Are you going to resign, Mr B....?

(London, England)

Downing Street is a most appropriate setting for the epicentre of British politics. It is a back street, which seems somehow fitting considering the seediness and criminality synonymous with British government dealings. It is caged in, reminding visitors that even fat, slothful beasts can be dangerous when they decide to lash out. And the building at number ten is hardly spectacular, which matches the anticlimactic effect of an appearance by its prime resident.

On Wednesday morning (29th October), a gaggle of reporters apparently gathered outside the house at number ten, with the intention, I imagine, of demanding an explanation from the Prime Minister on the lamentable state of affairs in Britain.

In sixteen months in power, Brown has been investigated for suspicious party donations, criticised for the attempt to emulate American detention legislation and shown up over the repeated loss of sensitive personal records.

To cap it all, the British branch of the credit crunch is in full swing, although in fairness to Brown this is really the fault of the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, during his ten-year tenure, managed to run the country into the ground.

The climax of the recent economic upheaval was the panicked, grovelling telephone call from the British Treasury to Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen begging him to reverse the decision to guarantee the money invested in Irish banks.

So on Wednesday the journalists came together in representation of The People to consolidate the protest of millions into one simple question: are you going to resign, Mister Brown?

Excuse me a moment, somebody is trying to attract my attention.

GET THE FACTS STRAIGHT

What do you mean I’ve got the wrong place?

So it wasn’t Mister Brown? Who was it then?

Mister Brand? As in Russell Brand, the comedian and presenter? What’s he done?

Let’s check up some facts. Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross were on a radio show, mainly because they are a popular pair of presenters that the British viewing and listening public demand to see on their screens or hear from their radios. They made some comments which, in the time-honoured tradition of tabloid journalism, look much worse when written down and then recited with a scathing tone of voice than they ever sounded when originally uttered. Admittedly, the comments were in poor taste, although no worse than what you can hear on any number of programmes, including such popular shows as Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Have I Got News For You or Big Brother.

The comments were made to the answering machine of actor Andrew Sachs. For those people still this side of retirement age, he is an actor famous for appearing in Fawlty Towers, a barrel-scrapingly unfunny programme which lasted just twelve episodes in the seventies. It was staple British fare, relying on national stereotypes (as well as some uncharacteristically humourless hyperactive screeching from John Cleese) to make the fascist English public laugh at a time when it was still considered acceptable to ridicule colonials and women’s rights.

More recently Sachs has worked closely with Peter Kay, an English comedian famous for advertisements considered so offensive they had to be banned from the air (although the shockingly offensive spot in the wheelchair was inexplicably allowed to continue), and the occasional prank call. Sachs’ granddaughter – the subject of the comments made by Brand and Ross – auditioned for The Sun newspaper’s Page Three before becoming a member of the pseudo-Nazi burlesque group “Satanic Sluts”.

A SENSE OF PROPORTION

At the end of Russell Brand’s radio programme there were two complaints. Two. It took twelve days of increasing hysteria brought about by a concerted effort from that other British staple, the tabloid newspaper, and fuelled by a comment from a Prime Minister who must have been relieved to see somebody else in the line of fire, for the number of complaints to finally reach ten thousand. A day later that had nearly tripled.

How? Well, yet again, the English have shown their usual mettle in a time of crisis by pillorying somebody they had previously revered in order to feel better about their own pathetic, insignificant existence. David Beckham, Michael Barrymore and the Princess of Wales are notable examples of people who at one stage enjoyed the favour of the tabloid-reading, television-watching English public, only to fall foul of The People by committing some heinous crime.

Russell Brand’s crime was not to force the value of pension funds to decrease with questionable economic management, or to propose draconian detention measures, or indeed to maintain a military presence in a foreign country, but simply to offend a race as fickle and self-important as the English.

So, are you going to resign, Mister B?