A Tale of Two Patriots

There were once two British patriots, Bill and Ben. One morning, Bill got up excitedly to save the country. He put on his Union Jack pants, brushed his teeth with his Union Jack toothbrush, got himself dressed, and then draped himself in a Union flag. He rushed down to the train station, one ticket to London! As he sat down on the train, he got a rush of pride knowing that he was doing something. He arrived at the Tommy Robinson rally. It warmed his heart to see so many other patriots all in the same place. He did some chanting. He met many other people who all thought that now, as so many of them had gathered in one place, change would be inevitable. The country had been saved! Meanwhile, Ben stayed at home. He had bought himself a can of Anchor whippy spray cream and a little paper plate of the sort one sees at the parties of children. He pressed the button on the dispenser and out came the cream in a large swirl. Then, when there was a decent portion of it, he stopped. He put the plate on a table and sat down as if he was going to eat. Then, he plunged his face into the cream.

Little Cousin Scampi was the inspiration for Ben’s new hobby.

About a month later, Bill was once again excited. He had acquired dozens of Union flags and had hatched a cunning plan to climb up all the lampposts down his street to hang the flags from them. This was to be his latest contribution to saving the country by doing something. As a patriot, he had to do his bit to Raise the Colours™. Once more the pride surged through his heart and coursed through his veins. As he finished his handiwork, he took a picture of the flags and shared them on X. This was now his favourite platform because it was owned by another patriot, Elon Musk! As the post was shared by his fellow patriots, Bill was buoyed and certain that now the country was saved from the evil clutches of then Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. As he watched an AI video of a roaring English lion posted by David Atherton, tears came down his face. Meanwhile, Ben in the privacy of his own home, had acquired yet another can of cream and paper plate. This time, he wore a red clown’s nose which made a little squeak if you squeezed it. And once again, he plunged his face into the cream, the nose squeaking out as it mashed into the plate.

Several months later still, Bill was feeling a little down one day so he decided to go down to Speaker’s Corner. There he shouted in the face of a Muslim and felt pleased with himself. He then made his way to a left-wing protest that had been planned a few streets down. He was wearing a shell suit with a Union flag pattern all over it. He started to heckle the crowd. ‘Communist scum!’ he shouted. Unfortunately for Bill, some of the protesters did not take kindly to this and a small ruckus ensued in which he was pepper sprayed in his patriotic eyes. ‘So much for the tolerant left!’ he screamed. When Bill posted this on X – where he now had a few thousand subscribers thanks to his previous heroic actions attending Tommy rallies and posting flags on lampposts – it went viral. It caught the attention of Lord Toby Young who saw it as evidence that ‘free speech is under threat in the UK’, and an example of the ‘chilling totalitarianism’ of the modern left. Tommy Robinson himself saw Bill’s post and amplified it, claiming that Bill had been attacked by a Muslim. Soon, Bill had an offer to appear on the New Culture Forum with Rafe Heydel-Mankoo and the pepper spraying became something of a cause célèbre in right-wing social media. Meanwhile, Ben had invited his mum and dad to go around his house. He had set up a paper plate once more and lathered it up with spray cream. ‘Watch this mum and dad’, he said with delight. And then, as his bemused parents looked on, he mashed his face into the cream. Admittedly, they did laugh.

As the years went on, this pattern continued. Bill got up to all sorts of hijinks such as: setting up a Stephen Crowder-style ‘Change My Mind’ table outside Bristol University before he was removed by security; going around town with a microphone and film crew showing random people a picture of a transexual woman and asking them if they thought it was a man or a woman; gate-crashing the BBC’s Question Time by blurting out ‘remigration is inevitable!’ which caused Fiona Bruce to scowl; and becoming incandescent with rage on social media at the dastardly Elite Theorists who suggested that the sum total of his activities had achieved nothing whatsoever. Ben, meanwhile, continued to mash his face into plates of cream in the privacy of his own home. His parents didn’t laugh anymore, yet somehow Ben knew that he’d done more to save the country than Bill.