Part I – Whiskey Pigs
In the small hours of the morning on December 6th, 2021, the great bulk of our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, sits among a group of cops at the Merseyside Police HQ in Liverpool. There’s a man upfront, delivering a pre-raid briefing, running everyone through the process. The words are deflecting right off the bird’s nest which Johnson has, out of the goodness of his heart, let reside on his head. He smiles nervously underneath his facemask and nods furiously at the commanding officer up front. No one else in the room nods.
“What on Earth is happening?” he thinks.
‘Operation Toxic’ is what the chief up front, towering above the rest, is calling it. He whacks his pointing stick against the board for emphasis, and screams, “NOW LET’S MOVE!”
A flurry of sitting police officers suddenly standing erupts all around Boris Johnson as he swivels his head from side to side incredulously, his eyes popping out of their sockets with confusion. The chief walks over to Boris who is still planted inextricably in his chair, places both of his massive hands on his shoulders, leans towards him and commands, “Get moving Mr Prime Minister!”
“uuuuuuh, alright. Yes! Moving!” Bumbles the PM as he shuffles out of the room and follows the black and white avalanche of police officers towards the tactical gear room.
Tactile sounds of Velcro on vests being tightened, handguns being loaded and heavy boots running from one corner of the room to the other jerked the room alive into a crescendo of action, and right in the middle of it, twiddling his thumbs together, is the Prime Minister. A passing female officer notices the elephant in the room and leads him to the equipment desk out of pity. The stony pair of eyes behind the plate glass window, belonging to the equipment officer stares down at cop with Boris Johnson in tow.
“Can I get a jacket, a vest and a hat for him?” asks the helpful police lady.
“What size?” replies a sandy course voice from the equipment officer.
The police lady looks Boris up and down and promptly says, “Biggest ones you got.”
With a nod, the officer of equipment turns around and ruffles through a large cabinet, pulling out a jacket, vest, and hat, then sliding it under the plate glass window separating him from the lady officer and the Prime Minister.
“Thank you very much, you did your country a great service.” Boris Johnson announces as he picks up the clothes and tentatively puts them on.
Four police officers standing by the door, one of them holding a battering ram. The lead cop counts to three on his fingers and the moment his third finger goes up, the embrace between the door and the frame was wrenched apart by the force of the battering ram blowing the door open.
“Armed police!” came the cry from three of them as they marched into the house, aiming handguns at anything that moved.
Boris Johnson, meanwhile, sits in the back of a police van with the doors open, his legs dangling out and not touching the ground, like some small child sat in a chair, witnessing the scene. In fact, he looks like a large round child wearing oversized clothes, the black police hat sat on his head like an incubating bird, his hands hidden inside the sleeves of the coat which curves around his large belly giving him the appearance of a garden gnome in police uniform. Three other officers stand by the van to ensure no early birds try their luck on the PM’s head.
Apart from the violent shuffling march and the occasional shout emerging from inside the house, the silence out here is stiflingly awkward.
“Soooooooooooo, do you do this kind of thing often?” ventures the Prime Minister.
“Yes.” Blurts out one of the cops, with a sharp edge to his reply.
Some of the officers who stormed the house are now filing out, shoving people in handcuffs in front of them, taking them to the van. Three people, wearing insultingly casual clothes for a scenario like this, looking equal parts stunned and aggressive, light from the streetlamps glinting off the shiny silver handcuffs bound to their wrists.
“You can come in now Mr. Johnson.” Calls out a cop standing at the front door of the house. Boris hops out of the van, unbeknownst to everyone hitting a barely felt 2.1 on the Richter scale, and hobbles over to the house with the cops stationed to watch over him following behind. The very first thing that greeted him in the house was the pungent miasma of weed mixed in with drywall crawling its way right up his nasal cavity and making him feel like his mucus had been set on fire. Had he not been wearing his giant black facemask; the cops would’ve seen his features twist violently like screw. They followed the trail of the stench into the living room which looked like a rural FBI narcotics lab. Many rows of cannabis plants growing in long rectangular pots under bright artificial sunlight near the back wall which leads into the kitchen. Huge mounds of fine white powder next to an assortment of sharp knives, plastic drug bags – many packed, many empty, and a scale on a coffee table. Acres of blotter paper ready to be cut up and soaked in LSD which sat invisibly in a glass jar with a long glass dropper on another table next to the couch. Thick rolls of hashish wrapped in tin foil stacked on the floor next to the couch. The TV was switched to a re-run of a football game. The place looked quite orderly and organised all things considered.
The very sight of all these drugs, enough to kill a Diplodocus, disgusted and excited Boris Johnson at the same time. While the police officers busied themselves with bagging all the goods for evidence, our Prime Minister got thinking about how long it’d take before some of it falls into the hands of his colleagues…
*
As the morning moon was falling out of the sky and stray dogs chased after it, Boris Johnson was rolling with the boys. Prancing around in police gear, his night out on the town with the authorities was a calculated political promotion to grab some publicity for what the British government hope to be the atomic bomb in their war against drugs. What it will turn out to be though is the pathetic pop of a damp firecracker, and history has attested to that time and again. What they’re calling From harm to hope: A 10-year drugs plan to cut crime and save lives, a little on the nose if you ask me, is their attempt to strike right on the jugular of the drug trade in Britain by targeting its trafficking and the supply chain. The policy report, which can be read on the gov.uk website, reads a lot like this, “We’re going to get you. This time… Hopefully.”
There is nothing new about this brand-new tactic they’re boasting. All governments who have engaged in a staring contest with the so-called drug problem have tried the same moves, sudden jerky movements to make them blink in the form of police raids on drug dens and going after kingpins and hunting down drug dealers in the streets and chasing after drug mules through the airport and locking up anyone who looks like they’re carrying a joint in public. But what they found was that when you knock out one drug trafficker or kingpin, there’s six more waiting in line to take their place. The British government tried going straight for the source in Afghanistan by taking over and exhorting farmers to stop growing opium in the biggest producing region in the world. “Uuuuuh, hey guys, you know… this stuff you’re growing, it’s…. bad for your health you know. Could you maybe, grow something else?” We all know how well that one worked out too.
An increase of cops swarming the streets aside, the few new things which they do want to try this time around, are not only another subtle shuffle towards the police state, which is carved into the future of this country, but also utterly stupid. Snatching driving licenses and passports from “lifestyle drug users”, with its authoritarian overtones aside, is evident that the government didn’t think this through. What good is taking a passport off a drug addict going to do? What good is their passport to them anyway? The very last thing they’d want to do is to throw themselves in the impossible gauntlet of smuggling drugs across the border. And for what reason would someone ditch their already well-established drug contacts in the UK and then start all over again in, say, Spain. But with the right kind of eye, you can pick a drug dealer out of a crowd of people. Look out for that peculiarly distinct drug dealer body language. Symptoms include but are not limited to; loitering around busy places with plenty of CCTV blind spots, usually carries around a backpack or wears trousers with deep pockets, and looking pretty damn shifty. But come on! The street corner drug dealers of yore are old news, we will get to that in a moment.
And when it comes to taking their drivers licenses off them, who the hell would want to drive in London anyway?
An idea is being toyed with by the Metropolitan Police. Have drug sniffing dogs prowling outside Tube stations in more affluent areas of London, say like, Sloane Square, West Kensington, and Tufnell Park.
It’s 9pm on a Saturday night, and a group of wealthy socialites emerge from the deep veins of the London Underground at Sloane Square Tube Station (not that the upper class in London would even humour the idea of taking the Tube but stay with me for a second). Four of them, two men and two women, dressed in the height of London fashion – bland and outdated, smart casual where the line between the two has been rubbed out by a pencil eraser – they take the stairs up to street level, expecting to be met by the immaculate high gloss architectural and cultural veneer of Chelsea, instead coming face to face with two large feral hounds at each end of the exit, snapping their jaws, full of razor sharp teeth, like a clock wound bear traps at certain people who promptly get pulled aside and frisked by police officers. The socialites stand stupid with fear, never having seen anything so wild and primal in their lives before, afraid to go through the ticket gates lest the hounds tear them to shreds. One by one with their eyes locked with the dogs, feeling completely stripped by their sense of smell, the socialites feeling completely out of their depths, swipe their Oyster Cards and slide through the gates. Seeking consolation in numbers, they sidle past the dogs together. Two more steps and they’re out in the open, they can feel the fresh air of freedom on their face. One more step and we’re out of there they all think…
!WOOF!!WOOF!!WOOF!WOOF!!WOOF!!WOOOOOOOF!
Their guttural barks aimed right at the four socialites as they stand at the precipice of the exit, a heavy hand lands on the shoulders of one of men in the group and they get pulled aside to get searched…
No. This won’t stand. Especially among the upper-middle class. The affluent don’t pay exorbitant taxes to be yapped at by bloodthirsty dogs. Unless the Met Police can train Dachshunds or Chihuahuas to sniff out drugs.
There is some wisdom behind this move, because if they’re going to go after people for drug use, they should go after everyone.
Kit Malthouse, the Minister of Policing, had a few things to say about the drug culture.
“We know that the consumption of drugs is widespread and covers every section of society, but some operate without consequence. So, we’re going to create a culture in society where there is a recognition that the use of drugs is not without consequence whether you’re a rich stockbroker or a kid in Brixton or Hackney.”
The cops have had a predilection of sorts to focus solely on higher violence areas, which has meant that only certain people have been targeted by their measures. So, a young black or brown person will be stopped and caught with a joint out of a racial bias, while a middle-class white person will casually get away with cocaine or ecstasy in their possession. Maybe having police dogs in the wealthier areas of London will even out the disproportionate targeting of black and brown people in poorer areas, or maybe their street enforcement will tackle black and brown people in rich areas as much as they target them in poorer areas.
As I said before, dealing drugs on the streets has grown out of fashion. The ravens of Natural Selection ca-cawed within the drug trade too, and the dealers adapted. They went mobile. No more standing around high-volume street corners when you can drop off the goods right at their front door. Armed with a phone number that only their customers have a hold of, behind the steering wheel of a car, their range spreads across the entire city. The smart ones never carry more than they’re out to deliver in one run in case they do get stopped and searched. This new breed of drug dealer has found measurable success in today’s drug culture where no one wishes to leave their house, especially over lockdown with nightclubs and dance venues shuttered. To the cops, they’re the “county line drug dealers”, to us they’re a fucking godsend. Police chiefs have likened their new enemy to a pizza delivery service, and for once they’re absolutely right. Any job which requires a car can easily be turned into a drug dealing side hustle. Taxi and delivery drivers are the obvious ones, but the more creative drug dealer could be a hearse or ice-cream truck driver. Nobody suspects the ice-cream man.
Apart from locking up as many drug dealers as they can find, the Met Police really want to focus on rehabilitation for us hopeless drug addicts. Citing a case which took place in the City of London to the Evening Standard, Kit Malthouse, who’s really spreading the word out on this 10-year plan, tells of an occasion the police picked up a drug dealer and then sent messages to all the numbers who had contacted that dealer for drugs, entreating them to get help from a drug counselling line they so nicely included in the text.
Although Malthouse wants the police force to go further, because that doesn’t sound all that effective. The message I’d least want to see on my phone while gliding on acid, from the very same number which I got it from, is this…
AS OUR BID TO CRACKDOWN ON DRUG CRIME, THE OWNER OF THIS NUMBER HAS BEEN ARRESTED. HERE IS YOUR LINE FOR DRUG COUNSELLING, HELP AND ASSISTANCE.
XXXXXXXXXXX
PLEASE SEEK HELP AND REDUCE CRIME.
What a goddamn desperate joke. I’d probably think that my mind had snapped, and my conscience had somehow been transferred to my phone and was giving me direct messages to change my lifestyle. Any sober mind would just get the hint that the number has been compromised and start asking around for another.
In Malthouse’s eyes though, this operation is going swimmingly, because he’s boasting with quite a lot of self-confidence that they’ve arrested some 300 drug traffickers under the government-funded ‘Project Adder’. Again, what he and the people who are still indefatigably wasting their time on the war against drugs fail to grasp is that arresting 300 drug traffickers means nothing when there’s another 600 waiting to fill the vacuum. Besides, people will always have a taste for drugs, and as long as that taste exists, so will the people who supply it, no matter how difficult it’s made to get them or how harsh the consequences. It’s just straight economics.
“Drugs are not going to make you cooler. They’re bad news.” Boris Johnson enlightens us. Of course, he should know, he’s no stranger to the queer highs of cocaine and cannabis. The man confessed in 2008 to have done them himself in his teenage years. He adds that he “thoroughly disagrees with drugs.” Mmhmm.
Nothing makes me want to load up on as many heinous substances as possible more than this disarray of a person telling me not to do them. These clowns can’t tell cocaine from coco-pops. How well do they think they’ll do this time around in their war on drugs when they don’t even know where to look for the damn thing? Especially when they can’t even stop their own from indulging in it.
*
Oh yes. Strange and horrible reports emerged from the British Parliament, yes that place, of coke residue all over the toilets… and I don’t meant Coca-Cola. The initial damning report appeared in the Sunday Times, around the same time as the government unveiled their new/not-so-new plan for drugs. It mentions around a dozen sites around Westminster Palace, the building which houses the Parliament, to have tested positive for traces of cocaine, as well as marijuana “being used openly” around the place. These dozen sites around the Parliament are in the House of Commons, House of Lords as well as a sedate dining room for it, rooms used by the Labour Opposition, and a pub exclusive only to Parliamentary staff called the Strangers’ Bar. Out of the 12 toilets around these areas which were tested with detection wipes, 11 of them came back positive for traces of coke, toilets close to the offices of Boris Johnson and Home Secretary, Priti Patel, and a disabled toilet in the Shadow Cabinet corridor, all of these had at one point or another people powdering their noses. These places are only accessible to those holding a Parliamentary Pass, such as that held by lawmakers, staffers, certain other personnel like clerks, librarians, security, and journalists. Only few people can roam freely within the labyrinthine corridors of this vast Victorian edifice, and a lot of them leave a trail of cocaine behind them so thick that Hansel and Gretel will have no difficulty finding their way back home.
Sat in his cosy little office which feels like the inside of the tip of a green felt tin pen, Sir Lindsay Hoyle is poring over the policies for today, checking them for any errors before he passes them in the House of Commons. The private little sounds of his office, the crackling of the fireplace, the occasional shuffling of paper, the muffled creaks and rumbles of the horribly outdated ventilation and plumbing of the Parliament building coming from the ceiling, punctuate the silence of his work.
*sssssnnnnnnnniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiffffffff* comes a sound from down the corridor. His grave eyes lift from the paper and swing towards the door. He knows that the only room down the corridor is the toilet, and he knows from the sniff going in rather than out that it couldn’t have been someone blowing their nose. He calmly puts the papers down and walks out of his room, down the narrow, white-lit corridor and quietly lets himself into the toilet. His eyes snap onto the only stall with the door closed, from which another prolonged *sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiifffff* emerges. He marches right up the door of the stall and knocks.
“Occupied…..” the stunned voice inside scarcely gets to blurt out the reply when Sir Hoyle kicks open the door with all his might. The weak stall door swings open violently and hits the side wall of the cubicle, leaving exposed like a deer in headlights a Parliamentary staffer in a clean black suit leaning over the toilet with the seat down. A short line of sugary white powder awaits his tomato-red nostril which has tiny flecks of the same powder clinging on underneath his right nostril from the last one. Sir Hoyle’s arm shoots forth like an arrow and grabs the staffer firmly by his ear, dragging him out of the bathroom. The staffer is mumbling all manner of excuses like “it isn’t what it looks like” and “it’s just paracetamol, I can’t swallow tablets properly!”, but it’s falling on Hoyle’s deaf ears. He drags the poor bastard through the halls of Westminster Palace, people along the way watching in perplexity, all the way to the nearest exit. Opening the door with his free hand, he shoves the staffer out into the courtyard, still mercilessly clutching his ear, then kicks him fiercely in the ass.
“Now don’t ever let me see you here again.” After a short pause, “This obviously means you’re fired.” Sir Lindsay Hoyle announces in a gruff yet measured voice.
The staffer nods sheepishly and ambles towards the front gates.
“Call the police if you ever see him around here again.” as an extra precaution, Lindsay calls out to the guards stationed at the outer gates.
House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle is quite livid about this. Coke?! In his place of work? Not on his watch… If he had his way, he’d put all the suspected coke addicts in the Parliament on a chain gang and parade them around those maze-like halls, keeping them on the move with a bullwhip until they sweat and bleed out their habit. The presence of drugs in the Parliament dates from before he took over as Speaker of the House of Commons in 2019 after John Becrow retired, which his comments about catching out not just the drink but drug use in the parliament too, would suggest.
“The accounts of drug misuse in the Parliament are deeply concerning. I will be raising them as a priority with the Met Police next week.” Says Hoyle. Although no word has come from the Metropolitan Police about this. Perhaps Lindsay is taking matters into his own hand. He’ll singlehandedly stamp out the coke problem like an ant. By funnelling it back into poor neighbourhoods to perpetuate the horrid cycle. But hey, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, that’s just wild speculation, and no sane journalist would speculate about such things, especially when politicians are involved, right? Anyway, FE FI FO FUM, I SMELL THE BLOOD OF DRUG SCUM. These are the ominous words echoing around the stuffy corridors and tiered halls of the Parliament, issuing in a deep vibrato right from the throat of Lindsay Hoyle which makes the stomach tremble as he marches around Westminster Palace with six huge drug-sniffing dogs on a worn-leather leash, waiting to be sicced upon any jittery, wide-pupiled motorhead. He’s pushing for a full crackdown on the drug problem with sniffer dogs, drug tests, the whole works, and our good Minister of Policing, Kit Malthouse is behind him every step of the messy way.
Marketing all the finer points of this 10-year plan, Kit Malthouse was in conversation with Sky News. When asked whether some of his colleagues could potentially see the wrong end of the law, he replied, “I hope not.” Come on, Kit. That’s not the spirit. “There are obviously several thousand people who work on the estate, and I would be surprised if there weren’t some lifestyle drug users among them.” Slightly better, even if it’s a vague allusion you’re making. Everyone in the political business (on the same side that is) will be looking out for their own. These swine know that behind closed doors they can get away with whatever they want. Politicians breath a very different air to what we do, so they will do everything in their power to maintain the illusion that they are on the same level as us, and to keep both these spheres completely apart. One politician tangled up in a public scandal is in the worst interest of all the others who are also giving themselves over to the same vices, because the chances of them getting away with it are lowered with the eyes of the public on that particular “evil”.
We certainly can’t let a few rotten apples ruin the whole orchard, even if they are more worm on the inside than apple. Surely not all the several thousand people, in keeping with Malthouse’s estimate, who work in the Parliament are sniffing up in between meetings. The ratio of drug user to not is quite low. But even if one person in that crooked institution was loading up on cocaine, and then flew into a meeting discussing how to end the drug problem, it’s hypocritically lacking in self-awareness at best, and setting a double standard at worst. You can’t, but we can. Or it’s possibly the best prank played on the government in recent history. But I doubt our politicians are equipped with such a sophisticatedly perverse sense of humour.
And certainly not everyone in the Parliament has witnessed their colleagues lacing their brains with that rocket fuel white powder, much like Yvette Cooper who sits as the Shadow Home Secretary for the Labour Party.
“It’s not something I’ve ever seen”, yes, we’ve already covered that Yvette, but go on, “but I think the speaker of the House of Commons is absolutely right to say this has to be referred to the Met Police” I sense you’ve got something more to say…
“You can’t be an institution that’s supposed to be law-making and in fact have within it so much law breaking.” Abso-fucking-lutely. Just who the hell do these tiny-headed twerps think they are?
On both ends of the political spectrum, white lines are going up noses and setting off violent fireworks in the brains of both the left and the right. This “Westminster Bubble” as all the journalists and Parliamentary staffers, who wished for their names to be kept out of print, call it, points towards a drinks and drugs culture so unhinged that politicians indulge in it like possession of cocaine doesn’t carry a 7-year prison sentence or an unlimited fine or both. Unless it doesn’t for them.
The confirmed reports leaking out of that gothic necropolis are staggering. An unnamed former MP turned his drug dealer into an example of breaking through the veil of illegitimacy and into upper-middle-class respectability with an annual salary. The most well-paid and respectable dealer around, on the Parliamentary payroll as a member of staff. Considering the basic salary of a deputy clerk is between £34 – 38,000 a year, this MP must’ve had one hell of an appetite. This aforementioned MP has reportedly dabbled into the trade of drugs himself in the past. Apart from him, at least one parliamentary aide has been fired, but needless to say they’d keep this under wraps. None of them want actual names and numbers of drug fuelled staff in the Parliament trickling out onto the rain-soaked streets of Britain.
Apart from the dread coke, noses are continually assailed by the burning stink of cannabis as it’s used “openly”. Like the shit-mist left behind by Pierre the skunk, visibly wafting around in a green wisp, the weed stink floats between Portcullis House and 1 Parliament Street.
In terms of arrest figures, they would suggest that the parliament really is the place to be to score some gear with 13 people arrested for drug possession and 2 for dealing in an around the Parliament just in the last year. Flipping the calendars back a few years to the period between 2015-2018, the numbers of recorded drug offences hit a peak of 38. These numbers only include the dumb and unlucky, where the shrewder dealer have evaded the authorities time and again, on their own turf too.
What does our venerable Prime Minister think of the carcinoma eating away at the very institution which gave him his job? Nothing. Or nothing more than he’s letting out of the vacuum in his skull. In the fashion of a typical schizophrenic, when asked about the alleged drug use in the Parliament by Sky News, Boris Johnson acted like a target completely missed by the bullet and said that the government “is absolutely determined to fight drugs.” Boris Johnson’s signature strategy of oblivious clairvoyance when answering press questions, or rather providing an answer which has nothing to do with the question asked and sounds like he’s answering his own interpretation of a made-up question, has somehow miraculously kept him going. Or it’s just a symptom of the press who never seem to question his planetary idiocy.
Just how do you square this circle? How does a government that shrieks like a banshee with a sore throat about the dangers of drugs to its people, harbour politicians who are a walking contradiction to their own laws? To them, it’s just part of the culture, “we work so hard, slaving away to keep this country prosperous, we deserve something to unwind.” Yet when the people do the exact same to cope with the nightmarish realities of said prosperous country, they’re immediately locked up and vilified. Cancers of society, lazy, sordid wastes of carbon. Ironically, this description fits the leaders and lawmakers of this country more aptly than the people it is meant to describe.
A journalist from the Washington Post armed with a Parliamentary pass took a stroll down those aged hallways of Westminster Palace. This cockroach’s nest is rotting from the basement up, pipes bursting within the walls, rodents the size of cats running around, and damp setting into the walls of this unventilated hive which is cursed with the constant scent of roast meat and eggs. When housing such human excrement, the building will surely fall into such degradation. But the place of work should match the character of the people running it. A broken handed forced salute with a gun in your back to the living monument of lies, deceit and devil-may-care double standards.
At least I know where to hang around to get some good cocaine, because the stuff sold to politicians most probably isn’t cut with the cocktail of glass, rat poison and dry wall which is sold to us commonfolk.
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