...a Statue to Oliver Letwin

The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured in the 34^th revised edition of Malleus Maleficus, The Moonshine Memorandum. If you wish to report racism or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com  To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .  

 The 1985 Broadwater Farm riots became notorious for beatings, stabbings, murder and hacking off of heads. So the memo[1] which young Oliver Letwin – now the minister in charge of the Cabinet Office  – sent to Margaret Thatcher at that fateful time, concerning rioters wearing masks or crash helmets, and carrying knives, machetes, baseball bats, bricks and petrol bombs, is surely a minor classic of its genre.“Bad moral attitudes”, he wrote with masterly understatement of a people living in a general condition of alienation. A disarmingly simple phrase which conceals a good deal of blood spilled on the part of the London constabulary (at least one police officer was hacked to death) and which he now apologises for – to give it its full title - “unreservedly”. Nor was his moral decrepitude mitigated in any way by Labour MP Chuka Umunna,

who thought him ‘offensive, disgusting and appalling’.

"There should be no positive discrimination!"

"I would annex the planets if I could!"

But that is precisely why we should erect a statue to Oliver Letwin (it could stand alongside Rhodes atOriel College), the perfect metaphor for the second Elizabethan age, or as a symbol for the inconsistencies we spend our lives contending with. Consciously or not, every nation pursues its own narrative of contradictions.  What Oliver Letwin will be principally remembered for, and why all upright men should pat his racist head in recognition,  is that he apologised on behalf of a chastised  people. Indeed, his late apology marks the reversal of everything this country once believed in. The final passing of all the petty bourgeoisies and the xenophobias and the jingoisms, and the huffs and the haws, and the stiff imperial upper lips.  Letwin’s abject act of contrition marks the ultimate surrender - and the sheer size of this nation’s mortification. In decrepitude, style and legacy matters, this is a shame suffused with the sense of national exhaustion. Once fertile pride now lies prostrate and remorse-ridden – for this nation has been well and truly sodomized. ”Oh yeaaa ....straight up the arse bro”.  And if that doesn’t make you want to hang your head in shame, nothing else will.

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[1]  released  by the National Archives under  what is known as ‘the 30-year-rule’.

[2] “The English are dying. The English are declining and they are declining fast.” – in the words of an African immigrant. Ben Judah, This Is London: Life and Death in the World City. Picador.
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* Malleus Maleficus is an advocate of English liberal democracy, and the  anonymous author of an historiographic apology of the British Empire.