Whenever I find myself dreaming about how awful things would be under a red/green dictatorship — increasingly often, these days — the one person who gives me a glimmer of hope that I might get out of the hell alive is Stephen Fry.
He’s a leftie, of course — but, like Frank Field and Kate Hoey, he’s the right kind of leftie. Even when appointed Minister for Culture in the new regime, as he inevitably would be, you just know that he wouldn’t indulge in either the gloating triumphalism or bullying sadism of his fellow Nomenklatura. It would be more a case of: ‘Yes, my dear, dear chap. How perfectly awful for you to be caught on the wrong side of history. Let’s get your little bot bot out of this frightful smelly punishment cell and on to the next flight to America. I don’t doubt President Palin is much more your cup of tea…’
It’s quite a fun game, actually — a variant on one I sometimes play with my dear friend Susanna Gross: which of her gentile friends would have said to the Nazi stormtroopers, ‘Oh, by the way, she’s in the cellar,’ and which ones would have risked all. In this new version I’ve dreamt up, because I’m morbid that way, you have to decide which people would give their unutterably evil inner bastard free rein under the coming dictatorship, and which ones would remain fundamentally decent.
You can easily imagine the Flashmanesque relish with which David Cameron would go to work on you with a bullwhip; or the Rosa Klebb mask of concentration on the face of Caroline Lucas as she carefully applied the electrodes for the 23rd time. Richard Branson: I bet he’d be an unutterable swine too behind that deceptively genial beardiness — and the same goes for comedian Bill Bailey; and as for that creepy Thom Yorke out of Radiohead…
Trying to make a list of who’d be nice is much harder.
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