Parody: One Day in the Life of Ivan Jonesobitch

Prisoner of the State 1984LGBT Ivan Jonesobitch searched in his morning bowl of alphabetti soup for some small morsel of substance that might help him struggle through another day of Nazi-smashing. In front of the prisoners, carrying the whip that defined his power over the unfortunates (the sight of which gave little Ivan a frisson of delayed gratification) was the former BBC know-all and now Camp Ubersturmbannfuhrer Andrei Brillochev.

Ivan had always disliked Andrei and the BBC Gang of Four for the way in which – week in, week out – they had bombarded the poor peasants of Jackboot Britannia with vicious lies about the scrupulously democratic People’s Red Army of Momentum, while ignoring the huge and growing mobs of fascist stormtroopers in total denial about a Britain riddled with Islamophobics scheming round the clock to smear the Muslim Legions of Peace.

But the final straw came when Brillochev had the audacity on live television to tell him – him, the world-renowned international author and former highly decorated Soviet tank commander Ivan Jonesobitch – to be quiet and let two other arch designers of the Neo-Nazi torture camps have their say. Without a thought for his own personal safety, Ivan and 3,000 disciples immediately sought out 11 HitlerJugend terrorists in Woking and – ignoring the overwhelming odds set against them – scattered them to the four winds.

This act of unparalleled bravery had landed Ivan in UKIP’s Dissident Gulag Aldershot, where he now sat searching for signs of socialist protein in his Soupe de Chaussettes des Gilets Jaunes. 

He wondered if his last three tweets about fascist spit, homophobia and EU Transsexual  Rights had got through to his comrades in the Socialist Purity Front led by the one openly equivocal politician in the Union of Guardian Correctness, Yurimy Corbynov….or perhaps even the former Young Communist, Buggerme Mandelpiece. Perhaps this was too much to hope for. He might never know….although this was unlikely, as he both knew and understood everything.

Had he not, for instance, written in the pages of The Guardian, that ‘Britain has been consumed by the worst peacetime political turmoil in modern history and is set to become poorer, in large part because of opposition to immigration’? Did the higher end of UK socialist intelligentsia not grasp how obvious this was? He understood of course that the average, rock-solid Labour voter was as thick as a granite millstone: but surely (he felt) most thinking Brits could quickly calculate just what kind of enormous benefit 200,000 starving and unskilled Africans would be to an economy, health service and housing programme unable to cope with the insatiable demands that were nothing whatever to do with 600,000 immigrants already arriving per annum.

The previous morning, a secret television in Tunnel T for Trotsky had revealed how Sky News had managed to avoid the censor, and broadcast the staggering size of the Hard Nazi Fascist Extremely Far Right in Britain.

“Vindicated!” yelled Ivan at the top of his squeak, alerting the camp guards to the tunnel, and resulting in all those involved having a portion of their brains removed. But such punishment did not scare Comrade Jonesobitch, for he had undergone the procedure a record 17 times.

On the whole, camp Commandant Marlene Vorster von Belsenfast was tolerant of Ivan, whom she regarded as mentally ill. She had taken upon herself the daily task of trying to explain to her famous prisoner that men who wanted to look and feel like women were still nevertheless men, and that storks did not deliver babies after all. She had encouraged Jonesobitch to try for an O-level in biology, but the former Guardian expert had fallen to arguing with his teachers. Later, she suggested he read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he dismissed as ‘a lachrymose bourgeois tract by a former British imperial policeman, in which The Party is betrayed by a slut’.

Undeterred, von Belsenfast had finally struck gold with the Famous Five books, to which her charge was now addicted. Very much a Commandant happy with an easy life, she had thus far shrunk from asking Ivan what he liked about them. She chose, therefore, to ignore his odd habit of walking about while insisting, “Once Corbyn is in power, there will be lashings of ginger beer and cream, and Jews will not be allowed in the golf clubs”.

“Prisoner of the State 1984LGBT Ivan Jonesobitch,” intoned Andrei Brillochev, “what do you have to say to us today about immigration?”

Ivan grinned the grin that had antagonised a Nation. He knew that this was meant to be a test of his reprogramming. He knew how to confuse his captor.

“Herr Ubersturmbannfuhrer,” he began, “Opposition to immigration is an emotional argument, and I did say before and just after the referendum that there would be a rise in hate crime. But hostility to immigration has fallen since the referendum, among both remainers and leavers. This is because of the rise of a Left led by me that directs popular anger at bankers, big business and tax dodgers. So as we can see, emotionally-charged ignorance can be controlled – which I’ve always believed – and so I was right all along.”

The wrinkles upon Brillochev’s eccentrically broad hair-parting deepened. His daily question sessions with Jonesobitch had kept his intellect sharp after being fired in disgrace by the clean-sweep new management of the British Sky Business Consortium (BSBC).

“I see,” he said, nodding in apparent agreement, “so there is no rational argument against immigration, and we should keep on allowing migrants in until the UK population is standing united, shoulder to shoulder, yes?”

“Exactly,” the prisoner replied.

“Even if there is nowhere to grow food, nothing for them to do, no space left for colleges to teach them skills, not enough water to drink, and they are killing each other like overcrowded rats?”

“The all-conquering European Union will provide,” Ivan responded.

Smiling with something approaching benevolence, Andrei Brillochev nodded with what he hoped would be seen as concurrence.

“Thank you, Prisoner Jonesobitch,” he said, “I am obliged to you.”

And so it was that Prisoner of the State 1984LGBT Ivan Jonesobitch had a good day after his less than satisfying breakfast soup. As indeed did Obersturmbannfuhrer Brillochev, who felt compelled to write in his daily report on 1984LGBT as follows that same evening:

‘It is my sad duty to report that the subject still prefers to live in a place where surreal leaps of logic enjoy considerably more engagement in his mind than more empirical neoliberal arguments….for example, trickle-down wealth, the obvious economic push given by the wealthy few, deregulation of financial markets and so forth. I would strongly recommend that his parole be denied’.

Both men went to sleep that night secure in the sense of having won. Which, in a way, they had.

Only humanity had lost.

For the record, I am not a racist, a communist, a fascist, a globalist, a socialist, a sexual orientation bigot, a neoliberal or a nationalist. I am an entrepreneurial communitarian mutualist who believes in offering the greatest fulfilment and responsibility to the greatest possible number of people.