The Thursday rant #8

Mr Eugenides wouldn’t describe himself as a blogging virgin, exactly, but he’s certainly still at the inexpert fumbling stage. Be gentle.

On Kilroy

Let’s start with the suntan.

I’m going to go out on a limb; no suntanned British politician has ever been anything but a shyster and a fraud. Three quick examples; Tony B. suddenly turning mahogany one weekend during the election (“I was working in the garden”); George Galloway, passim; and the entire madcap political career of Robert Kilroy-Silk. (Of course, his real name is Robert Silk. “Kilroy-Silk” is an affectation, an amalgamation of the surnames of his father and stepfather, presumably to make him sound less proletarian).

I’m a reasonably intelligent man. I understand, both intuitively and intellectually, the difference between the true evils in this world – poverty, disease, hunger – and the ephemera, the flotsam, the self-obsessed nonentities that jostle for position on the margins. And yet, increasingly, it’s the latter that obsess me, to the virtual exclusion of all else. Darfur, 7/7, torture; yes, they make me angry, angry at the injustices of the world and our inability, or unwillingness, to right them. But to stir the deepest, most unspeakable feelings of rage in my soul, only a Kilroy, a Patricia Hewitt, a – God forgive me for even typing the words! – Gillian McKeith, will really do.

Is it the way he cosied up to his hapless victims, the consoling arm round the shoulders even as he manoeuvred them in their seats to face the camera? Is it the ignorant, xenophobic tripe in his newspaper column which took him (let us hope forever) off our screens? Is it his ludicrous political meanderings, the ill-fated and wholly self-regarding flirtation with UKIP, the pathetic vanity of Veritas, which ended, deliciously, in him being ousted from the head of his own one-man band? Is it the monstrous hypocrisy? Is it actually just the tan?

No. My anger stems from the fact that, despite their utter insignificance, these people occupy a huge, pompous-twat-shaped hole in my life that I dearly wish I didn’t need to fill. Any decent psychiatrist could tell me that when I lie awake, imagining the sound that a rusty axe would make as it plunged through his leathery, apricot-hued face, I’m “transferring” my rage. This rant is really about myself.