Up in Smoke

In need of an update

Bonfire night hasn't ever had the same appeal since my father bought a dodgy batch of fireworks that fell of the back of a lorry a few years ago. Once you've seen an oversized rocket doing a mid air U-turn a couple of seconds after lift off and somehow fitting through the narrowest of re-entry windows (in this case a patio door opened only to a ventilation setting) and explode in the family lounge nothing else will quite match the excitement.

It's that whiff of gunpowder and controlled danger that I've always liked and I desperately hope the health and safety zealots fail in their annual whining for yet more draconian restrictions. They don't seem to publicise the annual injury toll on TV news outlets anymore, which is probably a sign that the numbers are becoming fairly small and un-newsworthy, but if true that would not deflect the zero risk brigade from their crusade.

There have also been the usual questions raised about the appropriateness of an annual celebration of Catholic burning from the usual suspects of political correctness as well as from more considered sources. I've got no particular views on Catholicism one way of the other, but I am inclined to believe that it is one area where perhaps we could include a little more diversity. A pub conversation last night covered some potential candidates to replace the historical Guido Fawkes, so I have now come up with my considered top 10. I've tried to stick to just a single victim from any given sphere or institution, otherwise I'd have just been able to cut and paste from a list of members of the current cabinet.

So here goes then…my top 10 for the bonfire kindled, of course with the entire print run (if that is sufficient) of The Independent, in effigy:

10 - Jonathan Davies
Davies is a fine rugby player in both codes of the codes, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of both games. That said, the Welsh accent can be a beautiful thing, but his isn't. If some digibox offers a 'mute Davies commentary' feature I will be out to buy one in a second.

9 - Jose Manuel Barroso
I was tempted to include two people from the commission so that, in EU style, it would be possible to satisfy the sensitivities of those both in Brussels and Strasbourg. In my opinion the more common hate figures of the Eurosceptic movement, such as Santer and Delors at least had a degree of honesty of what their ultimate goal was, even if they were not so open about how they were achieving it. Some may say that Barroso is just the EU village idiot and unworthy of the accolade, but I'd love to see him go up in his Napoleonic bicorn hat.

8 - The Poison Dwarf
Ok, a bit parochial. Those outside the Village will just have to trust me when I say that never before in the field of pub bores has so little knowledge been expounded so long and inaccurately to so many.

7 - Kate Moss
OK, it wouldn't add much to the blaze, but the Kate Moss effigy is there as a symbolic representation of British Tabloid culture at its worst. The mention of her name in the broadcast media used to be a cue that all the serious news had come to an end and you could switch off and go and do something else, now it's likely to somewhere up in the top three stories at some point in any given week.

6 - Quentin Davies MP
We have far too large a legislature for a country of our size so the back benchers must take their share of the cuts as well as the cabinet. Not only would Davies' oily bulk make up for Moss, but as people at least since the days of Dante have known, there is a special circle in hell reserved for traitorous scum. I suspect there are still plenty of his newfound colleagues that would help me drag his heavy effigy to the top of the bonfire.

5 - Richard Corbett MEP
The smug grin that the deputy leader of the Labour MEPs has worn since his wish to have the desires of the British People extinguished seems to have been granted is truly revolting. The stupefying dishonesty of his attempts to justify the most politically dishonest act of my lifetime are offensive in the extreme. His fervent hope that the gradual stripping away of real democratic control from the general public will continue is reason enough to give him a portent of what generally happens when self selecting elites scorn the people, in seeing his effigy meet the same kind of sticky end that ultimately befell many of his political forebears.

4 - Robert Mugabe
It's a rare person who can unite a vast swathe of the political spectrum in universal loathing. There are others whose leadership has turned their country into a complete mess, but so often it can be attributed to an obsession with failed and discredited ideologies. With Mugabe I'm not sure I could even credit a plea of insanity; I believe he knows what he is doing is wrong and where he is leading his nation but these issues are small beer to him in comparison to his desire for unfettered power and wealth for his friends and himself.

3 - Lord "I'll never accept a peerage" Kinnock
Kinnock becomes the peer for the pyre on many counts. At least seeing the Kinnock effigy burn would be a more upbeat experience than some of the others where the frustration that in a civilised society we cannot really burn the person depicted would be a bit of dampener. Just as traditional bonfire festivities celebrate, to an extent, an event that never came to pass, so too would the roasting of this trough pig's effigy be a celebration that he never actually became Prime Minister.

2 - Sir Ian Blair
Had this particular Blair done a job that had inspired confidence in anybody outside left wing political circles then I would have been defending him to the hilt over the recent ridiculous Health and Safety conviction for the Met. In truth though he has being doing an important job badly for several years now with an astonishing disregard to the damage he is doing to the image of his forceservice.

1 - Gordon Brown
Well, it had to be, didn't it? If I'm only going to burn one member of the cabinet in effigy it has to be the top man. I understand he has another in his series of books on courage about to hit the shelves. It's the only way he will ever see his name on the cover of a book on that subject. Utterly worthless.

I know there are so many other worthy candidates but it's a start and we do have to consider our carbon footprint.