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CONSPIRACY STREET: Don Brennan and 911.

In today’s cautious tiptoe down Conspiracy Street, we’ll be looking at the controversy surrounding Don Brennan’s ‘death’. 

Once a benign snowy-haired old grandad (although apparently he was only 59 when he died - insert shocked emoji here - I guess that’s what being married to Ivy "God’s Hitman” Brennan will do to a man’s face) Don was no stranger to controversy in his lifetime. 

In just over ten years on the cobbles, Dodgy Don stalked Denise Osbourne, declared war on Nicky Platt over the ownership of number 5, became addicted to gambling and kidnapped Alma Baldwin before driving her into the canal like some deranged proto-Hillman.

A seemingly unlikely nemesis for Mike Baldwin,  Don started by growling about the capitalist knicker-hawker’s many misdemeanours to anyone who’d listen at the Rovers bar, escalated to strangling him with his own tie and ended up braining him with a table leg in his own kecks factory on October 8th 1997. 

What happens next is less clear. Mike staggers out of the factory after being rescued by Angie Freeman, only to see someone driving Alma’s lovely sports car straight at him. We presume it’s Don - but does this look like Don to you? 

It seems too easy to presume that the driver who crashed into the viaduct and perished in a fiery hell of his own making was luckless loser Brennan. After all, he had form for it. After Julie dumped him some years previously, Don had got wasted and crashed his taxi (seriously, how did this man ever get insurance?) in a suicide attempt which failed but resulted in his leg being amputated.  So what better way to hush up any potential police enquiry than by pedaling the narrative that poor old crazy Don had gone and done it again? Mike’s just been hit repeatedly over the head -  he doesn’t know whether he saw Brennan or the ghost of Elvis. 

The following week we saw Don’s funeral. But did we see a corpse? We did not. Martin, Gail and Ashley magnanimously attended the burial (and Nicky turned up with a new body), but did they stop to wonder for a second who all those other mourners were? Because I didn’t recognise them. Do you? 

I’m going to say what everyone’s thinking here and say that Don didn’t die that day. The guy who died in Alma’s car was a random opportunist thief, and Don Brennan saw his death as a golden opportunity to escape justice. Don got on a plane to anywhere, and anywhere turned out to be an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. There, Don received a warm welcome from fellow enemies of the capitalist West who shared his vengeful nature and admired his vehicle-based suicide MO. Don had finally found a place where he fitted in. His new friends treated his pancreatic cancer, equipped him with a new, state of the art prosthetic leg and trained him to pose as an airline pilot. After all, Jon Lindsay got away with it for long enough. And that’s how Don Brennan became the perfect instrument to carry out the terrorist atrocities of 911. 

Implausible? Perhaps. But isn’t it just a little suspicious that Nick chose Don’s funeral as the perfect moment to return from Canada with a new body - if indeed he was ever there? Perhaps he was sent by the FBI to make sure everyone bought the ‘death crash Don’ story and simplify the 911 narrative into a straightforward case of Islamic extremists vs The West. That would certainly make justifying the Afghanistan war a hell of a lot easier. Which would mean that Nick Tilsley still works for the Feds and keeps his dark secret to this day.  That’s if he even is Nick Tilsley. Sure, Gail was convinced, but she hadn’t seen him for a year and judging by how well he’s aged since, I’d say plastic surgery is a possibility. I mean look at that smoulder. 

He’s been careful not to raise suspicions, but Nick’s never gone without cash for long since then, has he? 

Sadly, as the only witnesses to the events of October 8th 1997 are long dead and Nick is under a life-long federal gagging order, it seems we may never really know.