The marmalade dropper that arrived on the 5th of May: “EXCLUSIVE”, read The Telegraph’s headline, “GOVERNMENT SCIENTIST NEIL FERGUSON RESIGNS AFTER BREAKING LOCKDOWN RULES TO MEET HIS MARRIED LOVER”.
What had happened was this: Ferguson was divorced, and living alone in London. Disillusioned with the effect of his handiwork, he reached out to a woman he had met on a dating app. The woman - a Belgian called Antonia Staats - was herself still married, but in the spirit of your average Belgian campsite, practiced an “open marriage”. So she’d gone around to service the randy boffin and breached those stupid rules.
What made the story even stranger were her circumstances. Not only was she married, but she had introduced her husband, Chris, to Neil Ferguson, and the two had - apparently - “gotten on very well”. So, chuffed maybe? Antonia worked for Avaaz, an activist group funded in part by George Soros’ Open Society - so we can assume that, outside of sex, their politics were congruently Sutenbastud. With that being the case, there was a high probability that Staats didn’t travel to service Ferguson alone, but with her husband sitting in the passenger seat. So what happens when she arrives? I would imagine one of three things: she would make Chris wait in the car, or send him for a walk, hoping - of course - that the filth would arrest him, or he would accompany her inside, and be told to busy himself downstairs for a quarter of an hour or so. I really don’t think Ferguson boasted the constitution to have say, “let the fucker watch”. I just don’t think he’s that brave.
When the news broke, Ferguson was subjected to a non-punishment punishment. Supposedly, he resigned from SAGE, and its equally menacing subsidiary, NERVTAG. But in fact he remained, and continued to advise - in some non-official official way. The Metropolitan Police, who were happy to kick the shit out of people they caught breaching rules, were disappointed - or so they claimed, and the matter was quickly nixed. A question involving his extravagant grants lingered, but only for a while. He was, through Imperial College, a recipient of extravagant Gavi largesse, but that too dropped when it was revealed that Bill Gates had funded The Telegraph’s own health desk.
What the spectacle did was what you expected it to: increase skepticism of institutions. Moreover, it confirmed that the rules were just stupid and unnecessary, that if Ferguson, who you’d think had the highest quality of information, did not think this was the crisis Piers Moron was shouting it was.
But even more than that, through the examination of Ferguson’s past, it displayed a battle of logic. Long before Ferguson was caught doing what he was doing to Ms. Staats, he had made predictions that unsurprisingly failed to materialize.
In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE.
Again, in 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
And again, in 2009, a government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a “reasonable worst-case scenario” was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.
Nothing had ever happened to him. No warning, no disciplinary, no demotion. And there was also something else in his background that appeared suspicious - his involvement with a man called Roy Anderson.
Anderson was a director and co-founder of The Wellcome Trust’s Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases at Oxford University. The Wellcome Trust, of course, is the institution led at the time of coof by another Ferguson-like maniac, a man called Jeremy Farrar (more about him in a minute). As early as 2000 Anderson was not a fan of a woman called Suntera Gupta, who would become, alongside Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and to some extent the British physician Karol Sikora, the only reasonable voices to emerge from academia without being tarnished by right-on politics, or stupid, or unable to disguise their authoritarian tendencies. Anderson happened to be Ferguson’s mentor and started a rumor about Sunetra Gupta - claiming that she was only appointed as a reader in epidemiology at Oxford on the basis that she had slept with a man called Paul Harvey - who was Anderson’s successor as the head of the zoology department.
Anderson was forced to apologize, which by all accounts he did reluctantly. He was also suspended - but on full pay - from the Wellcome Trust. When coof exploded and Sunetra attempted to reason with the hysteria, she would have been transported back in time, to aspersions cast by the man who Ferguson was essentially an academic product of.
Ferguson was/is a failure, and worse, an upward one. He failed in 2002, in 2009 and in 2015; at the onset of coof, he was presented with his most prestigious opportunity yet - to fail again. This failure would influence advisors in foreign countries to fail too - to filter rubbish information into the heads of director generals or policymakers.
If it’s the phenomenon of upward failure that defines today’s elites, the use case is surely Jeremy Farrar.
All of SAGE were massive lockdown enthusiasts, but none more so than Farrar. He described his strategy for Britain to exit coof’s grip as “vaccine plus”, which was a combination of vaccines, ventilation and testing. He really wanted to lockdown in September 2020, and was reportedly pissed off with the UK government for refusing. Then in 2021, November, Farrar quit SAGE on account of concern at the levels of coof. Insiders claim he was irritated at not being listened to, and suggest that he resigned only to prompt the government into submitting to his desires. Also, according to insiders, Farrar believed he had cultivated an exceptional image amongst the public, and that his resignation would prompt outcry - at which point the government was supposed to submit and plead him to return because people were burning rubbish bins - or their own feces - in objection. That didn’t happen, and he quickly shifted the framing of his resignation into one of “wanting to spend more time at Wellcome”.
The Wellcome Trust is the largest charitable donation foundation in Britain, leading the charity industrial complex. Naturally, this institution got itself into romantic spasms over George Floyd, and subsequently later that year undertook to investigate “racism”. Leading the way was Farrar and in 2022, old Columbo released the findings. Words to the effect of: “I hereby find the Wellcome Trust guilty of racism” concluded the report.
That’s correct. A trust with an annual endowment of anything between £20b and £25b just called itself a racist. Ordinarily, people who have been found guilty of racism are issued with criminal records and have to make particular representations for mundane routines such as traveling overseas; for the latter, it is required that you have to disclose exactly what you did, and exactly how you were punished. Did the Wellcome Trust make these representations to the people that furnish them with cash? Of course not.
That is the phenomenon’s ultimate consequence. Upward failures answer to nobody, make stupid claims, get caught out, kneel to distract, then get up and repeat the exercise.
*
Even with all this carnage unfolding, this cluelessness, back-stabbing and paranoia bubbling through the land, you still cannot - cannot - invite someone like Devi Shridar to advise a government. So the question is: what would it take for that to happen? For this, we have to entertain a series of interlinked variables and apply some creative license. Any deviation simply would not work.
Firstly, what kind of country would “appoint” Devi Shridar? This part is straightforward. The country would need to suffer from bad weather, an appalling inferiority complex, and be inhabited by folk whose ancestors begrudgingly quit cannibalism for eating seals. So place it somewhere around the North Sea.
Secondly, what are the conditions inside our “imaginary” country in the North Sea that would permit the participation of Devi in a “public health crisis”?
Leading our, ahem, “imaginary” country around about the North Sea would have to be of the most vicious people ever conceived - let’s call her Morag, and she is chippy, massively pro-EU and pro-transgender, complete with a permascowl and a little smirk that she saves for watching amateur footage or stowaways falling from the landing gears of aircraft they’ve slipped into. At home, there’s a bald, pot-bellied and bespectacled man called Clyde Hogg - Hoggy - masquerading as her husband - and the CEO of the political party she leads to boot. Hoggy is frequently accused - in whispers - of being fast and loose with the party’s finances. Every 4 months he’s forced to attend swinger events where his wife unleashes herself onto other women in front of him - usually librarian types. Morag forces Hoggy to watch; across the room, doing what she is doing, she stares back, grunting, wiping the mucus from her nose with the back of her hand, just like the 8-year-old boy playing football in Manchester streets in the 1950s she always resembles. That’s the extent of any cuteness; she’s vicious, unhinged flies off the handle at any and everything. Needless to say, it is a sexless marriage for Hoggy.
But the nuances of a wild arrangement like this are still not enough to warrant the appointment of Devi, and this is where Hillary Clinton returns. Hillary wants in on a “public health emergency” but she can’t exactly hawk off her daughter - because it would be just too obvious. “Hmmm,” she says one day, “but that Indian one…hmmm.”
So Hillary turns to the demons, Satan’s descendants who missed the last bus home, who are responsible for polluting the heads of gender and grievance studies graduates in Western Universities and who founded the terrorist organisation Antifa (and possibly BLM too). So Hillary calls them up after Nancy Pelosi has just finished a session: “Listen, I need to have influence on a, erm, haha, um “public health emergency” - but let’s start with the government of some obscure backwater - you get my drift - put my sleeper into the government there, and see how badly we can fuck shit up.” The demons agree terms, and the process begins.
The demons make contact with Morag. They speak to her through vibrations - through heart palpitations, migraines, especially tortured nightmares and sleep walking. Suddenly she’s struck with all these, has no energy and is beginning to feel even angrier than she always is. The demons have planted an idea, Hillary Clinton’s instruction, with a hint that all these sudden ailments being cured if she acquiesces to a demand she can’t quite yet grasp but is floating in amongst the chaos. Morag, naturally resistant of these things, is waking up at 2 am and walking into walls and lying on the sofa screaming at Hoggy, her assistants - all at the same time she’s prepping the ground for “the public health emergency” response. She suspects some kind of dark force has gripped her and there is some kind of a deal to be made - but she’s not going to give up just yet.
Meanwhile Hoggy is feeling adventurous. He’s heard there’s a hook-up app called Grindr, and has taken to scouring the profiles. The thought of getting one over Morag excites him; he’s purchased a few packets of Viagra and enjoyed what he saw and felt until he overdosed, resulting in a headache and some unexpected evacuation - but no bother, he’ll be sure to remain hydrated in future. Then he sees something on Grindr which makes him sit up in his vest and y-fronts in an empty bed at 10 am one morning.
The first picture is of an African American man wearing a fedora. The second is of the same African American man - “Legraydon” as the man in the photo called himself - this time with his barrel chest revealed. He is very good-looking, to the point of being beautiful, with thick lips and smooth, high-boned cheeks. But it’s the third that bends Hoggy’s lip into a quiver: it’s Legraydon just wearing underpants, with the size and shape of his penis visible. Even flaccid the thing is a monster - and Peter’s now panting. He gets out of bed and heads straight to the bathroom. After finishing doing what he did, it’s inevitable. Hoggy shakes in excitement as he types out the word in the message box, closes his eyes, exhales and presses send. “Hiya!”
Legraydon - real name Demarcus Traigh Broward Jnr - is a nightclub dancer and he isn’t gay, he just sleeps with men sometimes. He’s learned that there’s an ideal type of man to sleep with - one that is ugly, submissive, but most importantly - rich. After finishing one of his shifts dancing at a club in New Orleans, Legraydon discovers the message from a user called “Hoggmeister”, and weighs up responding. As Hoggy has populated the criteria, adding a selfie he took of sitting on the loo, there could be something here for him - so, all good - let’s go.
And so begins, in the shadow of an emerging “public health emergency”, a steamy back and forth between the “husband” of the leader of a wasteland and an African American muscle dancer from the American south. Initially Hoggy is skeptical; he’s terrified his mental bat wild boar of a wife will find out - and who knows where this is going? But the volleys continue, culminating with Legraydon sending pictures of himself naked and aroused to Hoggy.
This happens on a miserable Tuesday night when Hoggy has been drinking and Morag’s out doing politics things. It’s freezing in the imaginary country but in New Orleans - in the background of Legraydon’s cock shots - it looks almost tropical. This makes Hoggy simultaneously mad and sad: how exotic it would be to made love to by a heaving, sweaty unit of sensual darkness. Inside the pub where Hoggy sits, elderly, working-class men throw darts - one from a mobility scooter - Hoggy can only think of lust, warmth and the freedom that lust promises. Fuck it, he thinks, as soon as I can, I’m out the clutches of this spastic bitch - and its Heathrow to New Orleans, then a small apartment he’ll rent in the French Quarter and two weeks of Legraydon’s body. He thinks: that man’s penis looks like a fighter jet nosediving - Black Hawk sideways. He looks at the first profile photo again, careful to avoid eavesdroppers with their mobile oxygen tanks.
But Hoggy is nothing else if not pragmatic; he knows he’s knocking on and at the age of 61, making a small hole into a medium-sized one comes with complications, especially if he’s never been in that position before. Well, once actually, but he was on the other side. So one day he orders an 8-inch black dildo on the internet and is delighted to learn that he’s earned a gift with the purchase: a pair of suspenders. He stays at home the day the package is scheduled to arrive and when it does, he quickly dispenses with all the wrapping walking to the furthest bin located on his street. Now’s the time, he thinks, preparation, preparation.
Meanwhile Morag is enduring a particularly bad day. She’s been campaigning on the fringes of another disaster town filled with council estates and smack heads, staying in a shitty Premier Inn overlooking a car park that smells of batteries and cigarette smoke. When she is told that only 7 people have RSVP’d to an event the party is hosting on the “public health emergency”, she loses it and cancels. She drops 5 small red pain capsules - her second dosage of the morning - and orders one of her assistants to drive her home.
At home Hoggy has taken off his trousers and replaced them with the kinky, crotchless suspenders. He’s sitting on the bed, examining the black dildo from all angles. “Oh,” he says, noticing the small jap-eye carved into the tip: “splindid attenshin te deetail”. He hasn’t taken his shirt or tie off.
The car trip hasn’t gone well for Morag. Her aides are deeply concerned: she’s turned gray, and has only managed to articulate a few words during the entire journey back to her house: “fook” and “coent” and “fookin’ coent”. They drop her outside her home and she stares up at it in loathing and contempt before picking up her bags and walking painfully to the front door.
She discovers it’s open. There’s music playing loudly - “Moments in Love” by The Art of Noise - but nobody is downstairs. In too much pain to bother, she grabs and rail next to the stairs and takes each step up slowly, her body now so weak she could collapse. Eventually she gets to the top; the music is still playing throughout the house, and it starts bubbling rage in her. The bedroom door is partially open.
The music is too loud in the bedroom for Hoggy to hear. But Morag is now at the door peeking in. On the edge of the bed Peter is wearing crotchless suspenders, a faded maroon-ish shirt from Next and a floral tie. He’s holding something, Morag notices. And he’s rubbing what he’s holding with something else. A black dildo. Lube. He’s rubbing lube into the tip of a black dildo. And with that realization, all the pain hockey sticks in her head, graduating to the impossible, a high-pitch - almost high enough to evade human hearing - white-hot fury.
She charges into the room like a fleet-destroying rugby flanker and flies into Hoggy’ chest with her shoulder, knocking him from the bed. All she sees is white - all she hears is ringing. She stands up and sees him staring at her from the floor; his eyes are wide, the realisation of what’s happening is just about to hit him. She jumps on him, straddling his face, and picks up the dildo lost from his hands in the tackle. His face is in her crotch but she jumps back to his chest, pinning him down. “COOOOENT FOOOOOKIN COOOENT!!!!” she bellows, before starting to beat him. Immediately she splits the bridge of his nose with the first blow of the dildo, but it only seems to aggravate the rage. “YIR A FOOKIN GERRL CHILD ACTCHALLY YA FOOKIN COOENT”. Hoggy’s almost unconscious at this point, being struck on the forehead and across the temples. He tries to move his legs but Morag is possessed, with spit running down her chin, and it’s not long before his body reacts in different ways. “WHAT THE FOOOK??!!” Morag screams as she senses a dampness in her stockings. “YA FOOOKIN” PISSED YERSILF JA FOOKIN’ GERRL COOENT”. It’s true. Hoggy, his face a bloody mess, drifting in and out of consciousness, has pissed himself. But that doesn’t stop Morag from beating him and she knows this: she knows that one more blow could end her “husband”, and here, in this place of hatred and ringing and fury, an unlikely thing happens. She stops and sits, panting, sitting in a bloody mess of saliva and piss and lube. “I surrender,” she growls softly, feeling a voice not her own rise in her chest, similar to backmasking - playing an AC/DC record backwards - and the words eventually reach her throat with a punch: “I will appoint Devi Shridar to the limit time expert group.” Calm suddenly returns, the headache subsides, color returns to her cheeks and ordinary strength to her legs.
It is only under those conditions - to the letter - that someone like Devi Shridar could be appointed to advise a government on a “public health emergency”. And that would never happen. Right…..?
*
In some completely unrelated news, Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as First Minister of the devolved nation of Scotland, was met with shock. Shortly after her resignation, cruel rumors started circulating indicating that Nicola was having an affair with a woman. These cruel rumors suggested that Nicola had tailed her lover to a motel, whereupon she was able to secure from the receptionist the number of the room her lover had entered. The cruel rumors claimed Nicola had discovered her lover in the arms of another woman. Nicola went mad, and smacked her lover in the face with an iron from the closet, before ripping the television off its mount and tearing down the picture frames from the walls then smashing them. It is said Nicola was forced to resign, but it is cruel, and to repeat these smears is…gingerphobic.