#also you get his gay little pose with the model so win

[waywardsalt]

refused to let myself rest until i finished making this

[killugonficlibrary]

Killugon: College AU

"There’s no way these lovestruck cantaloupes are passing their classes.” ~worm in theory

2 Series. 21 Works. 1 Tumblr.

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Oh My God, They Were Roommates by korns  ( T | 125,170 | 27/27 )

After a terrible first semester, Gon transfers to a university in San Francisco where he gets a stellar deal on a one-bedroom apartment.

At least, it was a stellar deal until he moves in and realizes that he inadvertently signed a lease with a complete stranger as a roommate. Not only that, but his accidental roommate is the single hottest guy in his major, Killua Zoldyck, and everyone and their mother is trying to get with him.

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Critical Hit by korns  ( T | 55,847 | 11/11 )

After a medical crisis, Gon's confined to bedrest and he needs to do something—anything— to keep his mind occupied, even if that thing is the latest game on the market: Hunter Vs Hunter. Gon becomes consumed by the world of gaming and streaming where he finds a famous, furious, and devilishly handsome streamer by the name Kill.

When Gon's dorm friend introduces them in a match, Kill's fanbase goes crazy because of one simple fact: That Gon is an absolute newbie who can kick Kill's ass any day, any time.

Kill won't stop until he ends Gon's winning streak—even if that means flying Gon out to a nation-wide HvsH tournament to face off, kick ass, and meet for the first time.

Series Part 1 of Trending: Kill’s Lifestyle Vlogs

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No Filter x Serial Dating by korns  ( M | 71,287 | 14/14 )

Gon is a serial romantic with an addiction to online dating. Killua is the barista stuck taking the orders of every date Gon Freecss reels in. It wouldn't be an issue if Gon wasn't such a hot topic—star running back for the Yorknew University football team as a freshmen, member of the most iconic fraternity at Yorknew, and general campus heartthrob.

When Gon convinces Killua to be his gym buddy, it sounds and feels like the friend zone. But who knew the #GymLife was so gay anyway? Certainly not Killua.

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[Series] college is a scam, here’s why: by callmebyyourmango ( T | 4,228+ | 2 Works | WIP )

college is a scam. these fics will tell you why.

CURRENTLY PUBLISHED:

1. group projects require comfort [ 1/1 chapters ] 2. core requirements are unnecessary and expensive [ 1/1 chapters ]

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[Series] Warning Signs by vitrifica ( E | 14,671+ | 2 Works | WIP )

Wet dreams are making Killua's life hard- especially when he realizes his best friend is starring in them. When a storm traps Gon and Killua together for the night, can he keep his fantasies in check?

CURRENTLY PUBLISHED:

1. Caution: Wet [ 2/2 chapters ] 2. Tripping Hazard [5/? chapters ]

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Tease by kornspiracy  ( E | 132,115 | 22/22 )

No fucking way, Killua thought. There’s no way Gon is a porn star.

He clicked onto the account’s profile page. There, in perfect clarity, was a picture of Gon Freecss’ face.

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The Only Exception by yahlreh ( M | 124,844+ | 28/? )

Sex. That's all Killua wants. Afterall, love doesn't exist in his mind, but that all comes to a close as soon as he meets his new roommate - Gon Freecss. Upon meeting the happy, go-lucky boy, Killua can't help but want to indulge on him, but it never seems to be enough as he allows his heart to constantly get in the way.

Warning: This story is heavily laced with mature themes and sexual content. Read at your own pace.

Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7g4EuDtd1xAvvu7mXnzz9H?si=78f0fb13b62c4d5d

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phantom pains by sunsetters (sanitized) ( T | 43,957 | 11/11 )

Killua moves into his new apartment.

He's not alone.

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The Bells Are Ringing by DecemberCamie  ( T | 4,432 | 1/1 )

“Gon,” Killua interrupted. He was clenching his jaw so hard it hurt. “Why don’t you have any pants on?!”

“Hmm? Oh, but I do! I have my-”

“That’s your underwear!” Killua’s voice jumped an octave. “That doesn’t count!”

“Yes it does! All the important bits are covered, so it definitely counts!”

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Dragons vs Foxbears by  DecemberCamie  ( T | 4,972 | 1/1 )

When Gon first meets Killua, he’s drunk and stumbling through some party Zushi dragged him to after losing the match. He doesn’t know what bar he’s in, what time it is, or how he got there. He doesn’t even know Killua’s name when he challenges him to a fight. All he knows is the white haired guy is wearing the opposing team’s colors—

And then Gon is on the ground.

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To Break Pose by DecemberCamie  ( T | 4,695 | 1/1 )

Gon asks Killua to be his model for his full-body art portrait project. It takes some begging, and bribing with chocolate, but eventually Killua agrees to help.

The thing is, though, Gon never expected for Killua to model nude.

The other thing? Gon finds he really doesn't mind this new development.

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College AU [Tumblr] - DecemberCamie  ( T | 739 | 1/1 )

“How about a challenge to speed this up?” Killua started, lifting his gaze to lock on Gon. “I quiz you, you answer. If you answer right, you get a reward.”

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Socially Unacceptable Pickup Lines by korns  ( T | 7,948 | 1/1 )

Gon Freecss is the new lone wolf on a campus founded on cliques, frats, and sororities for paranormal species. With everyone and their grandmother trying to recruit Gon, the co-op where Killua and his rag-tag team of mixed-species seems to be the last place on Gon's list.

Until Gon agrees to visit under the pretense of meeting a ghost and maybe, possibly hitting on Killua while he's there.

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Thinking In Circles by korns  ( T | 10,362 | 1/1 )

After signing a lease together, Gon takes Killua out to celebrate and their innocent night turns into a kiss on the front lawn of a frat house. As a flaming asexual, Killua is mortified and pitched into a downward spiral. To top it off, they're both bound for a two-day road trip to their shared internship in the middle-of-nowhere Utah.

Stuck together and on the cusp of an existential crisis, Killua has to decide just how, exactly, to broach the nature of their relationship.

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Don’t Hold Back by Anon_Co_op  ( E | 12,761 | 2/2 )

Gon cussed, thinking of all the different ways to call himself an idiot.

They all sounded like something Killua would say.

Would Killua still call him that if Gon said he was in love with him? . Or, Gon and Killua's 'friends with benefits' arrangement takes the 'un'-expected turn for the worse(?)

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there’s glitter on the floor after the party by reeyachan  ( T | 1,195 | 1/1 )

Gon never drinks.

And Killua wonders why in the world he would decide to try it now, of all days, of all nights. Why now, when it's less than 12 hours before graduation?

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freudian slip by slowlange  ( E | 15,171 | 1/1 )

“Our entertainment for the night. Or at least, I hope it is.”

Leorio throws a confident gaze to his audience before pulling something much, much smaller than a blunt.

Or, Killua and Gon trip on molly together. The events that ensue may or may not change Killua for the better, and show him that there's more out there that life has to offer.

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Cracked Lens by bluphacelia  ( T | 7,949 | 1/1 )

A soft peel of classical music assaulted his senses as a soft yellow light spilled into the hallway—a night class? He continued forward, trying to keep his footsteps quiet. He felt the tug of curiosity and he glanced through the door, eyes flittering past easels and canvases and he stopped—paralyzed. There in the midst of art students was the perfect portrait. 

-- Gon finds something he didn't know he was looking for.

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Art & Honey by wtfquitplayin  ( M | 4,402 | 1/1 )

Killua is forced to go to a party, forgets his lighter, and meets Gon.

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Stellar Date by losing_sanity_fast  ( T | 3,627 | 1/1 )

Canary wins a date with Gon in a lottery, but she's a) a lesbian, b) in a relationship so she doesn't want to go. As a joke Killua decides to go instead of her. Gon already has tickets and a reservation so he just rolls with it.

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Dungeon x Hunter by sub_divided ( G | 13,683 | 4/4 )

Every Sunday Killua, Gon, Leorio and Kurapika meet up to play "Dungeon x Hunter" (loosely based on DnD 5e) with Leorio as Dungeon Master. Why is Leorio the DM, you ask? Well, these nerds all met at the college roleplaying club two years ago, but recently, with Kurapika in law school and Leorio in med school, and Killua and Gon taking harder undergrad classes, no one has time to meet up anymore. Therefore, Leorio has taken it upon himself to DM their sessions, just as an excuse to get everyone together once a week.

Alluka, also a college student, is staying with Killua during the Christmas Break. Having heard about these Sunday roleplaying sessions from Killua, and especially about the antics of a chaotic multiclass druid/barbarian who keeps adopting all the animals (Gon duh), she asks if she can come along. The crew welcome Alluka into the nerd fold as romance gradually blossoms between Gon and Killua, and Leorio fights to keep Kurapika from ghosting them all as a stress response to lawschool deadlines.

Basically a heartwarming slice of life story about nerds playing Dungeons and Dragons. I'll be updating Wednesdays and Sundays until all the chapters are posted.

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First x or x Hundredth by gomicchi  ( M | 1,837 | 1/1 )

Killua pays very little attention to his philosophy lecture. Gon tends to his duties as a part time groundskeeper. The first case may or may not be related somehow to the second.

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Wait, We Had a Test Today?! by itiaskia ( M | 21,096+ | 4/? )

College is certainly an experience, to say the least.

It's a time for self exploration, learning lessons, making terrible decisions, and meeting people you either never want to leave or never want to see again.

Gon didn't really know what to expect, but it wasn't what he got. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The one where everyone meddles in Killua’s and Gon’s relationship by tulip05  ( M | 6,327+ | 4/? )

Killua thinks Gon likes girls, more specifically Retz, and that they're the perfect couple. Gon thinks Killua is way too cool for him. They're both wrong. Good thing they have friends to meddle.

[batskulldrag]

Phoenix by Fallout Boy

chapter thirteen is here. this one contains Romile, and plenty of fluff

Chapter Thirteen: Out of Hell by Skillet      

Virgil fluttered nervously past Roman for the third time. Roman watched as his nephew peered out each window and retreated back to the couch. Virgil drummed his fingers against his laptop and chewed the band aid on his stationary hand.

               “You ok Billie Stylish?” Roman asked, sitting down beside him.

               “Sure. I’m fine.” Virgil didn’t look up.

               “It’s going to be ok.” Roman put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Payton has laughed his last laugh. And he will spend the rest of his days being beaten up in prison.”

               “But what if Payton accuses you guys of being child rapists or something? Then he’s going to win because everyone always believes him, and he’ll have ruined your lives. Or he’ll lose anyway, but still manage to ruin the three of you, and I have to live with the constant guilt that this is all my fault for getting you into this. And Uncle Patton and Uncle Logan are going to be quiet about the whole thing while silent resentment grows, because everything was fine until I showed up. Or worse, they’re not, and they’re just gonna forgive me for bringing this plague down on them.”

               “That’s quite the soliloquy.” Roman patted him on the head. “And that’s not going to happen. Payton can accuse us of whatever he likes, but I know a secret.”

               “You can blackmail him?” Virgil jolted up.

               “No, it’s like this. You remember how the bastard always told you that people always side with the adult?”

               “Yes, that’s why I’m worried.”

               “Well, first of all it’s a fallacy. Secondly, what is true is that people tend to side against the man who is in prison for trying to murder a child.”

               “He wasn’t trying to kill me.” Virgil’s heart audibly sank. “Was he?”

               Roman leaned back in surprise. Payton probably hated Virgil, at the very least he didn’t love him. And the viper had put him in the hospital more than once. Yet, Virgil was still hurt to think that Payton wanted him dead. Why should he care what Payton wanted?

               “I don’t know.” Roman hugged him. “He trapped you in a burning building. If he wasn’t trying to kill you, then it just means he’s not a murderer per say. But at the very least, it means that he didn’t care if you died. And that’s not your fault. That’s on him.”

               “I’m sick of being upset about this.” Virgil made a sound halfway between a scream and a sob. “I know he doesn’t care about me. Why is it still a gut punch? Why do I even still care at all?”

               “Humans feel.” Roman rubbed his back softly. “And feelings never make sense.”

               “I hate it.”

               “Come on, let’s go do something to take your mind off things.” Roman patted him on the shoulders. “It’s about time you got to be a kid.”

                                                                               #             #             #

               Virgil chewed on his hoodie strings as the crowd gathered around the tour guide.

               “Sacred of ghosts, Sweeny toddler?” Roman teased, ruffling his hair.

               “I ain’t afraid of no ghost.” Virgil sneered.

               “No, but I bet they’re terrified of you. We might not even see any with you around.”

               Virgil laughed softly. Two hundred uncle points. Roman put his arm around him and they walked up to the guide.

               “Two spots in your tour please.” Roman said as he produced the fairs with a great flourish.

               “Oh, you again.” The guide exhaled. “And you have a kid with you. Great.”

               The guide took the money and Roman contentedly fell into step with Virgil in tow.

               “He doesn’t like you.” Virgil taunted. “Did you steal his boyfriend?”

               “Virgil, a man does not steal a life partner, nor does he win one. He woos one.”

               “Woo. Woo.” Virgil added with a straight face and a straighter voice.

               “And the tour guide simply doesn’t appreciate me practicing my improv while I’m on his tours.” Roman explained. “Although, he is a very nice fellow. We both work as nude models at the portraiture class. He’s straight, so I had no chances.”

               “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Virgil mimicked.

               “You’ve been watching a lot of sit-coms?”

               “I can’t sleep some nights, so I just YouTube deep dive. And now I know how to make a life like moose out of old newspaper.”

               “Chamomile tea. Try some before bed, or warm milk.”

               “You make it sound like conspiracy theories aren’t good for me.” Virgil grinned like the Cheshire cat. “Did you know that there was this one lady who made her victims into soap, and she used the soap. But the worst part was she also turned them into cake, and she ate the cake.”

               “Remind me to get you some video games, something less… horrible.”

               “I thought video games cause violence.” Virgil smirked.

               “Sure, and vaccines cause autism. Pencils cause bad handwriting, spoons cause fat people and gays in media cause gay people.”

               “Yeah, I’m gonna murder a bunch of people because I’m playing Pokémon.” Virgil sneered, damn he was good at it. “It has nothing to do with the school system that does nothing to stop bulling, or the extremely abusive dad y’all sent me home to every day. It was the video games, Linda.”

               “What kind of Pokémon did you have?” Roman changed the subject away from Payton.

               “I had a Mew, a Haunter and a Psyduck. And a psychic type Evee.” Virgil sighed. “I went with the mind powered ones and all the ghost types.”

               “That sounds fun.” Roman beamed, finally one nice thing in this little boy’s life.

               “My dad broke my computer, and any other device that had my game on it.” Virgil looked at the ground. “I think they starved to death.”

               Why is it that whenever something good happens you show up to ruin it? You snake in the machine, I hate you. Roman silently scripted a call out letter to Payton.

               “Hey, it’s Dr. Picani.” Virgil derailed his train of thought.

               Roman looked over and spotted the familiar blond-haired doctor now wearing a brown T-shirt that displayed the Scooby Doo gang and khaki cargo shorts. More importantly though was the fact that his now exposed arms showed off an array of tattoos. Roman rubbed his eyes, no way. No way did this man, this doctor have tattoos. No, it was far more likely that he had a twin brother, and that was who they saw now.

               “He’s got ink.” Virgil squeaked in awe. “Let’s go say hi to him.”

               Virgil grabbed his hand and darted towards the doctor. He was alarmingly strong for a kid who only weighed a hundred pounds.

               “Virge, wait.” Roman said in a hushed voice, pulling the emo back. “I’m not sure we should.”

               “Are you a-scared of the doctor?” Virgil laughed.

               “No, he was in my still life class last week…”

               “OOOOOO, you’re embarrassed to talk to a guy who has nudes of you.” He was incorrigible. “Maybe if you ask nice, he’ll give the pictures back. Or are you afraid he’ll post it on social media?”

               “I’m not embarrassed for me, he ended up getting really upset and I consoled him afterwards.” Roman explained. “I’m worried if I talk to him it’ll put him in an awkward position.”

               “SUUUREEEE.” Virgil rolled his eyes. “Cause the dude who strips down and poses isn’t the guy in the awkward position.”

               “Why do you suddenly turn into a kid now?”

               “What’s the problem?” Virgil shrugged. “So he got upset, big deal. I cried in front of him a few times and I’m not embarrassed to talk to him. If you refused to talk to anyone who’s seen you naked or who’s gotten frustrated with painting, you’d have to be a hermit. Just like if I avoided everyone who has seen me crying about something, I wouldn’t be able to leave my room.”

               “You’re stunningly sharp.”

               “Hey! Dr. Picani!” Virgil yelled, which Roman didn’t think he could do, as he waved over to the doctor.

               Picani waved back and approached them. His legion of tattoos becoming clearer. Unsurprisingly, if anything about this could be considered unsurprising, most of his tattoos were from cartoons. The one that struck Roman in particular was the image of Lady Rainacorn wrapped around his left arm from shoulder to wrist. His right arm displayed a group portrait of Clifford, Courage, Scooby Doo, Blue, some green dog that looked like a stuffed toy who he didn’t recognize and Goddard.[1]  

               “Hey Virgil.” Emile greeted happily. “Hi Roman.”

               “Awkward indeed.” Virgil looked over at Roman with raised eyebrows.

               “Good evening Emile.” Roman added cordially. “Are you out ghost hunting as well?”

               “Yeah, I figured I should get out. And this sounded like a nifty idea. What brings you to this haunted cul-de-sac?”

               “We live here.” Virgil said smoothly with an air of villainy. “Well, lived here. We’re the ghosts that haunt these streets.”

               “Aren’t you the cutest thing?” Emile ruffled Virgil’s hair. “It’s nice to see you so excited.”

               Virgil scowled at the sidewalk as his face turned red. The tour guide started walking and they followed him in quite precession. Roman rubbed his hands in anticipation of their first stop. Now he had two people to impress.

               “I didn’t know you had ink.” Virgil pressed Emile. “And I really didn’t know you had that much.”

               “Yeah,” Emile looked at his arms. “I’ve got a couple of books worth of it. Lady Rainacorn is new. I think it’s healing up nicely.”

               “Did it hurt?”

               “Not as bad as my first one did.”

               “What was the first one?”

               “It was actually Clifford,” Emile showed them the portrait. “I got it to cover up a dog bite.”

               “Really?” Virgil leaned back in surprise.

               “Yeah, he was old and sore, and I tried to pet him. Still got me good.”

               “That’s awful.” Roman added.  

                “It’s ok.” Emile shrugged. “He was a good boy, he just got old.”

               “Alright our first stop.” The guide had everyone gather around. “This building stands abandoned due to the ghosts that torment anyone who dares try to live in it. The house was built atop an Indian burial ground. The spirits buried here cannot rest because of the desecration to their sacred place.”

               “That is wholly inaccurate.” Roman added loudly. “The tormentors of the building are remnants of the poor souls who died their when it was used as an unlicensed hospital in the eighties. The proprietors mismanaged their facility horridly and would even go so far as to steal supplies from the actual hospital. They would go on to receive more unwelcomed visitors from beyond in the form of men and women who died as a result of their theft. Malpractice insurance really didn’t cover that one.”

               “Really?” The guide looked bored. “Who are you tonight Roman?”

               “Dr. Roman Brown. Paranormal expert.” Roman put his arm around Virgil. “I’m here with my ward.”

               “How’d you get a kid?” The guide expressed genuine confusion and revulsion.

               “I’ve had Virgil for a time now, I caught him trying to pick my pocket. Poor creature lived on the streets.”

               “Really?”

               “Yes really.” Virgil retorted. “I was abandoned as a baby on the steps of a Catholic church. But they believed that I had demon’s blood in my veins and sent me out into the streets to fend for myself when I was four.”

               “You’re half demon?”

               “Maybe.” Virgil shrugged. “Who’s to say? All I know is that there are a lot of things that keep trying to pull me into hell.”

               “Really?” The guide scoffed.

               “Just last month a hand shot up out of the dirt and grabbed my ankle.” Virgil continued flawlessly. “I fought it as it tried to drag me under and broke my foot in the process.”

               Virgil pointed at his walking boot. The crowd murmured in astonishment. Roman’s heart swelled with pride.

               Defeated, the guide took them to the next stop.

               “Virgil, that was beautiful.” Roman said quietly. “The way you flawlessly wove your cast into the narrative as proof was inspired. I’m so proud of you, I may weep.”

               “I got good at lying.” Virgil looked at his feet. “I learned from the best.”

               “Never mind Payton.” Emile patted him on the shoulder. “You can just have fun making up stories tonight. Be a kid.”

               “Are those doctor’s orders?” Virgil looked up at him.

               “They are now.” Emile stood up straight.

               Roman noticed an indent in Emile’s shirt. It looked like a stud in his navel. Did he have piercings as well? Who was this man?

               “Here we have the next stop, it may not look like much, but Kim and Jim’s Bar and Grill was built on top of the remains of the old mortuary and is plagued with strange events to this day.” The guide explained, you could tell he hated this job.

               “Yes,” Emile chimed in. “There was a gruesome series of experiments in the mortuary and now the woods are inhabited with the results. Terrifying amalgamations made of severed limbs. Hands attached to feet, heinous arm-leg monsters and every other combination that doesn’t include a face. Stripped of their identities they roam around helplessly.”

               “And at night, when the drunks go home,” Roman added. “You can hear them crying. They’re in so much pain.”

               The audience and guide looked at them, baffled.

               “Of course.” Virgil suddenly said, gesturing towards Emile. “Dr. Emile Vankmen. Parapsychologist. A true credit to his field.”

               There were many nods. The tourists didn’t really care for a believable story, they wanted a good story. And by the sniped snakes of a gorgon salon, that is what they were going to get.

               They went through the stops, trumping the guide’s every tale with a gruesome murder, demonic happening or cartoon plot line. The crowd was eating it up and Virgil was teaming with energy. He seemed to be absorbing it and converting it into power.

               “Virgil is having fun.” Emile laughed.

               “I know,” Roman beamed. “We uncles know how to let one become a kid.”

               “Are you related to the other two?”

               “No, we’re just especially close.” Roman recalled fondly. “I cheated for Patton for a month while he was dealing with his mother’s death. Of course, without him knowing.”

               “How did you do that?” Emile looked confused and slightly impressed.

               “I wrote a few essays in character as him.” Roman brushed it off as if it were nothing. “I’m always up for a chance to practice my vocation.”

               “Virgil, don’t let him cheat for you.” Emile looked down at where Virgil was.

               Emphasis on was, because he was gone. Roman felt instant panic. He had lost Virgil! He had lost a traumatized child with anxiety! Virgil was probably terrified! What if he was hurt?!

               “Where did he go!!??” Roman yelped. “He was just here? Virgil!?”

               “Ok, ok.” Emile held up a shaking hand. “Maybe he walked to the front of the group.”

               Through their panic they heard Virgil scream, then the tour guide and a few tourists scream.

               The worst had happened! Roman ran to the front of the line and saw Virgil on the ground laughing while the guide stared at him irately.

               “Virgil!” Roman grabbed him. “Don’t do that again! I thought I lost you!”

               “Sorry.” Virgil relented rather easily. “I didn’t mean to scare you like that. I, I hadn’t considered that you’d notice I was gone.”

               “Well, I did.” Roman walked back to their place in the group, holding Virgil’s hand. “I want you to stay where I can see you. It’s dark and you don’t know the neighborhood, something might have happened to you.”

               Virgil was quiet as he looked at the sidewalk in confusion. He was probably wondering why no one was hitting him. In fact, he was probably wondering why Roman cared what happened to him. Roman sighed, he didn’t know how to un-traumatize a kid, all he really had to go off was how Logan had been after everything came out. And Virgil and Logan were drastically different characters with very different abusers. So, that wasn’t much of a comparison.

               “Virgil.” Roman put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry I yelled. But you really scared me, and I don’t want you wandering around where I can’t see you.”

               “You call that yelling?” Virgil looked confused. “It’s fine. I didn’t mean to worry you. I’m sorry.”

               “Ok. Let’s continue our tour.” Roman wrapped his arm around him. “But now you have to hold my hand.”

               “Whatever.” Virgil rolled his eyes and smiled.

               “And to this day, no one knows the cause of the building’s collapse.” The guide pointed at a vacant spot where a house had once been.

               “Actually, that one was us.” Emile interrupted, feigning embarrassment. “It was how we found out about Virgil’s powers.”

               “He has powers now?” The guide raised an eyebrow.

               “Yep,” Virgil picked up. “Demonic powers made the whole building implode. I can control them much better now.”

               “He had a nightmare that manifested itself into physical form and started haunting us.” Emile continued. “It picked us off one by one until only Virgil was left. Last thing I remember is just… blackness. No sound, no light. I don’t think I could even feel anything, then next thing I knew, I was just back and there was no more building. Not even rubble, just what you see now, with Virgil standing in the middle of it.”

               “Yes, I remember that night.” Roman joined in. “A hideous creature started roaming the halls. It was six feet tall, completely black and had no face. Well, no face on its head. But it’s chest. Right where men have a navel, it had a mouth. And when it opened that horrid maw a vertical slit went up to its pencil thin neck and showed a ribcage. A ribcage broken down the middle that it used as teeth. A long red tongue cleaned saliva and blood off the jagged ribs as it drooled in anticipation of its next meal.”

               “And the smell.” Virgil added solemnly. “It reeked of decay. Of maggot filled puss and blackened flesh. Not like cooked blackened, more like dead five times over blackened. And he enveloped his prey in darkness like a spider cocooning its next meal.” Virgil gagged, for real. The little one had just made himself sick.

               “And he took the other two.” Virgil looked at the crowd. “I was the only one left, and just when I was sure that I was gonna die alone, with only that, that thing as company, I felt this sensation in my gut. Like a burning. And it went through my whole body and a moment of realization overcame me. This heat was natural, familiar. I realized what I was, who I was. And that thing, well, that thing was gonna pay for what it did. So, I focused my energy, my hatred, my courage on it and the whole building came down around us, and the thing was sucked into the ground, leaving me standing in an empty lot.”  

               “Let’s just move on.” The guide was even more unimpressed with them.

               Virgil made faces behind the guide’s back for the rest of the night. Emile did as well. Roman sent him a few ungentlemanly hand gestures and internally called him a bitch. He had no taste for a good horror story. Heathen. That was an excellent description and a lovely climax.

As the night went on Roman noticed that Virgil was walking differently and always stood on his good foot whenever they stopped. When they were moving, he would either limp very slightly or hop on one foot, which he tried to cover up, but really couldn’t.

               “Is your foot hurting?” Roman asked, fairly aware of the answer and the lie that Virgil would tell.

               “No.”

               “Yes, it is.”

               “That’s a neat trick. Can you tell me if my neck hurts next?”

               “Alright, come on.” Roman picked him up.

               “What are you doing!?”

               “I’m going to carry you.”

               “Like hell you are!”

               “Come on, you really mean to tell me that you don’t want a piggyback ride?”

               “I’m an adult.”

               “You’re a teenager at best.”

               “That’s still too old.”

               “But someday you’re gonna be too big to carry.”

               “Yeah, yesterday.”

               Ignoring him completely, Roman slumped Virgil over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and kept walking.

               “Have you been sleeping better lately?” Emile asked, lagging behind slightly so he could see Virgil’s face.

               “Yeah. I guess.”

               “He,” Roman interrupted. “Has been watching horrific true crime stories on his computer.”

               “Oh, sure. Say nothing about the newspaper moose.” Roman assumed that Virgil was sneering.

               “Well, they proved that you shouldn’t be on your computer before bed.” Emile offered.

               “Uncle Logan told me the same thing.”

               “Wikipedia’s sleep routine doesn’t help him sleep though.” Roman accused.

               “I’m telling him you called him that.”

               “He knows.”

               They apprehensively arrived at their last stop.

               “This cemetery is a hot spot for paranormal activity.” The guide explained. “It is home to The Tunnleberry Vampire, the bipedal dogs and the ghost of many a deranged Civil War general. The most famous of which resides in that mausoleum over there.” He pointed to a large grey building with carved angels out front. “Legend has it that he was betrayed in battle and rose from the grave to exact his revenge on those who betrayed him. His lieutenant who spear headed the mutiny was found suffocated to death inside the general’s empty casket. The general’s body was never found.”

               “I believe the vampire was just the cemetery caretaker in a mask.” Emile interrupted. “He wanted to increase tourism in these parts to drive up the value of this graveyard so they couldn’t sell it.”

               “And those bipedal dogs turned out to be a pair of really hairy dudes banging.” Virgil shuddered. “I think it’s scarred onto my retinas.”

               “But that mausoleum.” Roman said seriously. “There is definitely something about that place. Something that haunts me. Something that despite all my years of ghost hunting still strikes me as the most unnatural event I have ever been unlucky enough to witness with my own eyes.”

                “Of course, there is.” The guide sighed.

               “It was back when I was still trying to get my paranormal business off the ground.” Roman dove into the story. “My then partner, and senior ghost hunter, Luigi Verd, was by my side the entire time. True blue he was, I’ll always remember him. We found ourselves in this graveyard investigating a series of disappearances around town. Mostly just troubled teens, alcoholics, and the homeless. But a life is a life, and a mystery is a mystery indeed. So, we set up.”

               Roman took a pause to let them get sucked in.

               “I was doing most of the lifting, as Luigi was recovering from a head injury. He had healed nicely in the hospital. The only sign of trauma was a stitched-up gash along his forehead. He was excited to have a scar to show off.” Roman looked at the ground sadly. “Or so I thought.”

               He could feel their anticipation.

               “Just as I had set everything up for our séance, we were hoping to ask the dead for a clue about the living. Anyway, just as I had finished these hooded men burst into the tomb. They were clad in floor length, red robes with their hoods pulled up to block out their faces. Before I could even react, two of them had me by each arm and they forced me onto one of the coffins and started tying down. And Luigi, who was like a brother to me, he just watched. They didn’t even go for him, but he just watched them bind me. I called out to him, and in response. He…” Roman took an exaggerated gasp. “He pulled out the stitch on his forehead. And his skin fell limp, but behind it where I expected flesh to be was more skin. And he pulled his face off as if he were removing a mask. And under the mask, under the face of a man I had known my entire life was this… this stranger! This figure who I didn’t know from Payton, slowly pulling the hide of my friend off his face. Wearing Luigi as a mask! The stranger laughed at me! He laughed at the brutal terror that welled up inside me! And he pulled out a long sharp knife…”

               “I was at the cemetery myself that night.” Virgil took up the story. “Following the dudes who were nice enough to not have me arrested for picking their pockets. In my childish mind I had sworn a life debt to them in that moment. But, little did I know that I’d be paying it off that night. Because that was when I heard the screams.”

               Mimicking Roman’s style Virgil paused and took a breath.

               “Being seven, whenever fight or flight came up in my brain I would normally fly. But that night, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why, I chose to fight. I sprinted towards the source of the screams and found the tomb doors closed to the outside. But did that stop me? No, with whatever strength a half-starved kid possesses I threw myself into the door and just kept slamming into it. I was in a frenzy! I just kept bashing into that door with all my weight. Seventy pounds of skin and bones ramming the door like there was no tomorrow.”

               “That’s where I came in.” Emile joined. “I had hit an alligator, literally there was a tiny alligator wrapped around my tire and was trying to fix my tire when I heard both the screaming and the constant thudding. I too ran to the source and saw a small child, bruised and bloody, hammering his fragile body into the concrete doors. The first thing I did was wrestle him away from the door before he killed himself. Then, I forced my tire iron between the crack in the two doors to pry it open like a lever. It budged open an inch, but then the men inside swung it open to see what was going on. I fought them as best as I could, even managing to break one’s arm. But then their leader pulled out this whip, made out of bones, human spinal bones and he snapped my weapon out of my hands while I was still reeling from the shock. Next thing I knew I was being chained to the floor.”

               “They took this distraction in their stride.” Roman shuddered. “And with Virgil and Emile dealt with they turned back to me. The knife wielder tore my shirt off in one swipe and drove his knife into my chest. Just when I thought I was done for I realized that he wasn’t about to stab me to death. Instead he slid the knife down towards my stomach, he was skinning me!”

               “I did the only thing I knew how to do.” Virgil jumped in. “I played dead. And miracle of miracles, they bought it. The one with the whip bent down to check on me, and I bit him. I sank my teeth into his wrist like it was the most delicious prime rib known to man. He fought me with his free hand, but no number of blows was making me spit that fucker’s arm out. I dug in until I hit bone, I ground my teeth to widen the wound, I sunk in until I was certain that he and I were one…”

               “And I took the opportunity to dislocate my thumb.” Emile jumped in on cue. “And slid out of one of my wrist restraints. With my free arm I put Virgil’s new chew toy in a head lock, he didn’t put up too much of a fight, as now he was woozy with blood loss. He collapsed, and Virgil started rooting through his body for the keys. Another robed guy came at me, so I did the worst thing I could think of. I grabbed his groin and I pulled with all my strength. He doubled over and Virgil tossed me the keys.”

               “With this madness going on, the leader had stopped trying to skin me and was now running towards the other two.” Roman took the reins once more. “He flew at Emile with the knife and they engaged in battle. Meanwhile, Virgil freed me, and I took the leader from behind. Emile dodged a stab and the leader fell into his own weapon. I took it from him, and Emile took up his tire iron once more. And.” Roman stopped. “Knowing that we couldn’t go to the police for fear of how deep this madness runs, without any other options. We… we finished them off.”

               “With that done. We sealed the tomb and vowed never to speak of it again.” Emile added. “And then we took Virgil to a hospital.”        

               “I had a collapsed lung.” Virgil added happily.

               The crowd applauded them and even the guide looked impressed. Emile and Virgil were satisfied, but Roman had one more trick left.

               “And,” Roman added, pulling up the hem of his shirt. “Here’s the receipt.”

               He pulled his shirt up to display a long scar that went from his sternum to his navel, well past his navel actually. The scar took the place of the more traditional bellybutton. It was still visible in the evening light. The scar itself was horrid looking. It was jagged, narrow in some places and bore the impression of skin grafts in others. It folded in slightly at his stomach giving a clear picture of how deep it was.

               The crowd gasped. Virgil squeaked in surprise and Emile looked on baffled (and hopefully impressed to be seeing Roman’s physique a second time.) Roman laughed to himself. This had been an excellent improv session and he had managed to both impress his nephew and a rather charming doctor.

               At the end of the tour Roman had done the gentlemanly thing and walked Emile to his car. The three of them laughed about their story telling talents and the tales of terror they wove.

               “Well, this is me.” Emile stopped at his car. “Thanks for walking me to my car. I didn’t want the cult to catch me alone.”

               “Of course not.” Roman agreed.

               “So, stop me if I’m intruding.” Emile started hesitantly. “But how did you get that scar?”

               “It’s far worse than the story.” Roman sighed.

               “Now you have to tell us.” Virgil bopped his shoulder.

               “Ok. I was born a conjoined twin.” Roman sighed. “They had to cut us apart. Remus, that’s my brother, has the same scar. Well, at least a similar one”

               “You both made it? That’s amazing.” Emile looked impressed. “Also, your names are Roman and Remus? Like Romulus and Remus?”

               “I hate it when people get that reference.”

               “Whatever would they have done if you were triplets?” Virgil taunted. “Hey, we all have Italian names.”

               The two adults laughed at Virgil’s observation.

               “Oh.” Emile started. “Would you two like a ride back home? I think Virgil over did it with the walking.”

               “That would be lovely.” Roman lit up slightly.

               “Woo.” Virgil said softly to Roman.

               “Now Virgil,” Roman said as he buckled his seat belt. “What would you normally do if a stranger offered you a ride home?”

               “Fight him to the death.” Virgil said plainly.

               “Ok, the correct answer is to say no and run away.” Roman disregarded that comment.

               They pulled into the driveway and saw that Patton and Logan were home already.

               “Thanks for the ride Dr. Picani.” Virgil said quickly as he darted out of the car.

               He was inside in a flash, no doubt to tell his parents everything he had been up to. Good. Roman exited the car with a bit more grace.

               “Thank you very much for the ride back, Emile.” Roman said graciously.

               “PSHSHHSHH.” Emile swatted the topic out of the air. “It was nothing.”

               There was a pause.

               “I had a good time hanging out with you.” Emile said timidly.

               “I had a good time with you too.” Roman felt himself blush.

               “I know there’s still the court case and everything…” Emile blushed as well. “But after that, when there won’t be any conflict of interest… are you single?”

               “Completely.” Roman answered.      

[1] The dogs are Clifford the Big Red Dog, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Scooby Dooby Doo, Blue from Blue’s Clues, Gir from Invader Zim (Hi Marie Pippins, that one’s for you) and Goddard from Jimmy Neutron

[mikauzoran]

Lukadrien Drabbles: Nachtmusik Chapter Four

A Little Night Music (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik) Chapter Four: The more things stay the same...

“My father would kill me if I got a tattoo,” Adrien sighed, twirling a pen between his fingers as he leaned in to get a better look at the simple reference doodles Luka had drawn.

“You’d have to get it somewhere no one would see,” Luka hummed, going over the runes beneath the leftmost raven to thicken the lines.

Adrien scoffed. “Luka, I’m a model. My body is public property. There is no ‘somewhere no one would see’.”

Luka looked up and frowned. “Your body is yours…and whoever you decide to share it with’s…not public property.”

Adrien set the pen down on the counter and put his hands up in surrender. “Aren’t you getting discouraged yet?” he wondered.

“How so?” Luka went back to the doodle of the ravens.

“Trying to teach me self-worth,” Adrien explained. “Isn’t it frustrating having to repeat the same things over and over?”

“Not particularly.” Luka shrugged. “I mean, you’re only the way you are now because some people—who shall remain unnamed yet obvious—have been telling you you’re worthless and undesirable for years. Realistically, I figure it’s going to take me a solid two or three years of constant fussing and lavishing of praise and affection to get you back up somewhere close to normal. Why would I be frustrated after only four months?”

Adrien didn’t reply.

Luka looked up, an eyebrow quirking.

Adrien stared. “Are you serious?”

Luka’s brow pulled together into a frown. “It…probably is going to take longer than two or three years, honestly…but I’ve got time.” Luka’s eyes flicked back down to the doodles on the back of the flyer announcing a Greek music festival that weekend.

Adrien continued to stare, wondering what he had done in a former life to deserve this man’s friendship and devotion.

“…You could get a tattoo on your stomach,” Luka broke the silence after a minute or two had passed without words.

Adrien rubbed his stomach just above his bellybutton. “I pose shirtless or with my shirt unbuttoned sometimes. I think they’d see it.”

Luka snickered, looking up to surreptitiously wink. “I was thinking…lower, Angel.”

Adrien frowned, looked down, and then burst into laughter. “Geez. What kind of tattoo would I get on my pelvis?”

Luka shrugged, self-satisfaction still clinging to his lips. “What kind of tattoo would you get anywhere else?”

Adrien bit his lip. “Haven’t really thought about it.”

“How about a snake?” Luka offered.

Adrien smiled incredulously. “On my lower abdomen? Isn’t that kind of…I don’t know…suggestive?”

“I think the only people who would see it would be in a suggestive mood anyway,” Luka reasoned.

Adrien covered his face with his hands, shoulders trembling with laughter as he shook his head. “I think I’m too pure to be having this conversation.”

Luka rolled his eyes. “Please. Says the guy who has made suggestive jokes at my expense on numerous occasions.”

Adrien removed his hands from his eyes to playfully slap at Luka’s arm. He glanced furtively towards the stairwell to the upper deck. “What if your mom or sisters walk in?”

Luka snorted unconcernedly. “Juleka would gang up on whomever she most felt like seeing blush at that moment, Rose would go into hysterics over how we’re supposedly a couple now, and Maman would tell me to make sure my box of condoms isn’t expired and remind me how long it’s been since I last had need of them.”

“My father would…I don’t even know,” Adrien sighed. “Have a heart attack? He wouldn’t be supportive of me having a physical relationship with anyone like your mom is.”

“I kind of wish she was less supportive,” Luka grumbled. “She thinks it’s strange that I don’t have any interest in sleeping with people until I feel a really strong connection with them. She thinks I should experiment more.”

“I wonder why, if you’re happy the way you are,” Adrien hummed.

Luka shook his head, going back to tracing the runes on the doodle. “She comes from an era of free love, so it’s weird for her that I would only want one partner in a long-term, committed relationship…. Like…even though she was with our father for a long time, I’m not actually certain that Juleka and I have the same biological father. We look pretty different, and…Maman and my father’s eyes are both blue…but Juleka’s are brown. Genetically, that’s…”

Adrien drew in a slow, deep breath.

“…Part of me feels like they shouldn’t teach kids about genetics and Punnett squares until they’re old enough to deal with the reality that they’re adopted or their siblings aren’t full-blooded siblings,” Luka snorted. “…But we were talking about tattoos.”

Adrien nodded. “You should get the snake tattoo on your pelvis. You could pull it off.”

Luka grinned at the flattery. “You think?”

“It fits your image.”

“Because I was seriously considering it,” Luka informed.

“Were you really?” Adrien leaned in closer, picking up his pen once more and twirling it between his fingers. “What kind of snake? A cobra like Sass?”

Luka shook his head. “Something more stylized, more Zen, less threatening. Maybe a sleeping snake coiled up. Maybe a Chinese calligraphy-style snake.”

Adrien nodded in encouragement. “That would be kind of cool. I’d like to see that!”

Luka blushed. “I’m giving you the opportunity to remember the placement of the tattoo and adjust your enthusiasm.”

Adrien grimaced. “Pretend I made some kind of flirty, teasing comment to save face that made you feel slightly flattered but also a little uncomfortable.”

Luka gave him a thumbs up. “I actually think it would be cool to get an entire Chinese zodiac…plus a cat.”

Adrien’s face lit up. “Like Fruits Basket!”

Luka’s eye twitched as Adrien completely missed the implication. “Uh…what’s that?”

Adrien’s brow scrunched into an unimpressed frown. “You’ve never heard of Fruits Basket? It’s an anime…and a manga, but you have to see it. It’s one of the classics!” Adrien insisted adamantly. “I’ll have to show you. Marinette and I have been getting together for take away Chinese food and anime on Saturdays the past few months. We’re almost done with the anime we’re watching now, and, after that, we’re going to have to have you over to show you Furuba.”

Luka tried not to let the conflicting emotions show on his face. “That sounds like a lot of fun, but I don’t think Marinette would appreciate me intruding.”

Adrien rolled his eyes. “Marinette wouldn’t mind. She loves having you around. It would be fun, all three of us together.”

“Yeah,” Luka sighed, imagining an alternate reality where both Marinette and Adrien were ecstatic to have him around for all of the reasons he wanted them to be. “But it sounds like anime and Chinese is your thing—just the two of you. You would feel kind of off if Marinette started coming to our jam sessions or family meals, wouldn’t you?”

Adrien shifted awkwardly on the kitchen stool, his nose crinkling. “…That’s different.”

“Maybe it’s not to her,” Luka suggested kindly. “I’ll tell you what, you and I can watch that anime together, just the two of us. How does that sound?”

Adrien’s smile came back, and he nodded. “Deal…. So…tattoos?”

Luka grinned, motioning down at the doodles. “I don’t want a sleeve or anything too big or noticeable. Just some little decorative tattoos here and there that can be hidden easily.”

Adrien switched hands so that he was twirling the pen in his right, freeing up his left hand to point. “I love the concept of Odin’s ravens on your shoulder blades…and a snake around your wrist under your usual bracelet is too funny.”

“I’m also thinking about getting a little pawprint on my finger where I usually wear my ring,” Luka announced tentatively, awaiting Adrien’s reaction.

“A pawprint?” Adrien’s head slowly tipped to the side. “Why a pawprint?”

Luka fought not to show his chagrin. “You know,” he replied conversationally. “like Chat Noir.”

Adrien’s eyes widened, and his face took on an amazed gleam. “Really?”

“Of course,” Luka replied smoothly, inwardly steeling himself. “I am his biggest fan after all…both in and out of the mask.”

Adrien let out one of those dazzling, marble machine laughs, hitting a jerky collection of pitches that somehow managed to sound just perfect to Luka.

“You’d have to fight off hordes of fangirls for that title,” Adrien cautioned.

Luka shrugged. “I’d take them…and I would win.”

“You’re wasted on Chat Noir and whoever he is behind that mask,” Adrien replied in awe, a wide grin spreading from one corner of his mouth to the other. “He could never appreciate you the way you deserve. He’s too full of himself.”

Luka shook his head. “I’ve met Chat Noir. He may come off as a flirty goofball in public, but in private he’s sweet and considerate.”

“Wow,” Adrien chuckled. “If you like him so much, you should marry him. I’m sure you two would make adorable kittens together.”

Luka’s entire face went burgundy as he burst out laughing. “Oh my God,” he gasped, burying his face in his hands.

“As for me, Viperion is much better,” Adrien continued, smirking in triumph as Luka continued to laugh convulsively in a mix of misery, disbelief, and genuine amusement.

“Seriously,” Adrien pretended to pout. “He’s all mysterious and suave and sexy. I’d like to see him in a suit…. Though…Chat Noir is pretty hot. I mean, his butt…”

“Perfection,” Luka snickered.

“Exactly,” Adrien emphatically agreed. “…Do you think Viperion would think I was a slut if I wanted to have occasional threesomes with you and Chat Noir?”

Luka looked up from where his head rested on the countertop. He wiped a tear from his eye and wondered, “How did this become a thing?”

“What?” Adrien hummed, satisfied with his work. “The whole pretending to be gay for Chat Noir and Viperion thing? Remember when Rose got us to play Kill, Screw, Marry last month, and I said I would kill Chat Noir, screw Ladybug, and marry Viperion? And then you said you would kill Ladybug, screw Chat Noir, and marry me? And then Juleka made a joke about foursomes. And then I observed that it seemed like the best of friends always made jokes about sleeping with one another? Like Marinette and Alya and Nino and me, so…it seemed like a logical leap to start doing that with you?” Adrien frowned as a thought occurred to him. “…But is it weird because you’re bi? I know a lot of friends joke about being gay for one another, but…is this insulting? If so, I’m really sorry,” he backpedaled hard. “I’m still kind of new to this whole ‘acceptable casual social etiquette’ thing. Tell me if I cross a line. Please. I don’t want to screw this up.”

Luka straightened and shook his head. “You’re okay. I don’t mind your flirting and teasing. I know you’re a flirty person to start with and that it’s not just me. I don’t have any delusions about that. I mean, I’ve seen you and Nino. You and Nino need to get a room and work out some of the sexual tension between you two sometime. Put the poor man out of his misery, Angel.”

Adrien rolled his eyes. “I think Alya is doing a fine job. She doesn’t need my help…but we’re okay?” He eyed Luka anxiously.

Luka nodded. “I know you’re just joking. No offence taken.”

“Good,” Adrien sighed in relief. “…So…tattoos?”

The side of Luka’s mouth rose in a fond smile. “I think I’m going to get the pawprint tattoo on my finger. Do you think this looks accurate?” He indicated the doodle below Munin the raven.

Adrien frowned, pulling the paper in closer.

“I mean, I’m always distracted when I’m around Chat Noir, so I haven’t paid very close attention to what the pawprint on the ring looks like,” Luka explained.

“Distracted?” Adrien hummed, peeking up mischievously. “By his butt?”

Luka had mostly meant the akuma, but…

Luka bumped Adrien’s shoulder and replied a little too genuinely, too tenderly, “By his eyes. I’m a sucker for his eyes.”

Adrien’s heart jumped. “…Mine are prettier.”

“Jealous, Angel?” Luka snickered.

“Confused,” Adrien thought.

Confused because he kind of wanted Luka to be serious. Sometimes, Luka would say something painfully sweet, and Adrien’s heart would ache for Luka’s words to be true. And that was extremely confusing because Adrien wasn’t interested in guys. At least…he had never been interested in guys before. It had only ever been Ladybug, but…sometimes Luka confused him.

“Super jealous,” Adrien snorted.

“Don’t be. He’s not interested in me, so I’m all yours, Angel,” Luka chuckled at his own expense.

“Don’t you forget it,” Adrien clicked his tongue, switching the ink pen to his left hand to draw. “The pawprint is more like this.”

Luka nodded, impressed by the likeness. “…How is it that you have such an intimate knowledge of Chat Noir’s ring?”

Adrien looked up and answered with a straight face, “Oh? Didn’t I tell you? I’m sleeping with him.”

“Oh?” Luka snickered. “Be a friend and get me his number, would you?”

“I don’t think I want to share,” Adrien pouted.

“Share which one of us?” Luka arched an eyebrow.

Adrien smirked, twirling the ink pen playfully. “Either.”

Luka rolled his eyes. “In all seriousness—”

The pen went flying from Adrien’s hand, landing over by the wraparound couch.

“Oops.” Adrien smiled sheepishly. He hopped down from the stool into a feline crouch, scooped up the pen, and slowly rolled up, his posterior leading.

Luka’s brain blew a fuse. He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help watching. It had happened so fast, and now he couldn’t keep from staring. He was already a little riled up from all the suggestive flirting, and now…ngeh. His mind was in the gutter.

Did Adrien know what he was doing? He couldn’t. He couldn’t have any idea. Even if he did, he wouldn’t. Adrien may have been a flirt, but he wasn’t a tease. He would never.

Adrien turned back around, and Luka scrambled to put a lid on all thoughts of Adrien’s butt and Adrien naked and sinking his teeth into the flesh of Adrien’s hip until he left a mark and Adrien’s laugh and Adrien’s eyes and how bad he wanted this guy. Because Adrien had no idea, and it was an abuse of Adrien’s trust to be sitting there staring and having those kinds of thoughts when Adrien was under the belief that their flirting was only all in good fun.

“Sorry. What were you saying?” Adrien smiled innocently as he sat back down on the stool next to Luka.

Luka shifted uncomfortably, mentally cursing his preference for wearing skinny jeans that were too tight to begin with.

Belatedly, he realized that Adrien had asked him a question. “Um… Was I talking?”

Adrien nodded, waiting expectantly.

Luka gulped, trying to discretely regulate his breathing. “Uh…I forget.”

Adrien shrugged, not suspecting. “Well, just let me know if you remember.”

“S-Sure,” Luka replied thickly, shrugging off his overshirt because suddenly the main cabin was sweltering.

And then Adrien took hold of his hand.

The touch felt like a hot iron on Luka’s unexpectedly hypersensitive skin.

“May I?” Adrien inquired, motioning to take Luka’s ring off.

Luka nodded, not trusting his voice.

With the retrieved ink pen, Adrien carefully traced the pawprint onto Luka’s flesh, blowing on it to help it dry before slipping the ring back over it.

Internally, Luka was panting. The contact, the way Adrien bit his bottom lip in concentration, the way he puckered his lips to blow the ink dry…simultaneously too much and yet not enough. He almost whimpered when Adrien withdrew his hands.

“Done,” Adrien announced proudly.

Luka pulled the ring back off carefully to inspect Adrien’s work and immediately came to a decision: he was going that very evening to get that pawprint permanently tattooed onto his skin before the ink had a chance to smudge or wash off.

“I love it,” Luka breathed. “It’s perfect.”

“Glad to hear it,” Adrien chuckled, obviously pleased with himself.

Luka caught Adrien’s right hand. “Would you be comfortable with moving your ring to a different finger for a second?”

Adrien nodded, slipping his ring off and sliding it onto the ring finger of his left hand.

Luka picked up his own pen and made two little dots on the finger, reminiscent of puncture wounds. “Done,” he announced.

Adrien frowned, inspecting his “tattoo”. “Bite mark?” he questioned.

“Snake bite.” Luka winked.

Adrien tittered in amusement. “Oh no! Aren’t viper bites lethal? You’d better suck the venom out before I die!”

“Drama queen,” Luka snorted even as he grinned.

“Seriously!” Adrien insisted, hamming it up as he held out his hand. “Quick! I’m already feeling woozy!”

Luka took Adrien’s hand and delicately brought it to his lips for a feather-light kiss.

Adrien’s heartbeat tripped. His stomach fluttered. His breath caught.

Luka looked up, his eyes meeting Adrien’s as the most perfect blush skated over Adrien’s cheeks, highlighting the dazed look in Adrien’s eyes as his pupils widened.

Luka’s breath hitched.

At the same moment, a thought occurred to both boys:

“Shoot. I’m in serious trouble.”

[precuredaily]

Precure Day 140

Episode: Futari wa Precure Splash Star 42 - “Welcome Back! Michiru and Kaoru!” Date watched: 3 July 2019 Original air date: 3 December 2006 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/xgCNJSJ Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

The title kinda spoiled it

Another excellent episode! We left off with Saki and Mai in a bind because the Fairy Carafe was stolen and Dark Fall’s agents were revived and now more resistant to Precure’s attacks. Dark Fall holds all the cards and Saki and Mai are stranded in the Land of Fountains. It’s a good setup! Where do we go from here?

The Plot

Princess Filia reveals to the girls that the Fountain of the Sun is in the Land of Greenery and uses her own power to transport the girls, their fairies, and herself there... but she loses her corporeal form and ends up as a sphere of light that possesses Korone, Saki’s cat. Meanwhile in Dark Fall, Gohyaan has revived the rest of the generals, but Akudaikaan chews him out for not kidnapping the Princess when he had the chance, as she knows the location of the Fountain of the Sun, so Gohyaan dispatches Karehaan and Dorodoron to track her down.

This is the only time all 6 of these characters are together

Back at the Sky Tree, Filia explains that she needs the Fairy Carafe to return her body, but the villains appear before she can tell the girls more. Saki and Mai transform into Bloom and Egret but their power isn’t enough to defeat the enhanced warriors. Filia pointedly comments that the two spirits (Flappi and Choppi) alone aren’t enough, so she, Korone, Moop, and Foop gather their power and wish for a miracle. In a very emotional sequence, they connect with the slumbering Michiru and Kaoru, who receive the last remaining energy from the Fairy Carafe, and then revive and rush to the Sky Tree to save their friends. It’s a touching reunion, and some words are exchanged between both the sisters and their friends, as well as the villains who were eliminated before they changed sides. Ultimately, words aren’t enough, and Michiru and Kaoru fight Dorodorn and Karehaan.... and they’re winning! The power that Moop and Foop especially lent them, combined with their powers of darkness, are the perfect counter to the blend of dark and light that the villains possess, and the sisters are able to negate Gohyaan’s powerup (Dorodoron flees instead). This allows the Precures to perform Spiral Heart Splash and destroy Karehaan, who dissolves into a bunch of mini-Gohyaan heads that bounce off.

The four girls finally have a moment to take in their reunion, and Saki and Mai cry tears of happiness as the camera zooms out and the credits roll.

(speaking of the credits, stick around at the end for my take on Ganbalance de Dance finally)

The Analysis

What a great episode. I could probably write pages about Michiru and Kaoru’s revival scene, the dialog and music and visuals all come together to make an emotionally powerful sequence. Bloom and Egret are overpowered, Michi and Kao feel so helpless and they can’t move, but they can tell their friends are in danger and they struggle their hardest, so their feelings connect with the energy Filia is trying to send and create a miracle. I love it. Also, you can really tell that Nishio Daisuke worked on Dragon Ball prior to this series because the sequence of the two powering up and emerging from the water is EXTREMELY evocative of something DBZ would do. Joke’s on me, he only worked on FW and MH and had no hand in this series, he was tapped for Powerpuff Girls Z instead. Still very Dragon Ball, I wouldn’t be surprised of some of the other staff had their hands in that before working on this.

Karehaan proves to be his own worst enemy. He doesn’t like working together, believing he’s strong enough on his own to dispatch the girls. He does make a better team with Dorodoron than with Moerumba though, as they don’t butt heads so much as Doro just kind of goes along with that Karecchi says, until it’s in his best interests to run. However, Karehaan’s arrogance and ignorance about Michiru and Kaoru’s betrayal allow him to overestimate himself and the threat the sisters pose. Together with Dorodoron, they actually do have the Precures on the ropes at one point, they could have defeated them there, but they hesitated too long and allowed the Kiryuus to save them. Ah well.

Princess Filia posessing Korone is..... weird, to say the least. For some unexplained reason, beyond simply habitating in his body, her power allows him to speak as well, independently of her, so you have this tiny cat talking in a pretty deep voice. Not the first time an animated cat has talked, of course, but since it’s not Filia speaking through Korone, it’s odd. I don’t remember how long this lasts, presumably up until the finale of the show... in fact I must have blocked it out of my memory completely because I forgot about it happening at all. Korone was portrayed as an intelligent cat up to this point, of course, but now he’s standing on his hind legs and talking like a middle-aged guy and it’s all so strange.

Last thing I want to touch on: animation. It’s uh.... not great here. Close-ups are passable, although the shading is often minimal. The faces may be a little off-model but it’s nothing extreme. Anything further out than a close-up is pretty bad though, especially for human faces.

I guess it’s the usual conserving budget for the finale syndrome but it’s still pretty laughable.

The Opening and Ending

Okay it’s time I finally talked about these.

The opening theme is called “Makasete★Splash☆Star★” or “Leave it to Us★Splash☆Star★”. While the FW/MH opening was a drama, the SS opening is more of a poppy, light rock number. The composition features lots of strings, bowed and plucked at key moments providing both the melody and the bass line. Some high brass comes in here and there and I think there’s some kind of synthesized percussion providing the rhythm. It could be an electric guitar, though, I’m having trouble picking it out. There’s definitely some guitar towards the climax of the song. Mayumi Gojo has been swapped out for Uchiaye Yuka on vocals, and she sings about how there’s strength in life and to use that as inspiration. All together, it’s a nice uplifting tune, and the visuals give us a good idea about what Saki and Mai are interested in, the fairies, and some action sequences. There’s even a scene of the Tree of Life glowing with energy that might be foreshadowing the end of the series? For the revamped intro starting with episode 31, they add a few scenes of Bright and Windy, as well as Moop and Foop, and impressively they edited all shots of Boom and Egret to replace the Mix Communes with the Crystal Communes.

Now, the ending!

“Ganbalance de Dance” is a little bit notorious for being used, and reused, and re-reused. Yes 5 and GoGo both used reversions of it for their second ending themes, and I kind of get it, because it’s a cute tune, but there’s another more important aspect: this is the first dance ending in all of Precure. Why a dance ending? Well, there was a rather popular anime that aired in Spring of 2006 that featured a dance ending, and the world would never be the same. That show was “The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi” and the dance, the “Hare Hare Yukai” took the world by storm. It’s speculated that Precure adopting dance endings was a copycat move. The timing lines up, Haruhi started in April and ended in early July of that year so Toei had time to say “Hey this is really popular, let’s do that in our show.” Dance endings were already commonplace in the contemporary Super Sentai shows as well, so there was precedent. (although somewhat ironically, the Sentai of that year didn’t have a dance) Whatever the reason, they did it again and again but the cell animation was not always the best, so they switched to CG with Fresh and never looked back. However, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The lyrics to “Ganbalance de Dance” are half instructions for doing the dance, and half general uplifting messages about positivity and believing in yourself. The dance itself is fairly simple, due to limited animation most of the movement is in the upper body, so the girls twist their torsos and extend their arms while keeping their legs mostly still. when they move their legs, it’s only to stick them out and then back in, or to do some small marching. None of the more energetic moving around that later shows will use, again, probably a byproduct of the animation. Notably, since it’s cell animation rather than more expensive CG, they draw the girls in all three of their outfits: school uniform, Bloom/Egret, and Bright/Windy. The villains also dance a little, and I should point out that the text behind them reads “Uzaina” with only one “a” at the end. Suffice to say, I understand but I’m sticking with two. Also look at these guys.

Kintolesky is not present because he hadn’t been introduced in the show yet, and sadly they never update it to include him. This also marked the first reappearance of Michiru and Kaoru, only to segue into a shot of Bright and Windy and then they’re never seen again, but hey, it’s something.

Anyway, it all comes together to make a fun ending song. I’m sorry it took me so long to write about it.

I may revisit this if I think of more things to say about the episode, but for now I think that concludes it. Next time, everybody celebrates Michiru and Kaoru’s return....... but first it’s time for We Are Splash Gays: The Movie. Look forward to it!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: 0 Zekkouchou Nari!

No more miracle drop count

[angelynrostrand]

Chapter 22

Summary:  To the outside world, nothing should connect shy girl Angel Monroe and popular boy Xavier Hazelwood. But that isn't entirely true. They both hold secrets. Behind both of them lie 2 separate wolf packs. Xavier is well on his way to Alpha status and running the pack. Angel is not a wolf but instead the last healer in the world. When the realization comes forward that they are connected by destiny, will they decide to fulfill it? Is their connection predetermined by fate or will they choose their hearts? Lives and packs cross and mingle while romance and conflict brews. The story of 2 opposite souls on a collision path. Will destiny win out? Even the most innocent face, has the darkest secrets.

Word Count: 2,241

https://www.zibbet.com/prettylady/mermaid-off-the-shoulder-floor-length-red-sequined-prom-dress

 I went back to my room to relax. While sketching with music in the background my phone buzzes in my lap. Sage is calling me. I gladly answer it with excitement. “Hello?”

“PLEASE! HELP! ANGEL, HELP ME!” my phone screams at me causing me to stand up.

“Sage! Are you ok?”

“I am fine. I just want to get your attention.” Sage laughs at her dark humor. I take a deep breath and sit back down.

“That was not funny.” 

“Yes, it was.” She laughs in between. “Come on it, it was funny.” 

I gave up on my pride and laugh along. “Fine, it was funny. Do you have to a question of a reason for calling rather than trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Yes, I do. I was wondering if you can come with me to the mall. I need to go prom shopping and I need advice.” I awe in silence thinking she wants me there. But I forgot prom is coming soon. Maybe I should also go shopping for dresses? 

“I would love too let me just check in with my brother to see if I can. I’ll text you. Okay?” I say as I leave my room to find my brother.”

“Yes of course. Just text me.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.” We both sign off and end the call. 

I make my way to the arena where Eric is doing his regular workouts to stay fit. I walk around and avoid any interaction so I don’t ruin someone’s concentration. I see my brother lifting weights in front of a mirror. 

I skip down to his sections and begin to say, “Hello, beautiful brother of mine.” Giving my best smile. I love my brother and he loves me. I know I am my brother’s weakness and it is hard for him to say no to me. It is bad of me to play off of it sometimes.

“What do you want?” As Eric put the weights back in place with Cam’s help. 

“What makes you think I want something? I ask my brother.

He just raises his eyebrow suspiciously. “You never come in open arenas unless you need something.”

“Well, I hate working out and prefer a light jog, unlike some people.” I look around and see all our warriors working out and dying from exhaustion. “Fine.” I give up the act. “I was wondering if I can go to the mall with my friend Sage. Please.” I shyly ask with a soft smile. After I was done I hang my head down low ready to rejection. 

“Sure.” He answers.

My head pops up fast. “Wait really? You are going against father’s wishes for me to stay home?”

“I trust you and trust you enough to go on your own for a couple of hours.”

My eyes widen in shock and slightly confused. “Oh okay. Thank you. I’ll just go then. Bye, love you both. I would hug you but you’re a little sweaty.” 

With my brother’s approval and already texted Sage that I am on my way to pick her up. It will be easier to take one vehicle. Before I could exit out Jesus stops me.

“Where are you going? And who are you meeting?” Jesus does his Mexican interrogation.

“Umm… I asked my brother if I could go to the mall.”

“I know I just got a text from our Alpha saying to come with you,” Jesus says. 

“Oh okay. I didn’t know I had a plus one. Sage and I are going dress shopping for prom.”

“Oh really! Let’s go.” Jesus claps turning his serious expression off and back to his happy self. I smile and follow Jesus who decided to drive. 

We successfully picked up Sage and found a parking spot with shade. Sage is glad Jesus came. They both share an extroverted personality. I’m glad they get along and but both can be stubborn in their ways of living. Like when we pass a pretzel cafe inside the mall. They argue for 10 minutes if a pretzel should be salted or unsalted. We all link arms and skip inside our first stop. It is a bridal shop that holds their seasonal prom dresses collection.

“Alright, bitches here is the game plan. I am looking for a dress that makes me feel sexy, not slutty. A dress with rhinestone but I’m not trying to compete with the disco ball. I don’t care if they are short or long. I want to show everyone that at school I may look like a hot mess. But Just give me 10 minutes and I can be a hot bitch. Yes?” Sage says with her typical power pose.

Jesus and I nod at her demands and starts shopping around. All these dresses are beautiful. I smile and selfish wonder if they would look good on me. I push those thoughts away and remember I am here for Sage. Jesus and I hold open multiple dresses to Sage to see if she seems interested enough to try it on.

In total Sage walks in the dressing room with 10 dresses at a time. 

Jesus sits on a couch in front of the runway. I walk in the dressing room with Sage to help her. We giggle loud enough for the whole shop to hear. I try my best to quiet it down but sometimes Sage just makes me laugh by grunting to get into a dress. 

“I am waiting!” Jesus yells to hurry us up. 

Sage just rolls her eyes and walks out of the runway like a model. She is a feisty 5’5” figure but wants everyone to notice her presence. So she poses, poses and turns around. She did this for each dress she tries on. Jesus openly reacts to each dress. But he also pranks Sage by sneaking in a couple of ugly dresses. My favorite was a terrible big bird dress. I did take a photo of it to always remember this moment. 

After 7 dress Sage like a sparkle golden dress with a deep v neckline and backless. Jesus and I stop what we were doing because Sage looks so beautiful. The long dress flows behind her as she walks.

“Sage you look amazing. Are you going to wear heels?” I ask.

“Yeah, most likely.”

“Sage you need to get this dress. It fits you perfectly. I’m gay and I would fuck you.” Jesus says as he walks around Sage.

“Really? Thank you.” Sage says as we all laugh.

“You know I never been to prom and I have a bow tie that matches that dress.” He winks and hits at Sage.

“Oh really?” Jesus has caught her attention. “I wouldn’t want this dress to go to waste without some arm candy.” She says.

“Plus you wouldn’t have to worry about a date.” I encourage Sage.

“Or the pressure of prom sex.” Jesus smiles.

“You’re right. Do you want to come?” Sage ask.

Jesus kneels down and says, “I would be honored if I can take you to prom. Will you go with me?”

She smiles and says, “Yes, of course.”

“Now it’s Angel’s turn,” Jesus says and I eyes widen of the mention of my name. 

“Oh no. I’m good. I thought we were here for Sage. I’m not sure if I am going to prom.” I stutter and try to decline politely.

“As a power couple, we demand you to go and try on a couple of dresses,” Sage says as she wraps her arm around Jesus. 

“Guys please no,” I beg. “Fine just one then we are leaving.” I give up and let them have their fun. 

“Come with me.” Sage grab my hand drag me into a fitting room. “Stay here we will be back. 

I sit and wait until they pull a dress. I hear outside “Try it on!”

I look at it and my jaw drops down. Are they kidding me? It is a tight red dress. An off the shoulders with a heart neckline. I swallow my pride and just try it. I know it will make them stop pressuring me to go to prom. 

“Guy’s I can’t…” I say.

“Why?”

“It’s too tight. I don’t know.” I don’t feel comfortable in it.

“Just show us. Don’t make me come in there. I will.” Sage yells back at me. I stay quiet then I hear, “I’m going to crawling underneath.” She threatens me.

“Fine. I am coming out.” I am doing this for them rather than me. I unlock the door and walk up to them. I hold myself with my arms wrap around my stomach. I am too self-conscious. I feel like I am about to burst out of this dress like Hulk. I avoid their eye contact.

They weren’t even saying anything which makes this worse. Is it that bad?

“Omg! Angel! Look at you!” Sage run up to me to spin for them.

“What? Is it that bad?” I ask.

“Are you kidding? This is so sexy.” Sage gasp and made me let go of my waist. “You are a sex goddess

“I feel like I have sinned.”

“I feel like your brother is going to kill me,” Jesus says. He knows we must not dress too crazy. As an Alpha member, we must always look presentable and conservative. 

“Who knew you had these curves under all those cardigans,” Sage says. 

I honestly didn’t think my Mexican hips were going to fit in this tight dress and I am scared my boobs are going to pop out of this dress. I’m more of a heavier set of breasts.

“Can I change now?” 

“Wait? What? You have to wear this to Prom.” Sage says. I know she is trying to push me out of my comfort zone. “I can’t wait for Xavier to see you in this. He is going to shit himself.” 

“I don’t think I am going anyways.” I don’t think Xavier would even ask me. I know people want him for prom king. “It is too tight.” I don’t want to wear something I don’t feel confident in. I want to wear something for myself and not for anyone else’s twisted fantasies. 

“It is supposed to be. It is a mermaid cut dress.” Jesus says.

“You should never cut a mermaid,” I mumble.

 In the end, Sage pay for her dress and we make our way back to the car. I feel so much better to be back into my normal clothes. While walking with shopping bags in hand Jesus stops walking and backtracks. His sudden reaction made Sage and I follow his new direction.

“Jesus, where are you going? The car is this way!” I say.

“Isn’t that your brother’s car?” Jesus questions.” 

I look at his direction he was pointing at and I see three men crouching down in shame. They start rolling up the window. I march over to them and knock on the driver side. Through the spotless glass, I see Eric, Cam is on the passenger side, and Xavier sitting in the back. 

With my hand on my hip, I ask, “What is going on here? What are you guys doing here?”

“Oh, we are just shopping.” My brother starts to say.

I calming repeat myself and ask. “Please don’t lie to me.” 

“I’m sorry Angel we were watching you from afar,” Eric says.

“You guys were watching me?” I ask.

“That’s creepy,” Sage says in the background. They all got out of the car and line up in front of me. “Really creepy.”

“Why would you guys do that?” Jesus asks mostly in Cam’s directions. His tone of voice sounds disappointed.

“Well…”

“We...were..”

Both Xavier and Cam stumble with their words do to our disappointed state. 

“We were worried about you,” Xavier says while putting his head down.

“Angel we were worried. This is your first time out since the shooting accident. We didn’t want you to be in trouble or…” Eric trails off as Sage picked the sentence up.

“Or if someone was following us like creepy stalkers,” she completed.

“Do you not trust me?” Jesus asks with watery eyes. I look back and forth between the two lovebirds. I pray for Cam to response the both his mate and his Alpha.

To Cam’s rescue, Eric says. “Considering the recent events, we believe more protection would be helpful. It has nothing to do with your ability to protect her.” 

Jesus stays quiet to please his Alpha. I am still not satisfied with his answer. “Why are you here?” I ask Xavier.

“I went to your house, Eric answered the door and he told me to get into the car. I didn’t realize what we were doing until we saw you shopping.” He answers.

Blood rushes to my cheeks and thinking he saw me in the prom dress. They all saw me in THAT dress. That evil red dress. “So you saw us in the mall and…”

“Yes, we did.” He smiles at his memories which only makes me crumble more of embarrassment. 

“Did you guys have fun?” My brother asks.

“I thought you said you could trust me. I guess I was wrong. I’ll see you at home.” I whimper about my brother’s lie and walk back to the car. 

I hear my brother calling for me but lies are never acceptable. Lies only cause my trust to break and is never put back. 

[mercerislandbooks]

Pride Month Picks

If you don’t already know, June is LGBTQ+ Pride Month, which means it’s time to celebrate and support our community. Businesses across the Puget Sound area are flying rainbow flags, and Island Books is not missing out! To mark the month, we are going to giveaway two awesome rainbow Lokai bracelets (read to the bottom for more details).

It is also an excuse to call attention to queer books, an overarching category for any book that features a LGBTQ+ main character, focuses on queer issues, or is written by a queer author. This is one of my favorite genres because literature about queer people normalizes their existence, in the same way it does with racial or religious minorities.

I have to admit that I told Lillian, our children’s buyer, last summer that I had one rule when I read queer books: No one can die.

This may sound like a silly requirement, but until recently, I felt like all of the books about LGBTQ+ characters were depressing. While trying to portray real world examples of these characters’ situations, the books I saw also squashed hope for a better future. The only queer book I knew about in high school was Blue is the Warmest Color, and it is not the happiest. It seems that queerness in literature equaled heartbreak, and that wasn’t the world I wanted to exist in. (I probably should have gone to a bookstore and asked a salesperson, but I was introverted fifteen year old who wasn’t quite confident enough in her own identity.)

I pulled as many books as I could think of from the teen section that featured queer characters!

I have been so excited over the past year or so to rediscover queer literature, especially for young adults. One of my favorite books of the past year has been Hot Dog Girl by Jennifer Dugan, an adorable book about two best friends mourning the closure of the town theme park, and consequently their childhood. Through their hijinks to save the park, the girls realize that the most important thing they have is their relationship and that they’ve fallen in love. And it’s so sweet! Over the past almost-decade since my rejection of queer books, authors have made a point to write books that show positive role models for queer relationships, highlighting complexity, intersectionality, and humor in fantastic ways.

Consequently, there are now stories about queer characters in almost every genre now, from picture books to literary adult fiction. As there are too many books to showcase in this blog post alone, I’ll start with some of favorite summer reads, which all happen to feature gay relationships.

Camille Perri’s When Katie Met Cassidy is a spin on romantic comedy. Katie is a Kentucky born blond-haired blue-eyed sweetheart working at a law firm in New York City. Raised with traditional family values, she is put into a tailspin when she can’t stop thinking about Cassidy, an androgynously masculine woman working for an opposing firm. On the other side, Cassidy is dealing with her own personal crisis, passing thirty and feeling like she is aging out of her party lifestyle. To top off her woes, Cassidy can’t stop thinking about Katie, the straight girl who is not so straight, either. I loved this hilarious romance because gracefully deals with identity politics and the complications of being true to one’s instincts. Camille Perri focuses on queer communities and the power of female relationships.

Two books I loved featuring kitten paws.

Red, White, and Royal Blue is one of my must-reads this summer. It has received a huge amount of hype; I read the book in the day and the hype is accurate. The book poses the question, What if the hypothetical First Son of America and the hypothetical Prince of Wales hated each other? What if they had to spend PR time together for political peace and then fell in love? What if?? While the plot may sound silly, I adore the book because Casey McQuiston does a fantastic job of balancing the levity of first love with real-world consequences of such a political “scandal.” As a bonus, I enjoyed how vivid and realistic the characters are.

On the literary side, there are so many beautifully written books about queer experiences that I cannot even begin to cover them all. I will talk about two, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and Lie With Me by Philippe Besson, translated by Molly Ringwald. All books about queer people deal with ideas of self-identity, especially when the characters are discovering their sexualities. These two books both follow men in their experiences with first love and heartbreak. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the main character Little Dog writes a letter to his illiterate mother about his childhood and experiences growing up the child of a Vietnamese immigrant. The poetry of Ocean Vuong’s previous work bleeds seamlessly into this sometimes stream-of-consciousness narrative. One of my favorite things about the novel is how Little Dog’s sexual identity is not the main focus of his story but simply an aspect. The intersectionalism of Vuong’s work is definitely one of its many strengths. I definitely broke my rule about death with this one, but the sadness is integral to the story line.

Lie With Me is heartbreaking. There is no way for me to get around it, but the simplicity and restrained manner of the French translation is addicting. The book starts with the narrator seeing a teenager in a hotel lobby that looks identical to his first love. This vision sends him into a spiral of memories, jumping back and forth in time and space. Because of its a reminiscence, the AIDS epidemic tints his youth in grief. The reader also learns that the title has a double-meaning, referring to both the intimacy of the teenagers and the social perjury they have to commit. I loved the uncomplicated language and the fundamental and overwhelming emotions that fill the story. Clearly, there is a reason it sold over 120,000 copies in France.

Though there are many more queer books that I could have reviewed, these are some of my favorites of the year so far. Each of them delved deeper into the emotional milieu of queer identification than expected or spoke to me in a personal way.

We have two bracelets up for grabs! Photo courtesy of Lokai.com

Please come into the store if you would like to get more recommendations or just simply chat! We would all be delighted to help you. If you would like to win one of these super fun Lokai bracelets, post a picture on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram of your favorite queer read and tag us! We will be taking submissions until the 20th of June.

Happy Pride!

— Kelleen

[rinamrathos1971-blog]

I have a late 2009 model where I upgraded to a ssd and increased the RAM on my own but it's still failing. I was holding out for a new mbp since I need it for a CS class in school but the newest models are just so expensive that I'm tempted to just drop the class instead lol. I've been looking for a 2015 model but they are hard to find and very expensive. That was a Green Iprovement. A Card that can only be played by Green Heroes. As soon as it got reworked, Mono Blue control became top of the metagame and Green as a color disappeared. Win 40% of cali, get 40% of their elecotral college votes. Win 80% of texas, 80% of their votes. The minority political party maters again to eek out votes in "safe" states. 14 points submitted 5 days agoI honestly still expected him to win, this past month was a shit show for him though. I think the second he was on people lips for the false police report, people started telling all their stories of him being a creep.He was really desperate towards the end, misleading people about endorsements (especially Will Guzzardi), he openly accused La Spata team of defacing his election signs on Twitter yesterday, and there were lots of complaints of his people electioneering past the set boundaries.The fact that Moreno raised over $653,000 compared to La Spata $74,000 and still got his butt kicked is so amazing.I live a block away from Daniel, and my goodness did I have someone knocking on my door every other day. He was really motivated and slayed Goliath. With each episode, I just love Soo Im more and more. She doesn shy away from what she truly believes in and carries herself with so much class. For this reason, it so easy to root for her as a viewer. Daria morgendorffer. She a little bitch to everyone all series constantly whining about how everyone is a moron and she the only one in school with any brains and also about how she this big out cast. The thing is she made a lot of her own problems with her shitty attitude. Well, this is 영동출장샵 simplified. First of all, you only get citizenship through ius soli when your parents have lived here legally for at least eight years. As a rule of thumb, children born here get german citizenship if their parents would be technically eligible for citizenship (ignoring shortcuts etc.). Right, I get it isn't safe for you to be out in your current environment. Work up to getting out of there ASAP and some therapy. You're not going to hell for being gay lovely, that I can guarantee you. Skin problems can be caused by everything from viruses to heat. Warts are caused by human papillomavirus, or HPV, and more than 100 different strains of the virus exist [source: CDC]. Other examples of skin issues include athlete's foot, which is caused by fungal infections, and heat rash, which blocks off openings for sweat trapping it under the skin's surface.. I got ganked, left behind, and had to try and run back from the HP. I was there around 30 or 40 minutes mostly just walking with no definite purpose 영동출장샵 in mind. I learned nothing of value other than, unlike PvE, you don randomly join a commanders squad. In the future, these questions will likely be posed for cities that exist on the moon or Mars. Urban planning in such situations will have the added challenge of dealing with microgravity, extreme temperatures, radiation and other environmental issues. You might think that such a city is unrealistic, but NASA has been planning a "city in the sky" for years.

[outropeace]

20+ Jealous Louis Fics:

Fake It Till You Make It (136k)

In a twisted turn of events, Louis finds himself posing as the brother of his fiancé, Harry, for an annual company retreat.

Did he sign up for this? No.

Is he doing it anyway? Yes.

Can they actually pull this off? Probably not.

It started with a whisper (92k)

Louis isn’t someone who Harry thought he could ever be with, and Louis never thought he’d break his rules for anyone.

Sometimes being wrong isn’t so bad after all.

Don’t Look Down (91k)

AU. In which Louis is a solicitor at one of London’s most prestigious law firms and Harry happens to apply for the position as his trainee. And everyone else is around, too.

Pinkies Never Lie (83k)

AU in which Louis hates his job and loves Harry, Harry just wants a distraction, everyone else wants them to get their shit together, and Louis learns the hard way that new beginnings are only possible when something ends.

Now you know me (for your eyes only) (77k)

larry duet

Just a Flower Boy (70k)

Harry Styles is a clumsy, flower crown-wearing, openly gay junior with only two true friends, Niall and Zayn. Louis Tomlinson is the school’s attractive, straight football captain, with a small body and a big personality. As fate will have it, Harry has a huge, unrequited, utterly hopeless crush on Louis.

the impossible now (49k)

A wish on Christmas Eve sends Louis to an alternate dimension where Harry is a member of One Direction.

Skin New, Hands True, My Hands All Over You (44k)

Harry designs wedding cakes, so of course meeting blissfully happy couples every day is part of his job description. Unfortunately, it’s caused Harry to perpetually hope each new day is the one he’ll find love, too. That is, until Harry realises everything he’s ever wanted is right under his nose in the shape of his best friend, Louis.

to kill the mess we’ve made (42k)

AU where Harry and Louis are both models, and they decide being friends-with-benefits is a great idea. It isn’t.

I could use somebody (41k)

Louis comes to stay at Liam’s place while he’s on a business trip. Liam’s boyfriend Harry is the last person Louis should be dreaming about or lusting after. But what do you do when you fall for your little brother’s boyfriend? Louis tries to stay away. He does.

Can’t love, Can’t hurt (40k)

Harry is living on Gemma’s sofa after he moved out of his and Louis’ flat because he just couldn’t take it anymore. Watching Louis with his girlfriend during the day and then coming home and curling around Harry on the sofa. So he moved out and now Louis might be losing his mind because Harry’s gone. The lads worry after Harry says something in an interview that he just won’t talk to them about. And Gemma is an awesome sister.

To Be Loved and To Be In Love (34k)

First Dates AU. Louis Tomlinson is a thirty-year-old divorcee whose friends have signed him up for the Channel 4 show First Dates. Harry Styles is a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer who has never been in a long-term relationship. They are filmed going on their first date.

You’re the Light (31k)

Before beginning a new graduate school in the fall, Louis Tomlinson decides to spend the summer working in Chicago as an editor’s assistant for the Chicago Tribune newspaper and staying with his old college roommate. What he finds on his first day of work is a tall, gorgeous editor named Harry who has the most beautiful green eyes he’s ever seen—and who also happens to be his new boss.

Candles On Air (29k)

Or a short roadtrip!au in which Harry and Louis have to travel together across the US, deal with the past and of course, share a bed.

Play the Odds (25k)

Harry and Louis are best friends since childhood who, after a night of drinking, find themselves locked in a bet: first one to kiss the other a thousand times wins. Wins what? They don’t know. Glory, Harry supposes. Bragging rights, though those don’t do much in this economy. All Harry knows is that this is one bet he can finally win. What he doesn’t expect, though, is what happens when he starts kissing his best friend on a daily basis.

Gold Running Through My Veins (24k)

an Olympic gymnastics AU that finds sworn enemies Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson on the same Olympic team, battling it out for gold medals in Belgium while they fall, quite stubbornly, in love. Featuring a steamy striptease in an empty gym, Harry canoodling with a gymnast from another country, a bit of sight-seeing in gorgeous Belgium and some really delicious waffles.

Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me But Divine Intervention (19k)

the soul mate AU where Harry overthinks everything having to do with finding the love of his life, and Louis doesn’t think there’s a Mr. Right for him at all. It takes them a while to realize that their soul mate is the person they want it to be: each other.

A Little Love (is better than none) (15k)

It’s supposed to be no strings attached sex, but Harry’s in love with beauty and tragedy and Louis Tomlinson so there might actually a few strings they’re not talking about.

lay all your spells to bed (i’ll choose unloved instead) (13k)

high school au; harry and louis have been best friends all through high school. harry’s got a crush, and louis isn’t jealous. he really, really isn’t.

Just Lucky (13k)

Jay looked uncharacteristically thrilled by her daughter’s latest choice of boyfriend but that could be because the guy was smiling at her in, what could only be described as, a charming manner. Louis inexplicably found himself wishing that smile was directed at him.

Harry couldn’t possibly be his soulmate…could he?

two feet standing on a principle (10k)

Harry is a famous fashion model and Louis works at the mall, nobody knows they broke up two weeks ago.

one day you’ll see (all the things that we can be) (10k)

Louis has a problem; he’s in love with his best mate.

It’s Always You, I Always Knew (8k)

Or the one where Louis pines pathetically and miserably for his best friend who is inconveniently taken.

+jealous harry +more fics

[sartle-blog]

Sex Lives of Dead Presidents

[biofunmy]

Inside ‘The Circle,’ Reality TV Gets a Social Media Filter

LONDON — “Message: ‘Hey girls, hey. I want to start this chat just to get to know all of you. Girls who stick together are pretty girls.’ Emoji heart. …”

Alana Duval, 25, from Brownsville, Tex., begins a group chat with three of her seven fellow contestants. They are sitting in separate apartments, never meet in person, and they bond and back-stab only through online profiles and a voice-activated social media platform.

It may not immediately strike you as a killer television format. But the drama had already begun.

“How old is Alana again?” wondered another contestant, Samantha Cimarelli. “Because she’s acting like she’s in high school.”

When “The Circle” debuted in Britain in 2018, cultural commentators were skeptical, to say the least. The Guardian predicted “fame-hungry nitwits sitting alone in their pants spewing small talk online,” and asked if the concept heralded “the coming of the apocalypse.”

But the series, a reality competition show in which “anyone can be anyone,” soon became a cult hit. Within a month, that same newspaper was hailing it as “one of the standout TV shows this year,” and Netflix snapped up the global rights. A 12-episode American version debuts on Netflix Jan. 1, and Brazilian and French versions are in the pipeline.

Contestants craft their online profiles with the focus and precision of a brain surgeon. While some opt for full-frontal honesty, others exploit the artifice of social media to experiment with their identities — or purely to help win the $100,000 prize. Past impostors, known as catfish in social media parlance, have switched gender or sexual orientation, pretended to be their sons or girlfriends, and even invented babies and dead pets.

But how did producers turn this flurry of emojis and hashtags into binge-worthy entertainment? (Ultimately, the show is mostly scenes of solitary people talking to themselves and their screens.) Is it an ennobling social experiment, as its producers — and many of its contestants — suggest? Or is it a descent into the worst inanities of contemporary online discourse? In 2020, does it matter?

“We’re in a social media era — that’s how we’re going to be defined 1,000 years from now,” said Shubham Goel, a virtual-reality designer from Danville, Calif., who is a contestant on the American version. “I think the show really encapsulates the world more than any other thing at this time.”

Producers clearly hope they have distilled the essence of our times. Ratings for the British “Circle” have been modest (1.2 million viewers on average), but the series has been catnip among 16-to-34-year-olds: The first season was Channel 4’s “youngest profiling” show in six years, according to the British TV industry magazine Broadcast, drawing half its viewers from that sought-after demographic.

“The starting point I’d had is: What would a reality show look like where people never met face to face?” said Tim Harcourt, the creative director of Studio Lambert, which produces the original British series and the international versions for Netflix. “At the same time, I had also been toying with a ‘Rear Window’-style documentary where you could visually see all these people in their apartments, living out their lives, but they were atomized.”

The two strands came together when Harcourt heard that Channel 4 was searching for a reality-show format centered on social media.

“Quite quickly I realized I had a much more simple game of communication and of masks,” he said.

Sometimes those masks can help a contestant’s efforts; other times, not so much. In the British version, James Doran, a 26-year-old recruitment consultant, morphed into Sammie, a single mother with an angelic baby — the guise he felt would be most likely to prevent his competitors from voting him out. He reached the final.

Busayo Twins, meanwhile, a 24-year-old black woman, became Josh, a trust-fund kid “with a white savior complex” pictured on his snowboarding holidays. She said she had wanted to subvert “the stereotypes attached to black confident women that they may be angry or aggressive.” After a cake she decorated appeared to show the imprint of long fingernails, she was suspected of being a catfish and “blocked.”

Other players’ experiences complicate the very idea of authenticity. Duval, a white, blonde model with more than 80,000 Instagram followers, used her real identity in her profile, which featured a professional-looking portrait and declared, “Tacos all day every day.” Her status was immediately in jeopardy.

One of the series’s hallmarks is its diversity, and not only in demographic terms — not every player is as practiced as Duval in social media. Goel, 23, described by Harcourt as “probably one of my favorite all-time reality characters in any show,” is an earnest Indian-American techie who described social media as “our modern-day bubonic plague.” But “The Circle” eventually won him over.

“I brought a Shakespeare book, and I was playing a lot of Ping-Pong against the wall,” he said in a phone interview. “As the game went along, I kept losing my hobbies because I was so enrapt in my connections with these people.” He said he still communicates with his fellow contestants on a private Instagram group. (Their season completed filming earlier this year in Manchester, England, where every version is filmed.)

Amid the naked gamesmanship engendered by “The Circle,” beautiful human stories emerge. In the second British season, Georgina Elliott, 22, uploaded a photo of herself wearing a bikini and an ileostomy bag — to raise awareness of Crohn’s disease. It helped cement a friendship with Paddy Smyth, 31, who had started by uploading only pictures of himself without his crutches. (He calls them “glam sticks.”) He had wanted to hide his cerebral palsy.

“It’s not that I’m ashamed or scared,” he later told Elliott by dictating to his TV screen. “It’s that I wanted to feel what it would be like for once to just be me and not be that disabled guy.”

Elliott responded with the hashtag #ProudOfYouProudGayDisabledMan. Both ended the virtual conversation in real tears, and Smyth soon opened up about his disability to the rest of the group.

Not everyone is quite so smitten. Helen Piper, a professor of television and film studies at the University of Bristol, believes that the “obligation to perform,” which has been at the heart of reality TV for decades, has been “turbocharged” by the pretense encouraged by social media.

“I think the whole moral, touchy-feely thing that they’re talking about is a bit of a facade,” she said. “It’s substituting for a kind of more robust moral framework, in which people could really be themselves. They can’t just be a single parent, they have to be a single parent who’s ‘struggled’, who has to narrativize that process.”

The fact that a catfish won the first British season, she added, shows how hollow all the talk of “authenticity” is.

“But we’re all spinning narratives of ourselves now, that’s the world we’re in,” she said. “The personality is everything. The performance is all.”

Few have been as central to TV’s transformation in that regard as Peter Bazalgette, who as a British TV executive at the turn of the millennium helped take the Dutch reality series “Big Brother” global. At the time, he received no shortage of easy criticism, but he believes reality TV has played a part in fostering open-mindedness, citing winners of “Big Brother” who were gay, transgender, or had Tourette’s syndrome.

At its best, he argued, reality TV showed the “humanity behind the stereotype.”

“It’s a very clever format,” he said of “The Circle,” “and it touches a very contemporary nerve — the uncertainty we feel in what I like to think of as the digital dystopia. Are people what they seem online?”

Eventually, that format ensures that all players, regardless of strategy, must confront such tricky questions unfiltered: When a contestant is voted out, he or she is allowed to meet one other player in person. Those exits can be complicated, but the five contestants interviewed for this article expressed overwhelmingly positive feelings about their time on the show.

Karyn Blanco was one of them. After a straight male contestant is eliminated from the American version early, Blanco must reveal her true identity to him. She had posed as a willowy 27-year-old named Mercedeze, who is intentionally vague about her sexuality, using photos donated by a stranger. In reality, she is a 37-year-old lesbian from the Bronx.

In an unguarded moment, she confessed: “I did a catfish because all my life I’ve been judged. I’m not ugly, but I’m not feminine. So it’s really the fact of just showing the world you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Still, the acceptance she received after unveiling her true self “pretty much revived my faith in humanity,” she said in a phone interview.

“I feel as though it made me just look a little bit differently towards men as far as why they’re so protective of their ego when it comes to me being around,” she said. “I just learned a little bit more about myself and the power of perception.”

Sahred From Source link Arts

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Kanye West Has Long Been Primed For Radicalization

https://styleveryday.com/kanye-west-has-long-been-primed-for-radicalization/

Kanye West Has Long Been Primed For Radicalization

Then president-elect Donald Trump and Kanye West pose for media at Trump Tower in New York City, on Dec. 13, 2016.

Andrew Kelly / Reuters

The past week has been particularly difficult for Kanye West fans. Since reactivating his Twitter account on April 13, the rapper has declared his love for Trump — “You don’t have to agree with Trump but the mob can’t make me not love him” — and showed enthusiasm for a prospective meeting with Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel. Though West had previously taken a meeting with Trump, shortly after the election, this was the first time he appeared to actually endorse the president. People reacted by saying West had finally hit the point of no return, sharing memes of the rapper in the “sunken place,” and laughing at the hypocrisy of West championing free speech and free thought while showing admiration for the man who spent a fortune to shutter Gawker. But if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realize that West’s current behavior falls in line with what made him appealing in the first place.

Because in addition to his brutal honesty and glowing narcissism, West is someone who thinks of himself as a perpetual underdog and who still seeks validation from various elites.

West has spent the entirety of his career trying to kick the door down on spaces he has been excluded from. On his debut album back in 2004, West waxed poetic about how he was laughed at by his label for wanting to transition from producer to rapper, and made the hit song “Jesus Walks” about how difficult it’d be to get Christian rap on the radio. He often scoffed at the amount of awards he would lose even while being ranked 11th for the most Grammys won of all time.

He considered himself to be an underdog, facing off against naysayers, white supremacists, and stubborn institutions, but he was also an early advocate for certain social justice issues, talking about the effects of the drug trade on young black men, speaking out against anti-gay sentiment in the hip-hop community well before other people of his level of fame, and most infamously decrying the media coverage of black victims of Hurricane Katrina and President George W. Bush’s handling of the catastrophe in 2005. While those views are well within the mainstream today, West’s outspokenness was not cosigned by his peers at the time.

West’s message of individuality, self-worth, and perseverance in lines like “Every motherfucker told me that I couldn’t rhyme / Now I could let these dream killers kill my self-esteem / Or use my arrogance as the steam to power my dreams” from his 2004 song “Last Call” seemed to really resonate with his young audience, and put West in the position where his voice helped many young fans find theirs. By sharing his own stories he stumbled into being a role model for a generation of teens looking for a way to be their authentic selves.

West is someone who thinks of himself as a perpetual underdog and who still seeks validation from various elites.

West was generally consistent in getting positive feedback for his unsolicited opinions, but a big turning point around West’s public persona was the infamous 2009 MTV Video Music Awards with Taylor Swift. More so than his repudiation of Bush, his interruption of the young country star accepting the award for Best Female Video made West a kind of a martyr for free speech. While it was objectively a rude gesture, in that moment, West vs. Swift became a tableau for the rejection of white mediocrity eclipsing black art, a message most of West’s black fans were happy to see brought to light. Even immediately after, rapper Wale fronting the awards show’s house band said, “You can’t fault a man for speaking his mind.” West was put through the wringer for challenging what art deserves recognition, famously going on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and shedding a tear when asked what his recently deceased mother would have thought of his behavior. But the gesture won him ardent support from those critical of awards shows, establishing West as a more honest barometer of the music industry, especially given how quick he was to concede awards he won to the artist he felt was more deserving.

West had one notable critic though, in then-president Barack Obama, who called West a jackass in a leaked, behind-the-scenes CNBC interview from 2009. He would later stand by the remark in a 2012 Atlantic profile of the rapper. Though West was somewhat magnanimous in his response — “Obama has way more important stuff to worry about than my public perception,” he told XXL in 2009 — it must surely have grated that he’d been denied a relationship with Obama at every turn, and that embarrassment seemed to set into motion his years-later endorsement of Trump.

After the release of his career-defining album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, West decided to launch his own women’s fashion line, and once again he felt himself unfairly excluded from the upper echelons of the fashion word. He invited every major fashion critic to see it in a packed show at Paris Fashion Week in fall 2011, to disappointing results. The Wall Street Journal wrote, “The only thing more painful than witnessing the dress was watching the model pitch down the runway in shoes so ill-fitting that her spike heels were bending at angles.”

West channeled his anger into Yeezus, his abrasive 2013 album that took specific shots at the fashion industry, religious leaders, corporate America, and white supremacy again. He did a series of interviews that excoriated what he perceived to be the elitism of big fashion corporations like Nike, as well as the limits placed on him as a celebrity. He was allowed to be sponsored by brands, but was not allowed to give them any creative input in return.

West said in a 2015 interview with Zane Lowe that prior to his Adidas deal, “I’m giving examples of work that I did that was really successful and I’m getting just completely shut down. But not just by the company we talked about last time, but every single company, every single company you could imagine is just like, ‘No, you are a celebrity. You are not allowed to create, you’re not allowed to think, you’re not allowed to have an opinion.’” However, after the Adidas deal had already proven itself to be a success, West claimed on Twitter to be $53 million in debt and tried to rally his followers into convincing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to invest $1 billion into his ideas. His platitudes of self-worth mutated, now he was a self-professed thought leader, though his thoughts felt even more erratic and inscrutable. He wasn’t just a celebrity anymore, he was akin to Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Nikola Tesla — figures that had little to do with music or fashion.

West had always had an ego, but had demonstrably put himself into a bubble and ceased to empower his fans. And while he was not necessarily wrong to rank himself among the most influential public figures in 2013 — in fact several publications corroborated his statement — in fighting to be perceived as a thought leader he exposed the myopia he developed a decade into fame. He used the fact that he and his wife, Kim Kardashian, had to lobby to be recognized by institutions like Vogue or the Hollywood Walk of Fame as an example of why classicism had replaced racism — as if they were new money still fighting old money for respect. He equated the fashion world not taking him seriously to Michael Jackson not being played on MTV because he was black. West ignored constructive criticism from those who cared and questioned how his plight actually affected others, clamoring for meetings with influential businesspeople and seemingly feeding himself a media diet of what he wanted to hear instead.

Just last week, when West shared pictures of his baffling new Yeezy shoe designs, the fan reactions were less than kind — and it felt like an ominous precursor to what was to come. One Twitter user named @Cripple_God, who uses a wheelchair, quote-tweeted a photo of the electric blue Yeezy slides the rapper debuted and said, “Wouldn’t wear these shits if they could make me walk.” The post was retweeted thousands of times.

Damon Young’s recent piece on VerySmartBrothas about West refusing to read is apt because it indicates that West looks for convenience in the content he consumes. Physically isolating himself in his Hidden Hills home or in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and seemingly separating himself from people who could question his views (though he did just have John Legend over for dinner after Legend himself made news for trying to convince West or others to detach from Trump), allows him to seek out any sort of message in media that serves as a unchallenged validation of his thoughts.

Donald Trump was a win for Kanye West because he now has access to a man who can relate to being ostracized by corporate America and those elites in power that West himself was trying to ingratiate himself to. Like Trump, West has proven to thrive off the credit he has been given, and now two Republican presidents have publicly shared how big an effect he’s had on them, for better or worse. Meanwhile, Trump now has a black face with star power that just so happens to share his desperate need for validation from the most powerful people in the world.

What’s next with West is hard to pin down. His music is often where he is most insightful, but if the song he posted Friday called “Lift Yourself” is any indication, he is not taking public opinion about his recent actions very seriously. A second song released Friday night, “Ye Vs The People,” is a political tête-à-tête with rapper T.I., which ends at an impasse, possibly indicating that he is still under the same delusion he was in 2013, believing he was the one person in the world who could rebrand a Confederate flag or MAGA hat as symbols of black empowerment. For as much controversy as he has caused, while dropping hints about running for president in 2020, he admits to having little knowledge about conservative politics.

His recent retaliations against Obama and Jay-Z seem to indicate that West still cares about other powerful black cultural figures’ opinions, though he could just be raging against the lack of attention they seem to pay to him. By all accounts, the visionary has finally lost his laser-focused vision, and some have even said he’s been “redpilled.” Whatever the case, what is constant is West will continue to look for respect, whether it be from the president of Universal Music or the president of the United States, and as he racks up debt — whether it be emotional or financial or both — those who lose out the most are the generation of fans who have stood by him up until now. ●

[marmara]

JUN 10 The Incredible Shrinking Woman  If I ever have grandchildren, which seems a long shot at time of writing, I shall gather them on my knee and tell them of the General Election of 2017. "Grandpa Gladstone", their little voices will pipe; "tell us the tale of Corbyn the destroyer; of the Incredible Shrinking Woman; and of how the blazes the Democratic Unionist Party ended up in government". And I shall take my pipe from my mouth, look deep into the middle distance and try to explain how Theresa May was transformed in six short weeks from Boadicea to Jar Jar Binks; how a Labour leader whose own MPs didn't want him to become prime minister stormed the country like a tribute act to the Stones; and how an election inspired by Brexit ignored the single biggest issue confronting the country. This was a night of paradox and perplexity. The Conservatives gained their largest share of the vote since Margaret Thatcher in 1983, winning more votes than Tony Blair at the height of his popularity. Yet Theresa May emerges not so much diminished as shrivelled, her departure now a matter of time. The Labour Party lost its third general election in a row, gaining only four more seats than under Gordon Brown in 2010. Yet its supporters are electrified, its fortunes on the march and Jeremy Corbyn's leadership unassailable. So what can we learn from what happened - and where might things go from here? First, this was a good night for democracy. The two most dangerous tendencies in our political system - the long withdrawal of the young from electoral politics, and the imbalance of power between generations - have been decisively and spectacularly reversed. Young voters swept through the polling stations like an avenging army; and, far from piling up uselessly in already safe seats, their votes carried Tory citadels like Kensington and Canterbury. For this - wherever one stands on his policies - Corbyn deserves enormous credit. He set out to re-engage young people with democracy, and our politics will be healthier as a result. It was a good night, too, for Parliament. Since the referendum last year, our politics has been infected with a poisonous atmosphere of authoritarianism. Dissent has been treated as heresy and opposition as treason, while parliamentarians have been held up as 'Enemies of the People'. For our repellent tabloid press, this was to have been an exorcism, not an election: a chance to 'crush the saboteurs', impose 'unity' on Westminster and burn out of Parliament dissenting voices. Instead, May has lost her majority and must live at the will of other parties in the House. Contrary to the strange fascination with 'strong and stable government', a hung Parliament is likely to provide better government than an outright majority. The wilder fringes of the Tory manifesto - grammar schools, fox hunting, compulsory voter ID - are now surely in the dustbin. Ministers must engage seriously with Parliament over Brexit, and something will surely have to give on NHS funding, the schools budget and the wider decay of Britain's public services. A third beneficiary of the campaign is the Union with Scotland (if not with Northern Ireland). Multi-party politics are back, and the unhealthy situation by which neither the Government nor the Opposition at Westminster had any stake in the Scottish electorate has come to an end. In Scotland, as in England, the populist tide has been checked: and a second independence referendum looks more distant than at any time since 2014. Finally, the result has exposed the pretensions of our putrid tabloid press. Every drop of poison that could be wrung from the bile ducts of The Sun, The Mail and The Express was poured out upon Labour in this campaign. It proved powerless to prevent a historic collapse in the Tory lead. The tabloids' readership has been contracting for years, and is concentrated in ever smaller sectors of the electorate. If this election finally breaks their hold upon the governing classes (and upon the broadcast media), our democracy will be healthier as a result. So what of the two main parties? It hardly needs saying that this was a catastrophic result for the Conservatives and a humiliation for May personally. So it is perhaps worth reiterating that the Tories remain comfortably the largest party in the House, winning more seats than Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens combined. A campaign of almost comic ineptitude nonetheless delivered 42.4% of the vote and 13.6 million individual suffrages. The party has rebuilt its fortunes in Scotland, increased its vote share in Wales and piled up additional votes (though not seats) in the North and the Midlands. None of this detracts from the disaster of the night, but it suggests that a more adept leader, wielding a less destructive manifesto, would have something to work with. Yet the new Tory coalition of which the party dreamed has also proven fissile - and things may get worse before they get better. UKIP voters did not march obediently into the Conservative column; on the contrary, a significant minority seems to have found in Corbyn the anti-establishment, protest figure they had previously identified in Farage. In Scotland, the Ruth Davidson effect is predicated on a model of Conservatism that has precious little in common with the Brexiteering, anti-immigrant, UKIP-lite confection served up by May - let alone with their new allies in the DUP. If Scottish Tories vote loyally with their party at Westminster, they risk destroying their brand in Holyrood; if they do not, May's troubles are only just beginning. Above all, the alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party poses real dangers to the Conservatives. A party that screamed blue murder at the prospect of a Labour-SNP alliance in 2015, and that (rightly) made much of Corbyn's IRA connections, has a great deal to lose from climbing into the lap of an extreme evangelical party, keen to funnel money to its own supporters in Ulster. The votes of the anti-gay, anti-abortion, climate-change deniers of the evangelical right may carry the Conservatives through a parliamentary session, but the damage to their reputation could be severe. What, then, of Labour? Those of us who have been critical of Corbyn should acknowledge the scale of his achievement. A party that seemed dead and buried just weeks ago has gained seats across Scotland, Wales and the South of England. It has energised young activists and voters, while posting its highest share of the vote since the landslide election of 2001. Corbyn's leadership is now untouchable, and the premiership no longer a fantasy. Yet for Labour, too, there are problems ahead. The Labour manifesto was a superb campaigning document, but as a programme for government, it had two significant flaws. In the first instance, the party has no policy of any substance on Brexit: the issue that will consume the attention of the next Parliament. Brexit was a gaping void in the Labour manifesto, that was only possible because of the comparable silence coming from the Conservative benches. A hung Parliament makes that conspiracy of silence harder to maintain, and puts at risk the alliance between Labour's Eurosceptic leadership and the young voters who have driven its revival. Secondly, the Labour manifesto - however attractive in the short-term - has saddled the party with a mass of spending commitments from which it will not be easy to resile. That's fine, if it can find the revenue to pay for them; but with a disruptive Brexit looming and a probable deterioration in the economy, tax revenues are more likely to shrink than to grow in the coming years. Labour is right to declare war on the injustices of austerity, but the call to battle has not been accompanied by any serious debate about how to finance this. Doing so will involve a more serious conversation about taxation - and about priorities - than the party has yet been willing to countenance. Finally, the coalition of forces behind the Labour vote looks almost as fissile as the Conservatives'. Labour brought to the polling stations two very different sets of voters: one, fired by enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn; another, that deplores the Labour leadership but was confident it would not win. That coalition may prove harder to sustain as power becomes a realistic prospect. In short, the revival of the two-party system seems to me more brittle than at first appears. Both main parties remain unstable coalitions, wheeling their rickety caravans into the storms blowing from the East. The whirligig of Brexit is only now beginning to turn; and when British politics stumbles out the other end, it may yet look very different to the present. Posted 10th June by Robert Saunders 5 View comments MAY 22 The May Illusion  As David Cameron could testify, the danger of basing an election campaign on a fantasy is that it rarely survives the collision with reality. The speed with which Cameron cut the trouser elastic of his own government, barely a year after promising "competence" versus "chaos", set a high benchmark for political mis-selling; but his successors are approaching the challenge with considerable verve. In junking her flagship policy on social care - her fourth significant U-turn in ten months - Theresa May has transformed "strong and stable leadership" from a slogan into a punchline. As Margaret Thatcher could have reminded her, "being a strong leader is like being a lady: if you have to tell people you are, you probably aren't". Of all the robotic slogans currently raking their nails across the eardrums of the electorate, the "strong and stable" tag seems the most ill-judged. That's not just because it sounds like a brand of toilet paper, or one of those pills you can buy from the condom machines in the pub. "Strength" is a bold claim for a government that abandoned its budget at the first breath of tabloid criticism, and whose leader spent three days rummaging around for her backbone while others spoke out against Trump's Muslim ban. A "strong" leader does not spend an election campaign sealed in private locations in case she accidentally meets a member of the public, or refuse questions from the press unless they've been approved in advance. Nor was this strength much in evidence during the referendum last year, when May announced that Britain would be less prosperous, less secure and less sovereign outside the EU, before going into hiding for the rest of the campaign and then pivoting on a sixpence within hours of the vote. As for "stability": whatever is coming over the hill on 8 June, it is not a period of cautious managerialism. This is a government of almost staggering ambition, dedicated to the most radical, disruptive policy adventure of modern times. In just two years it plans to rip up our single largest trading arrangement, overhaul 40 years of foreign and economic policy, and reconstruct our entire system of agricultural funding, regional policy, industrial strategy and border control. When the dust has settled, we may perhaps be more prosperous, more sovereign and more "global" than we are today. But this is not a manifesto for "stability". At best, it is an exhilarating slalom-ride into undiscovered territory; at worst, a wild plunge off the edge of a cliff. Like Iron Man, facing down an alien army with a reminder that "we have a Hulk", the Tory plan for Brexit seems to go little further than to put Theresa May in charge of it and invite her to "smash". Yet there is not the slightest evidence that May is suited to the Messianic role in which she has been cast. The result is an extravagant fiction: a personality-based campaign, marketing a personality that cannot safely be exposed to the electorate. History does not record whether May is a fan of winsome boyband One Direction; yet in the very week that Harry Styles launched his solo career, the Conservative Party seemed to have joined his former employers on the scrapheap of history. At the manifesto launch on Thursday, the Tory brand was hardly to be seen. Instead, banners proclaimed "Theresa May's team" and "Theresa May's manifesto for government", while Cabinet ministers bounced up and down like love-struck teenagers, cheering "my policies", "my manifesto" and "my government". The danger is that this becomes a substitute for serious thought. May tells us, repeatedly, that "every vote for me and my team strengthens my hand in the Brexit negotiations". Yet the EU27 will negotiate on the basis of their national and collective self-interest, not on their reading of the arithmetic at Westminster. What the British government needs is not less scrutiny at home but a clearer understanding of what it is trying to achieve. May has at least begun to nod towards the risks involved. Launching the Conservative her manifesto last week, she warned that if the negotiations failed, "the consequences for Britain and for ... ordinary working people will be dire". Yet the only danger she seems willing to acknowledge is that the negotiations might be conducted by somebody else, who lacks her strength and steel. A prime minister who will not admit the trade-offs inherent in Brexit - who refuses even to acknowledge that the currency dropped as a result of the Brexit vote - is setting up voters for an incendiary collision with reality. May likes to be compared to Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" who brandished her handbag at the European Council. A more troubling precedent might be Neville Chamberlain, another politician who took personal control of foreign policy despite having no experience of diplomacy. Chamberlain is a much-misunderstood figure, whose reputation as an "appeaser" has left an unfortunate legacy in British politics. In popular memory, he has become a caricature in a political morality tale, which contrasts the "weak" diplomacy of the "appeasers" with the roar of the Churchillian lion. Yet Chamberlain's problem was not weakness but an exaggerated confidence in his own strength - and a determination to take command of a policy area he did not understand. Like May, Chamberlain marked a shift from previous Conservative leaders, and he brought to the premiership a substantial record in domestic politics. He inherited one of the great parliamentary majorities of the twentieth century; and his approval ratings reached such extraordinary proportions that pop songs were composed in his honour. Yet he had little feel for diplomacy. His brother, who had been Foreign Secretary, famously urged him to "remember that you don't know anything about foreign affairs", but the warning went unheeded. Viewing dissent as disloyalty, he actively shut down alternative sources of debate, closing the Foreign Office News Department when it reported on Nazi rearmament, leaning on newspaper editors not to report stories that might jeopardise the talks with Germany, and demanding unity behind his negotiating position. As one of his ministers later recalled, "He was so sure that his plan was right ... that his singleness of urgent purpose made him impatient of obstacles and indifferent to incidental risks". From the Munich disaster to the Suez crisis, and from Cameron's EU negotiations to the Iraq War, the cult of personal diplomacy has an inglorious record in British politics. International relations are not an exercise in will-power, and critical voices are not saboteurs. The domestic limits of our "strong and stable" government have been cruelly exposed over the last twenty-four hours, in a manner that may cost the Conservatives in the polls. If we sail the same ship into the Brexit negotiations, the consequences could be altogether worse for us all. Posted 22nd May by Robert Saunders 2 View comments APR 19 The Charge of the Left Brigade  There has always been a touch of the Grim Reaper about Theresa May, and yesterday morning she sharpened her sickle, donned robes of purest midnight and came for the soul of the Labour Party. For Opposition MPs, who have spent the last six months ordering flowers, taking leave of their loved ones and polishing up the coffin lids, the coming election has all the allure of a ride into the Russian cannon on the plains of Balaclava. "Tories to right of them, Tories to left of them, Tories ahead of them volleyed and thundered ... Into the valley of death rode the two hundred". Yet the tragedy of this election is not solely its destructive potential for the Labour Party. It is the poverty of choice on offer, at a time when our politics has rarely felt more urgent. With a misfiring government careering along behind populist forces it cannot control, the case for a progressive alternative has never been stronger. Yet the options have rarely felt so inadequate. For a party that is allegedly on course for a landslide, the Conservative position is weaker than at first appears. Theresa May is a wooden performer who looks as comfortable in front of the camera as a vampire on a sunbed. Behind her looms the least talented cabinet of my lifetime, which is grappling simultaneously with a funding crisis in the NHS, the collapse of the social care system, the continuing immolation of the public finances and the prospect of a second independence referendum in Scotland. Nothing so far suggests that it is remotely adequate to the task. The Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, appears to believe that you can crack online encryption by manipulating "the necessary hashtags"; the Chancellor's inaugural budget evaporated at the first breath of tabloid criticism; and if Boris Johnson makes it through the campaign without fathering a child, declaring war or triggering an international incident, the Conservative Press Office can feel well pleased with its work. May is also straining the patience of the electorate. If she wanted a personal mandate, she should have gone to the country last autumn. Instead, she not only ruled out an election in the most explicit terms; she pinned her integrity to that decision, telling reporters that "I mean what I say and I say what I mean. There won't be an early election". Despite dark warnings of sabotage in Parliament, MPs have waved through the government's Brexit legislation with much larger majorities than in the referendum itself. That leaves only two compelling arguments for an election at the present time: the first, that Labour looks ripe for the taking; the second, a fear that the economy will deteriorate later in the year. Neither is an easy sell to the electorate, who may resent being called out for a third time in two years. The greatest danger to the Conservatives may be the management of expectations. Voters will not turn out if the result seems a foregone conclusion; and as political allegiances become more balkanized, so landslides become harder to win. In the South West, the Lib Dem revival endangers a tranche of Tory seats won in 2015, requiring them at the very least to divert resources to holding what they have. The collapse of UKIP releases more voters for the Conservative Party, but it also limits the prospect of a mass defection in Labour's heartland seats. Even the Labour Party still has one or two bullets left to fire. For the first time since the Blair era, it is flush with cash and boasts the only mass membership in UK politics. Over the last fortnight it has begun, belatedly, to assemble a serious policy offer on issues like free school meals, pensioner benefits and the living wage. It's not yet a programme for government, but the concept of a Labour Manifesto is no longer a contradiction in terms. With two dozen MPs facing prosecution; with inflation rising faster than wages; and with public services in disarray, the Conservatives should be approaching the next election with real anxiety. Instead, they have brought it forward three years. The reasons for that can be summed up in two words: The Alternative Despite the ravings of the Daily Mail, which has instructed its readers to "Crush the saboteurs", it is the weakness of the Opposition, not its strength, that has triggered this election. Not since the nineteenth century has the Opposition entered an election campaign in such an enfeebled condition. Less than two years ago, Labour was the bookies' favourite to form a government; today, it lags in the polls by as much as 20 percentage points. The party has no discernible policy at all on the two biggest issues of our times - Brexit and the public finances - and as John McDonnell made clear this morning, it does not intend to focus on these issues during the campaign. In a binary question on the best candidate for prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn achieves the remarkable feat of coming third behind Theresa May and "Don't Know". Even his own MPs don't consider him a serious candidate for office. All this is before the Conservative Press Office starts cracking its knuckles. For all the prating about a right-wing press running scared of the socialist alternative, the grim truth is that the Tories have gone easy on Corbyn since 2015. Over the next six weeks, every word that Corbyn and McDonnell have spoken for the last forty years will be pored over, ripped out of context and plastered across the front pages: the association with Hamas and the IRA; the excoriation of NATO; the swithering around on the EU; the tenderness towards extremists and the hostility towards previous Labour governments. It will be the most viciously negative campaign in decades; and the tragedy for progressive politics is that much of it will be true. Diane Abbott suggested yesterday that voters faced a simple choice: "between Theresa May's Britain and Jeremy Corbyn's Britain". The tragedy is that she's right. Despite the mild tumescence of the Liberal Democrats, there is currently a blasted wilderness in the centre of British politics, where many voters would wish to position themselves. Britain desperately needs a progressive and serious-minded Opposition: that will accept the verdict of the referendum while seeking the closest relationship with Europe; that is serious about rebuilding the public finances, without loading the costs onto the poor, the young and disabled; and that views neither Cecil Rhodes nor Hugo Chavez as the beau ideal of statesmanship. Above all, we need a liberal, progressive alternative that will stand up for a pluralistic parliamentary democracy, against the totalitarian impulses of a tabloid press that demands the silencing of dissent, the burning out of traitors and heretics, and that regards opposition and scrutiny as a crime against the people. If you see it, let me know. Posted 19th April by Robert Saunders Labels: Brexit Corbyn election GE2017 May 4 View comments FEB 28 John Major: The Dark Knight of Brexit  When John Major was prime minister in the nineties, his cautious, mild-mannered persona was the stuff of legend. Such was his lack of charisma, critics jested, that "if he became a funeral director, people would stop dying". So it was a surprise to read in the tabloids this morning that the Grey Man of British politics had allegedly fired up the chainsaw and "gone tonto" against Theresa May and her government. Reporting on his speech at Chatham House last night, the Express accused the former prime minister of "a furious anti-Brexit rant". The Daily Mail called it "an incendiary speech", an "acidic and sly" intervention by the "vengeful doormat" of British politics, while the Telegraph wrote breathlessly of his "extraordinary attack on Theresa May's government". Ironically, Major had begun his remarks with an appeal to end the shouting down of contrary opinions; so inevitably, like overgrown school-boys with baseball bats, Brexiteers lined up to deliver a punishment beating. Iain Duncan Smith accused Major of "the bitter speech of an angry man", while Nadine Dorries mocked him as "a dull, irrelevant, sad, adulterous, hypocritical, pompous has-been". Jacob Rees-Mogg, an unlikely flag-bearer for modernity, dismissed his former leader as "yesterday's man with yesterday's opinions", a remark that was indicative not just of the abusiveness of the modern Right but of its curious ahistoricism. Not so long ago, it was a founding principle of *Conservatism* that "yesterday's opinions" had much to teach us. So what was the "treachery" of which Major was guilty? Far from rejecting the outcome of the referendum, or demanding - as Duncan Smith falsely alleged - that the electorate "re-run it again until they get it right", Major began with an explicit acceptance of the result in June: Eight months ago a majority of voters opted to leave the European Union. I believed then - as I do now - that this was an historic mistake, but it was one - once asked - that the British nation had every right to make. The Government cannot ignore the nation's decision and must now shape a new future for our country. In other words, he did exactly what Leave voters have repeatedly asked Remainers to do: to accept the result, however reluctantly, and to engage constructively in the debate about what happens next. He then delivered a series of warnings, which the most ardent Brexiteer would be unwise to neglect. The first was a reminder of what is at stake. As Tony Blair noted in his own speech last week, Brexit was not a single moment of decision. It is a process that will unfold over the coming years, involving ministers in further decisions that will be felt across the spectrum of British politics. If that process is mishandled, the consequences could be devastating. Whatever its intrinsic merits, a botched Brexit has the potential to break up the United Kingdom and collapse the three-hundred year union between England and Scotland. It risks disrupting the fragile peace process in Northern Ireland, jeopardising a twenty-five-year struggle to bring peace to that troubled region. Failure to secure our economic links with the Continent will dislocate trade, send valuable industries overseas and put thousands of people out of work. If the negotiations fail, Major noted, it will be "those least able to protect themselves" who are "most likely to be hurt". This was not an assault on Brexit; it was an appeal to get Brexit right. The approaching diplomatic exercise is probably the most difficult in which the British state has ever engaged; yet complex negotiations are being approached with the swagger of a drunk at closing time. Like a beery football hooligan on a stag weekend, our Foreign Secretary veers around the streets of Europe shouting lewd insults, singing songs about the War and chundering over historic monuments. He has likened the EU to a wartime prison camp, got into a spat with the Italian government, and compared Brexit to the "liberation" of Eastern Europe from the Soviet bloc. Malta, which holds the Presidency of the EU Council, is dismissed by a senior Tory MP as "a tiny little island", "anxious to scoop ... some of the spoils of Brexit". Meanwhile our boorish newspapers instruct the EU to give us what we want "or you'll be crushed". All this makes a successful negotiation much harder to achieve - with all the dire consequences that involves. It also stores up future problems for the Government, by raising expectations that it cannot possibly meet. As Major put it, I have watched with growing concern as the British people have been led to expect a future that seems to be unreal and over-optimistic. Obstacles are brushed aside as of no consequence, while opportunities are inflated beyond any reasonable expectation of delivery. The electorate are told that they can enjoy all the benefits of membership with none of its costs, in a deal unsullied by trade-offs, compromise or concession. Machiavelli himself could not pull off such a deal; and when that becomes clear, Theresa May and her ministers will feel the full venom of some of those now cheering them on. Newspapers and backbenchers will cry treason; ministers' own pronouncements will be brandished in their faces; and those who voted in June - in some cases, for the first time in decades - will again feel betrayed by the democratic process. John Major can do what current ministers cannot, from fear of the tabloids and of their own supporters. He can point out the rocks that lie ahead, and seek to manage expectations among the wider public. In that sense, he and others like him are the critical friends of Brexit, who make a successful outcome more likely rather than less. Without seats or offices at risk, they can take the punishment before which MPs and ministers tremble. To misquote The Dark Knight, they are the politicians Brexit needs, if not those it deserves. For the most serious danger to Brexit now comes, not from its avowed opponents, who are divided among themselves and adrift from public opinion. It comes from the silencing of constructive debate on the choices that lie ahead. The peace, prosperity and very existence of the United Kingdom now rest in the hands of a government with little experience of foreign policy or of international negotiation. We should all hope that they succeed; but this is unlikely so long as even candid friends are denounced as traitors. Curiously, both main parties are now led by tribes that consider critical comment an act of treason. That mindset, as I have written elsewhere, has driven the Labour party into a decline that may yet prove terminal. If the Brexit Right continues down the same path, the consequences could be more costly still for us all. Posted 28th February by Robert Saunders Labels: Brexit Major Referendum 0 Add a comment FEB 24 Everything is Awesome  It is hard to exaggerate the cataclysm that engulfed Labour in Copeland. Politics has no iron laws, but for an Opposition to lose a seat at a by-election to the governing party breaks every known rule of electoral warfare. Since 1945, it has happened only when (a) the sitting MP defected to the SDP and ran against his former colleagues; (b) the Labour candidate won the most votes but was disqualified for holding a peerage (yes, really); or (c) in seats with wafer-thin majorities. Copeland could not be more different. This was a fortress, a seat that had voted Labour at every general election for eighty years. The last Conservative to represent Copeland was born in the 1870s, when the very idea of a Labour Party was an absurdity. Even in 2015, a disastrous year for the party, Labour held the seat comfortably with a 6.5 point lead. It fielded a popular local candidate, and the threat to a local hospital meant it could fight on solid Labour territory. So the loss of Copeland is not a 'setback' or a 'misfortune'. For the Labour Party, it is the breaking of the seals; the opening of the books of judgement in the latter days. Blaming the nuclear issue isn't good enough: a single by-election posed no threat to Sellafield, and the local candidate could hardly have been more pro-nuclear if she had exposed herself to gamma rays and hulked out on the campaign trail. Nor should the party take false comfort from hanging on to Stoke Central, a seat won by nearly 17 percentage points in 2015. The Tories barely campaigned until the final week and the UKIP candidate ran a comically inept campaign; yet still Labour lost ground. Copeland is a beacon, not a blip. As a Liberal MP once put it, 'The angel of death is abroad in the land. You may almost hear the beating of his wings'. The response from the leadership and its acolytes has been entirely predictable. Like a man brandishing an umbrella at the Atlantic Ocean, Richard Burgon dismissed Copeland as a 'Labour marginal', rather missing the point that all Labour seats are now marginal. For Denis Skinner, the 'glaring lesson' of the result was that Labour 'isn't left-wing enough', while Corbyn himself murmured something about a victory for the Conservative government being a rebuke to 'the political establishment'. Interviewed on the Today Programme, John McDonnell blamed Brexit, the nuclear industry, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, before concluding that Labour must carry on exactly as before and that all criticism of the leadership must now cease. It was like watching the poor, doomed citizens of The Lego Movie, singing 'Everything is awesome' as the Kragle prepares to fire. It is difficult to be temperate about those who have brought Labour to this state. The party's problems go back far beyond 2015; but rather than addressing them, Labour retreated into a narcissistic fantasy of its own creation. Like a battered old teddy bear in a cape, Jeremy Corbyn was endowed with superhuman powers that existed only in the minds of the children waving him around. That illusion proved impervious to evidence to the contrary: whether the desperate state of the polls; the policy vacuum at the heart of the party; the chaotic incompetence of the leader's office; or its sheer irrelevance to the debate around Brexit. It's not as if we weren't warned. In 2016, almost everyone who had worked with the leadership, or who had served the Labour Party in the past, warned of the iceberg ahead. Labour MPs, MEPs, local councillors and peers all begged the party to change course. The Shadow Cabinet resigned en masse, as did Corbyn's own economic advisory team. His head of policy went to work for Owen Smith. Every living former leader of the party, from Neil Kinnock to Ed Miliband, urged a change of leadership. To which the membership replied, its fingers stuck firmly in its ears: 'we know best'. And here we are. Corbyn's position is currently impregnable, so the future of the party is for him to determine. The question is one not of personality but of purpose. What is his leadership for? If the goal is to win an internal struggle within the party, then victory is assured. The membership is larger than ever and has swung sharply to the left. Corbyn's hold on its affections is not in doubt. His critics in the parliamentary party are demoralised and directionless; all that remains is to bayonet the wounded. But a party of government must surely aspire to more. The Labour Party is not a private members' club. Its success cannot be measured by the size of its membership list, or the scale of Corbyn's victories in its own internal leadership contests. A party exists, not to make its members feel good, but to make a difference to the lives of those it claims to represent. If Labour wants to influence the shape of Brexit; to stop hospitals closing; to rescue the social care system; or to roll back the anti-immigrant mood that is engulfing British politics, it must change course. Yet the message from the bridge is "steady as she goes". In Corbyn world, as in Legoland, 'Everything is awesome'. Posted 24th February by Robert Saunders Labels: Blair Brexit Copeland Corbyn Labour 1 View comments JAN 1 2016 and the Crisis of Parliaments  The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, by J.W. Turner (1834) The year that has passed dealt three tremendous shocks to Britain's parliamentary system. Taken together, they constitute a quiet revolution: potentially the most significant recasting of how Britain is governed since the coming of universal suffrage. Understanding how this has happened, why it matters and what should be done about it is essential, if we are not to sleepwalk into new and potentially more dangerous forms of government in the year ahead. The Crisis of Parliaments The first great shock was Brexit, which struck the parliamentary system like a visit from the Death Star. The referendum lifted the biggest issue in British politics out of the hands of Parliament, then delivered a verdict that comprehensively over-rode its judgement. With three-quarters of MPs backing Remain, the vote to leave was a devastating indictment of the judgement of Parliament and of its claim to represent the people. The shockwaves will be felt for decades, as the whole cast of British foreign, economic and trade policy is reset in a manner to which MPs are largely hostile. If Brexit marked one blow to Parliament, the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn was another. For the first time in British history, the Leader of the Opposition commands no meaningful support within the House of Commons. He was placed in that role against the express opposition of MPs; and when they attempted to remove him, even serious news outlets described it as a "coup". A vote of no confidence, backed by three quarters of the parliamentary party, was dismissed as of "no constitutional legitimacy". Corbyn's re-election confirmed a remarkable constitutional fact: that the power to appoint the Leader of the Opposition no longer resides in Parliament. Labour MPs now huddle together on the backbenches, powerless behind a leader whose mandate is entirely extra-parliamentary. Only a happy accident prevented an even more serious constitutional anomaly on the Conservative benches. If Andrea Leadsom had not given a foolish interview to the newspapers, bringing a premature end to the Tory leadership race, Britain would now have its first directly elected Prime Minister. The new premier would have been placed in Downing Street, not by Parliament, nor even by the electorate, but by 170,000 entirely anonymous party members. Not since the Great Reform Act have a few hundred thousand people exercised so much unaccountable and undemocratic power. This was followed by a third key blow: the controversy around Article 50. When the High Court ruled that only Parliament could trigger the withdrawal process, the tabloids responded as if a coup d'etat had taken place. The Daily Mail denounced the judges as "enemies of the people", who had "declared war on democracy". The Daily Express dismissed MPs as a "Westminster cabal", that could not be trusted to carry out the will of the people. Even when MPs voted by a majority of 5-1 (rather larger than the majority in the referendum) that Article 50 should be triggered before April, The Daily Telegraph published the names of the 89 dissidents, accusing them of "contempt for referendum voters". Minorities must now be silenced, not simply outvoted. The most striking feature of the Article 50 case is that it is happening at all. The spectacle of MPs waiting patiently, while the courts decide whether to return powers that they are quite capable of demanding for themselves, would have astonished the Victorians. If the court finds for the government, Parliament will become irrelevant to the single biggest question in British politics. If the government loses, it will table an unamendable bill designed to prevent any meaningful parliamentary involvement. Either way, talk of "the sovereignty of Parliament" has become a quaint archaism, like singing "Britannia rules the waves" on the last night of the Proms. Does it matter? Does any of this matter? Parliament is a medieval institution in a digital age, and there have always been those who suspect that it exists rather to frustrate the popular will than to enact it. Surveys consistently rank MPs alongside journalists, estate agents and bankers as the professions least trusted by the public, a sentiment deepened by Iraq, Chilcot and the expenses scandal. Why have MPs at all when, as the Daily Express notes, we already have "a government carrying out the will of the people"? Democracy is a principle, not a form of government. It expresses a conviction that "the demos", or "the people" should govern, but says nothing about the forms through which this is done. Since only anarchists believe that "the people" can govern themselves without rules or institutions, some mechanism is necessary through which "the will of the people" can be tested and expressed. That is harder than it sounds. In all but the most primitive societies, "the people" are a chaos of different interests, impulses and identities. Human beings are not, like the Borg, mere extensions of a single, unitary intelligence; they are farmers and factory workers; old and young; rich and poor. They are shopkeepers, manual labourers and company directors. They vote for different parties, follow different religions and cleave to different values. Democracy is a process, not a body of opinion, which seeks to arbitrate between the glorious cacophony of voices within a free society. It is this that underpins a parliamentary system. The word "Parliament" comes from the French word "to speak". It is a place where the different classes and interests that make up a nation come together to parley. MPs talk, debate and bargain; they make compromises, in order to build coalitions of support. Where agreement cannot be reached, the majority must decide; but even majorities are alignments of conflicting ideas and intentions, pulling in different directions even as they coalesce around a temporary position. That's why there are 329 MPs on the government benches, rather than one MP wielding 329 votes. In a parliamentary system, dissidents are outvoted, but not silenced. They can test and challenge the majority, asking difficult questions and trying to peel off support. Opposition is not just expected; it is institutionalised. A shadow administration exists throughout the duration of the parliament, led by "the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition". The archaic title captures something important: that opposition is itself a patriotic duty. 'The true meaning of democracy' The vision of democracy currently taking root is very different. For the tabloids, in particular, "the will of the people" is clear and unambiguous. Those who oppose it are guilty of treason against democracy. "Time to silence Brexit whingers", proclaims the Daily Express. "Damn the Bremoaners and their plot to subvert the will of the British people", the Daily Mail expostulates. For a columnist in the Express, no punishment could be too severe for critics of Brexit: Here's what I would do with them: clap them in the Tower of London ... we should give them 28 days against their will to reflect on the true meaning of democracy. We're in the midst of an exhilarating people's revolution and those who stand in the way of the popular will must take what's coming to them. The Telegraph was only slightly more measured: "all parliamentarians", it decreed, must "get behind Mrs May and her ministers". After all, "why would ministers be seeking anything other than the best possible outcome for the country?" This vision of "the people" as a single intelligence, issuing instructions to politicians, is a dangerous fantasy, made possible only by the vigorous suppression of dissenting voices. The 16 million voters who backed Remain are summarily expelled from the people; they are no longer "people" at all. When Nigel Farage proclaimed, on the morning of 24 June, that Brexit was a victory for "real people", he meant precisely that. To the populist, minorities are not "real people"; they are traitors and quislings, "metropolitan elites" whose "snake-like treachery cannot go unpunished". Their views are of no consequence, except as a source of unpatriotic resistance. In truth, the voice of the people is like the announcements on the London Underground: loud but often difficult to understand, because so many people are talking at once. In populist visions of democracy, only the voice that shouts loudest deserves a hearing. Whether that means the Daily Mail and the Murdoch press or the Momentum faction in the Labour party, that is a grim prospect for our democratic future. What's next? Over the next two years, the country will confront a series of momentous policy questions, none of which was on the ballot paper in June. What trade relationship do we want with the EU, and what price are we willing to pay? How do we rewrite our laws, after 40 years of integration? What do we want to keep, and what must we replace? Our fractured politics has never been more in need of a place where competing ideas and interests can gather to argue, to educate and to inform. What we have instead is a prime minister channelling the malevolent spirits of the tabloid press, wielding prerogative powers and "Henry VIII clauses", while dissent is shouted down as an offence against the people. If we want to turn this around, we'll have to fight for it. That means demanding the right of Parliament, not just to "have a say" on Brexit, or to vote on some meaningless one-line bill expressly designed to shut down discussion, but to take the lead in determining Britain's new direction. It means not being cowed by the thugs in the tabloid press, whose language increasingly resembles that of the Blackshirts they so admired in the 1930s. It means not putting up with the delusion that Jeremy Corbyn, one of the least popular leaders in British electoral history, has an unparalleled "democratic mandate", which demands the obeisance of MPs elected by 9 million Labour voters. But it also means admitting where Parliament has been complicit in its own decline. MPs must take much of the blame for their shrunken status. Parliament was badly damaged by the Iraq vote, when too few MPs were willing to resist the pressure of government and the tabloid press. The expenses scandal did colossal damage, as did the parachuting of party apparatchiks into safe seats with which they had little connection. Above all, an indefensible electoral system has shut out from Parliament significant bodies of opinion that deserved a hearing. When 4 million people vote UKIP at a general election, and are rewarded with a solitary MP, we should not be surprised if they conclude that Parliament is something done to them by an external elite. If Parliament is to revive, we must do more than simply forget that 2016 ever happened. The culture, behaviour and institutions of Parliament all need to change - a subject to which this blog will return. But it is a fight worth having, if we are to retain a democracy that is pluralistic, discursive and respectful of minority opinions. As 2016 limps unlamented from the stage, let us take back our parliamentary democracy. Posted 1st January by Robert Saunders Labels: Brexit Britain and Europe Corbyn democracy EU May Parliament 16 View comments SEP 16 "Censoring Queen Victoria": The Men who Invented a Monarch  CENSORING QUEEN VICTORIA: HOW TWO GENTLEMEN EDITED A QUEEN AND CREATED AN ICON by Yvonne M. Ward Oneworld, 208 pp., £16.99, March 2014, 978 1 78074 363 9 In his classic study of The English Constitution, first published in 1865, Walter Bagehot issued one of his celebrated obiter dicta on the paradoxes of popular monarchy. The nineteenth century, he noted, was pre-eminently the age of ‘public opinion’, when every branch of government was being opened to popular scrutiny; yet ‘the utility of English royalty’ lay chiefly in its ‘secrecy’. Bagehot was writing four years after the death of Prince Albert, at a time when the seclusion of the monarch was causing growing public anger. Invisible to her subjects and in neglect of her duties, Victoria was an increasingly unpopular figure, whom critics believed to be imperilling the monarchy. Yet in Bagehot’s skilful rendering, personal eccentricity was conjured into vital constitutional principle. Writing at the dawn of the democratic era, Bagehot proclaimed a monarchy of the imagination: a quasi-religious institution whose ‘efficient secret’ lay in its cultivated mystique. ‘Above all things’, he insisted, ‘royalty is to be reverenced’. ‘We must not let in daylight upon magic’. The challenge was to combine the mystery of distance with the illusion of intimacy, a requirement that Victoria understood better than most. Over the course of her reign she published extracts from her journal, commissioned a biography of Prince Albert, and was restrained only by the intervention of an Archbishop from writing a memoir of John Brown, her devoted ‘Highland servant’. When she died in 1901, her collected letters were issued in three handsome volumes. This was a new kind of public monument: a memorial intended, in the words of her editors, ‘pour servir the historian’. The Letters of Queen Victoria was a publishing sensation. To this day, it can be found in university libraries across the world, and it shaped historical writing for a century. And yet, as Yvonne Ward argues in this intriguing study, the woman it portrayed was as much a public construction as any statue or ceremonial arch. Her executors may have believed that ‘the truest service to the Queen is to let her speak for herself’, but her words would be selected and arranged by others. Her editors - tormented characters with their own secrets to hide - were more than simple chroniclers. They were the men who invented a monarch, and their creation has obscured the historical Victoria ever since. * The publication of the Letters was the brainchild of Viscount Esher, one of the most remarkable men of his day. Esher was the Pooh-Bah of the Victorian state, a man who could, had he wished, have been a Cabinet minister, British Ambassador in Paris, Governor of the Cape or Viceroy of India. Instead, he rejected all those posts for an assortment of more junior positions, which he wove into a spider’s web of social and political influence. He was Lieutenant-Governor of Windsor Castle, Keeper of the King’s Archives, Secretary of Works, a director of the Royal Opera House and a board member of the British Museum, the Wallace Collection and the London Museum. He served on the South Africa War Inquiry Commission, the Commission of Imperial Defence and the Committee on War Office Reconstruction. He was Private Secretary, factotum and possibly lover to the Whig magnate Lord Hartington, learning ‘to represent Hartington’s conscience when it would not otherwise have moved, and Hartington’s opinion when the Chief had none’. He was a partner in the great financial house Cassel’s, and became Secretary of the Memorial Commission on Victoria’s death. In the latter role, he built Admiralty Arch, redesigned the approach to Buckingham Palace and oversaw the purchase of Osborne House for the nation. Esher had many valuable attributes, not the least of which was discretion. He first came to the attention of royalty in 1889, when the discovery of a male brothel at Cleveland Street threatened to expose senior members of the Court. It was Esher who kept the story out of the papers and who spirited Lord Alfred Somerset – a friend of the Prince of Wales – out of the country. He would spend the next thirty years hoovering up evidence of the scandal, to be locked away in his own private archive. Esher could be trusted with the secrets of others because he had so many of his own. As a schoolboy at Eton, he had been trained in the Hellenic ideals of romantic boy-love and imperial service. Esher never lost his taste for Eton boys, taking a house near the school and haunting the grounds in search of ‘paramours’. He filled a closet at Windsor Castle with Eton blazers and had an unhealthy fixation with his son, Maurice. Nicknamed ‘Mollie’ – a slang word for a homosexual – Maurice was the object of an obsession bordering on mania. In one letter, Esher complains of his distress at Mollie’s ‘obvious boredom when I fetched you from the station … I suppose I was a little too demonstrative last night’. Maurice was a product of Esher’s unlikely marriage to Eleanor Van de Weyer. The couple had met when Esher was 23 and ‘Nellie’ just 13. Esher began courting her two years later, and they married when Nellie was 17. Esher seems to have regarded marriage as a necessary evil, writing grimly before the ceremony of ‘the icy shroud of matrimony’, yet the ‘gloomy event’ proved surprisingly successful. As Ward observes, ‘Nellie tolerated his dalliances, even welcoming into the household the various adolescent boys who infatuated him throughout their marriage’. She had, in any case, been obliquely warned. Shortly before their wedding day, Esher had warned that ‘[s]ome day … you will find me out and you will hate me … there is no necessity for elaborate detail’. Esher’s co-editor was Arthur Christopher Benson, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and author of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Benson also spent his formative years at Eton, where he acquired the same romantic longings. As a housemaster at Eton, he wrestled with his feelings for the children in his care, writing hungrily of ‘boys with serene eyes’ and ‘low voices full of the fall of evening’; yet ‘how much pain … and no one sees the dangers more clearly than I do’. Benson blamed his education: ‘A strongly sensuous nature, brought up at an English public school, will almost certainly go wrong’. Benson relieved his feelings through writing, filling 180 volumes of diaries with almost 4 million words. He published more than 60 volumes of poetry and history, prompting wags to observe that ‘a thousand pages in his sight/ were but an evening gone’. Yet even in his diary, some feelings were not to be spoken of. There were, he acknowledged, ‘at least two thoughts often with me, that really affect my life, to which I never allude here’. ‘Anyone might think they could get a good picture of my life from these pages but it is not so’. Benson and Esher were well suited to the editing of a life, for they had carefully edited their own. It was this, perhaps, that made them so effective in their duties. Since childhood, Victoria had professed a hatred of being ‘on display’, and her editors could be trusted to show no more than seemed strictly necessary. Their task was not simply to select correspondence; it was to edit the image of a Queen. * Victoria was a prodigious correspondent, whose literary endeavours made even Benson look slack. Her journals alone filled 120 volumes, and it is estimated that her collected writings would run to more than 700 large volumes. The editors had to boil this down to just three: a daunting task, even with the decision to end the volumes in 1861. Working through the correspondence, Benson’s language became increasingly agricultural: he was ‘ploughing’, ‘hewing’, ‘slashing’, and ‘cutting like a backwoodsman’. His mood, always febrile, deteriorated as the scale of the task became obvious: ‘a very bad hour of despair, on waking’; ‘how am I to know what is interesting and what is not?’ This was not the only dilemma confronting the embattled editors. Victoria was not a private citizen. Her son had inherited the throne, many of her correspondents were still alive and there were legal and diplomatic niceties to observe. The very idea behind the project remained controversial. Critics complained that the letters were ‘never intended for publication’ and ‘would only supply matter for gossip’. Passages at which readers took umbrage included ‘The Queen anxiously hopes that Lord M. has slept well’ and her disappointment at his failure to come to dinner, suggesting a rather low threshold for scandal. Lord Stamfordham urged the editors ‘for the sake of the monarchical idea and “Cult”’ to ‘publish nothing which could tend to shake the position of Queen Victoria in the minds of her subjects’. Managing the new king was a project in itself. As Esher grumbled, All the old scandals, the Duke of Kent’s debts, the Conroy business, the Lady Flora Hastings business & so on – the King has never heard of them. He doesn’t read memoirs & of course no one dares talk to him of such things … [I]t is no good telling him that everybody who knows anything knows far more about them than he does himself; & that they won’t arouse comment simply because they are so stale. Benson wrote furiously of ‘the idiotic pomposity of monarchs’, but the King’s feelings could not be ignored. ‘We are between the devil and the deep blue sea’, Benson complained. ‘The King will be furious if we violate confidence, and displeased if the book is dull’. There were also diplomatic pressures to consider. The needs of the Anglo-French entente sat uneasily with Victoria’s strictures on ‘the wickedness and savagery of the French mob’. Her enthusiasm for ‘some great catastrophe at Paris’ (‘for that is the hothouse of Iniquity from wherein all the mischief comes’) was quietly excised. So, too, was her distaste for the Russian Emperor and her unfavourable opinion of the Irish. The censor’s pen could be somewhat haphazard: Victoria was not permitted to call the Irish ‘dirty’, but words like ‘ragged’ and ‘wretched’ were deemed acceptable. Her more sanguinary views were of course suppressed. The ‘rebellion in Ireland’, she wrote, seemed ‘likely to go off without any contest [which people (and I think with right) rather regret. The Irish should receive a good lesson or they will begin again]’. The words in square brackets were wisely removed. Sometimes excisions were demanded after the pages had been set, making it necessary to find replacements of equivalent length. Benson assured Esher that he would find ‘absolutely colourless passages’, though he had warned at the outset against ‘a colourless and official book’. He had wanted to advertise for letters in private possession and to publish ‘all the love letters to the Prince Consort in one volume’. ‘There should’, he told Esher, ‘be a little spice of triviality … to give a hint of humanity’. It was not simply the pressures of space, the needs of diplomacy or the feelings of the King that narrowed the volumes’ scope. Just as important were the biases of the editors. Ward draws repeated (and probably excessive) attention to the editors’ sexuality, but it is clear that neither knew much of women or of heterosexual marriage. Esher’s own marriage was a cover for his adolescent infatuations, while Benson was a lifelong bachelor. None of his siblings married, and his parents’ marriage had been as curious as Esher’s. They had met when Edward Benson was 23 and Mary (‘Minnie’) a child of 11. Edward pronounced her a ‘fine and beautiful bud’ and determined at once to marry her, moving into the family home in order to press his courtship. He proposed when Minnie was thirteen: ‘she sat as usual on my knee’, he recalled, ‘a little fair girl with her earnest look’. Their courtship continued until Minnie reached 18, when they married and set up home together. For a young girl coming under the power of an older and more experienced man, the emotional trauma was considerable. ‘The nights!’ wrote Minnie subsequently. ‘I can’t think how I lived’. For Benson’s parents, as for Esher, marriage was an essentially tutelary relationship, in which a young girl came under the wing of an older man of the world. Not surprisingly, this was also the model they imposed on Victoria. Esher produced an outline for the volume which was to guide Benson in his selections, exhibiting six phases in the young Queen’s life: (a) the early training of the Queen by Melbourne and Peel (b) the “coming of the Prince Consort” (c) the influence over him of the King of the Belgians and [Baron] Stockmar (d) the growth of their powers (e) the change in the relations of the Crown to the Ministers after the retirement of Aberdeen (f) the culmination of the Prince Consort’s rule 1859-1861 This was a history, not of the Queen, but of the men who had guided and instructed her. As Ward observes, this was ‘the template that made sense to Benson and Esher’. The correspondence would be used ‘to tell a dramatic story’, centring on the Victorian men who had manufactured a Queen. The bias was largely subconscious: as Ward shrewdly observes, when Benson and Esher read Victoria’s correspondence, they ‘could “hear” her male correspondents’ voices more clearly and appreciate their importance more readily’. Benson confessed that he found women’s letters ‘very tiresome’, and few of Victoria’s female correspondents made the published volumes. This excluded not only some of her closest confidantes, but also major European figures. To take but one example, Victoria and her half-sister Princess Feodora corresponded weekly for the best part of forty years, yet only four brief extracts were published in the Letters. Victoria’s nine pregnancies barely feature at all, reflecting her editors’ view of childbirth as a distasteful and mercifully private indulgence. Even the Queen loomed less large than one might expect. Of the letters published in these volumes, only 40% were actually written by Victoria; for her editors, the men in her life were simply more interesting. Lord Melbourne was a particular favourite: ‘I adore him’, wrote Benson; ‘the delicious mixture of the man of the world, the chivalrous man of sentiment, the wit, the soft-hearted cynic appeals to me extraordinarily’. The first volume reproduced just 35 of Victoria’s letters to Melbourne, but found space for 139 in the opposite direction. Family and continental relationships were also treated with suspicion. The young Victoria had been especially close to her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians. Benson and Esher were happy to acknowledge his moral tutelage, but were less comfortable with the overtly political correspondence. Wary of overstating the Continental influences on Victoria, they preferred to foreground Melbourne, Peel and other domestic statesmen. Early on, they made the remarkable decision to omit altogether ‘a very large series of volumes entitled GERMANY’, which they deemed – quite literally – to be ‘foreign to our purpose’. No effort was made to explore Continental archives or the resources of European courts. As Ward puts it, the editors ‘were Englishmen, and did not recognise the extent to which Victoria had been a European’. * As the volumes progressed, the woman at their heart became more Edwardian than Victorian. Into the dustbin went her continental relationships, her network of female correspondents, her close attention to royal marriages and her somewhat Wagnerian view of international relations. What remained was a model of constitutional propriety; a woman tutored by the gentlemen around her, for whom England, not Europe, was the point of reference. This Victoria – the Victoria of her Edwardian designers – reigned even longer in the twentieth century than she had in the nineteenth. Esher had promised to let the Queen ‘speak for herself’; yet in death, as in life, Victoria was rarely permitted that luxury. Her words were chosen for her, and the selection has proven the more powerful because of the difficulty of accessing the Royal Archives. The 1921 biography by Lytton Strachey, for example, followed almost exactly the model set out by Esher, following what Ward calls ‘the young, innocent girl-queen’ through her tutelage by the men around her. ‘Victoria’, Strachey concluded, ‘was a mere accessory’, who could almost be written out of the age to which she had given her name. Benson and Esher were neither incompetent nor devious. They did not set out to mislead or to ‘censor’ the Queen they revered. Confronted with so great a mass of material, it was inevitable that they would draw out those portions that seemed, to them, most important. New editors would do the same, though their prejudices would be different. Ward herself would want more on Victoria the woman: her experience of marriage; her networks of female correspondents; and her complex negotiation of patriarchy. Few today would cavil at such a selection; but it would reflect the priorities of our own era as truly as Benson and Esher did theirs. Victoria remains as mysterious a figure as Bagehot could have wished; a will-o'-the-wisp, glimpsed but never captured in the pages of her letters. The pursuit almost cost Benson his sanity: he had a breakdown shortly after publication and was admitted to a clinic in Mayfair. Checking the final proofs, he confessed to his diary that 'depression lurks in the background, moving dimly like a figure in the mist'. The same might be said of Victoria herself: the Queen he had adored, but could never truly comprehend. Posted 16th September 2016 by Robert Saunders 0 Add a comment JUL 5 Flying Off the Atlas: Why Britain Needs an Election  Our new prime minister arrives in Downing Street Towards the end of The BFG, by that astute political analyst Roald Dahl, the Queen sends the Heads of the Army, Navy and Royal Air Force on a daring helicopter raid. Led by the valiant Sophie, they quickly find themselves in places that even the British had never invaded: ‘This place we’re flying over now isn’t in the atlas, is it?’ the pilot said, grinning. ‘You’re darn right it isn’t in the atlas!’ cried the Head of the Air Force. ‘We’ve flown clear off the last page!’ As in all atlases, there were two completely blank pages at the very end. ‘So now we must be somewhere here,’ he said, putting a finger on one of the blank pages. ‘Where’s here?’ cried the Head of the Army. The young pilot was still grinning broadly. He said to them, ‘That’s why they always put two blank pages at the back of the atlas. They’re for new countries. You’re meant to fill them in yourself.’ British politics flew off the atlas more than a week ago, and has been without map or compass ever since. The priorities of government have been overturned at a stroke: out goes the elimination of the deficit, in comes a decade of trade negotiations. Within weeks we will have a new prime minister, leading a new government, confronting questions that were scarcely dreamed of in the election of 2015. When do we trigger Article 50? What trade relationship do we want with Europe? Does access to the single market trump control of immigration? Before confronting these issues, we urgently need an election. Our constitutional crisis has many dimensions, but the immediate issue lies with the premiership. It is entirely normal, in Britain, for a prime minister to take office without a general election. Six have done so since the coming of universal suffrage; most recently, Gordon Brown in 2007. But this practice rests on the assumption that we are a parliamentary democracy, in which consent flows through our elected Members of Parliament. For the first time, however, our new prime minister will not be chosen by MPs. The appointment will be made by 150,000 Conservative activists - 0.3% of the electorate - nominated for this role by nobody except themselves. For the first time in our history, we will have a directly-elected prime minister - placed in Downing Street, not by the electorate, not by Parliament, but by people whose names we do not know and whom we cannot hold to account. There is no precedent for this in British history, and its gravitational pull is already reshaping our politics. Leadership candidates are making pledges about the deficit, tax and spending, the rights of EU citizens and the National Health Service, pitched not at Parliament or the wider electorate but at the tiny subset of the Tory membership. This would be outrageous under any circumstances. At a moment when we are about to renegotiate the entire spectrum of our trade relations, it is absolutely intolerable. The situation arises, as so often, from the constitutional carelessness of our political class. In a laudable attempt to engage their members, parties have opened up their leaderships to the choice of party members. Yet in so doing, they have bolted on a quasi-presidential element to what is still functionally a parliamentary system - and they have done so without any of the logic or protections of presidential models. In the United States, for example, presidential nominees are chosen through party contests, but they cannot exercise power until they have run directly for election among the wider public. Before they can take office, the mandate they receive from party supporters must be endorsed by the electorate. If it is, they exercise the independent powers of that office, whatever the situation in Congress. In this way, the Constitution provides both for the popular mandate of directly-elected officials, and for the functioning of government where parties are divided. Donald Trump, for example, could win the presidency against the opposition of Republicans in the House, and each would then exercise their own independent powers. Under a parliamentary system, none of this applies. Authority - and democratic legitimacy - flow through our elected Members of Parliament. A prime minister can only govern with the confidence of the House of Commons; laws can only be passed if MPs actively vote for them. So we have developed - quite suddenly - a constitutional fiction, by which the party mandate of the leader trumps the constituency mandate of the MPs. Members of Parliament are now expected to speak, vote and act under the instruction of the activists, a far smaller cohort than those who elected them to Parliament. In this way, the pursuit of internal party democracy has blown a hole in our parliamentary democracy. If Tory activists vote for anyone other than Theresa May, both our major parties will have leaders imposed upon them against the wishes of MPs. The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition will have been chosen by fewer than half a million people, yet will claim a mandate over MPs elected by 21 million. Let us imagine, for a moment, that Andrea Leadsom wins the leadership. In a tight contest, 75,000 votes could put her in Number Ten - roughly the size of an average English constituency. As Prime Minister, imagine that she abandoned manifesto pledges made in 2015, cutting benefits and abandoning deficit rules on the basis of the new conditions created by Brexit. Imagine, finally, that when MPs rebelled, she demanded their loyalty on the basis of her 'mandate' - a mandate smaller than her own constituency of South Northamptonshire. Left-wingers would be rioting in the streets. Yet that is precisely the position in which the Labour Party also finds itself, with a 'mandate' bestowed by 0.5% of the electorate and less than 3% of Labour voters intoned like a sacred charm, to whip our Parliamentary representatives into obedience. In the name of internal party democracy, wholly disproportionate power has been vested in the hands of self-selecting cliques. If we want a presidential system, with heads of government exercising direct personal mandates, we should do it properly and separate the executive from the legislature. Party leaders should run in national elections, with parliamentary parties seeking their own mandates as a check on the executive. There is much to be said for such a system; there is nothing whatsoever to be said for a hybrid in which Parliament is expected to prostrate itself before gangs of activists. Unless and until we establish a presidential system with proper checks and balances, we need desperately to reassert the primacy of our parliamentary democracy. In the longer term, all parties face serious questions about how they select their leaders, how we hold them to account and how we repair our battered constitution. In the short term, the issue is more acute. There is no precedent in British history for a prime minister propelled straight into Downing Street, over the heads of Parliament, by the votes of a small, unelected and unaccountable group of activists. For the sake of our democracy, and the legitimacy of our institutions, Britain urgently needs an election. Posted 5th July 2016 by Robert Saunders Labels: Brexit Conservative constitution Corbyn Labour Leadership Leadsom May 0 Add a comment JUN 27 Britain Needs an Opposition  The crisis currently engulfing British politics has no precedent in modern history. In the 72 hours since the referendum, the prime minister has resigned, the shadow cabinet has declared war on its leader, and the Leave campaign has been torching its promises like a drugs cartel destroying the evidence before the police arrive. Over the weekend, as $2.7 trillion was wiped off global markets, it appeared that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had been taken to his eternal reward, leaving the Governor of the Bank of England to run the country. The scale of what happened last Thursday would be difficult to exaggerate. With one vote, the electorate knocked over the central pillar of British foreign, economic and trade policy for fifty years. That decision - whether we voted for it or not - has left our creaking institutions facing three Herculean tasks. First, they must negotiate our departure from the European Union, probably the most complex diplomatic exercise since the Second World War. Second, they must unpick 40 years of legislation, peeling apart two legal systems that have grown together like the trunks of ancient trees. Thirdly, they have to set up new arrangements to replace the old, on everything from regional aid and industrial policy to immigration and the funding of higher education. Any one of these tasks would consume the energies of Whitehall for years; coming together, they constitute probably the biggest exercise in government ever undertaken by the British state. All this will be happening at a time of exceptional constitutional volatility. If Scotland votes for independence (which is by no means certain), we can add restructuring the United Kingdom to the in-tray. Northern Ireland is going to need especially sensitive handling, something at which distracted British governments have not always excelled. Throw in a general election later this year, and there is barely a cog in the machinery of government that is not in frenzied motion. As the Chinese curse puts it, 'may you live in interesting times'. In this context, the existence of a functioning Opposition is now a matter of urgency. If Boris Johnson is not to use the country for his own personal game of whiff-whaff, we cannot go on with our second biggest party - and the only alternative government - strapped to the life-support machine. That means, with apologies to my friends who feel differently, that the Corbyn experiment must come to an end. In practical terms, the Labour Party has no leader at present. Jeremy Corbyn inhabits the office, but he cannot command his MPs. A year ago, he could barely find 15 Members of Parliament to nominate him for the role; today, he can hardly scratch together a Shadow Cabinet. The list published this morning is simply not credible as a government; if put before the electorate later this year, we could see a Conservative majority on the scale of 1931. Labour cannot go to the country behind a man whom its own MPs do not want to become prime minister. But what of his "mandate"? What of the democratic will of the party membership? The 250,000 who voted for him last year deserve respect, but the word "democratic" is being stretched to breaking point. In the General Election last year, nearly five times as many people voted for the Green Party as voted to make Corbyn leader. Ten times that number voted for the much-derided Liberal Democrats, whom we are constantly told are now an irrelevance. What of the mandate of the Parliamentary Labour Party, for whom more than 9 million people cast their ballots? It is an offence against democracy that the second party in Parliament - and the only alternative government that can be put before the voters - can be held captive in this way. If we have learned one thing in this referendum campaign, it is that our parliamentary democracy needs to reassert its legitimacy. A party of government cannot become the plaything of Momentum. Corbyn himself seems a decent man, though manifestly unsuited to leadership. That the second half of that sentence weighs so little with his supporters is at the core of the problem. Labour is not a cult and it does not exist to make its members feel good about themselves. It exists to protect the poor and vulnerable; to build a better society; to challenge inequality and extend opportunity. Indulging an incompetent leader, because he makes us feel good, is a betrayal of the very people Labour exists to serve. We are told this morning that Corbyn will fight; that he will force a leadership election and run as a candidate. There is a good chance that he would win such a contest. But what then? Labour MPs will not serve under him. They cannot campaign for him at an election. The new Shadow Cabinet released this morning is an an embarrassment, a public declaration of incapacity to govern. I, and millions of other Labour stalwarts, simply will not vote for it. The Corbyn experiment has brought to the leadership some noble impulses: a more positive attitude to immigration; a desire to rebuild Labour as a campaigning vehicle; and a determination that Labour should protect the most poor and vulnerable. John McDonnell's economic advisory committee has been a positive step, which has brought new intellectual firepower to the party's policymaking. Too often, however, Corbyn has indulged the worst of Labour's traditions. The first is sectarianism: the view, famously expressed by Nye Bevan, that Tories are 'lower than vermin'. For the Corbynistas, 'Tory' is a word to be spat out, loaded with such venom that those who utter it must have asbestos lips. On social media, Corbyn's critics are subjected to a vicious torrent of abuse, actively stoked by some in Momentum. Any one who dares to question the leader is told to 'f**k off and join the tories'. The problem is not simply that the charge is untrue, or that handing out membership forms for your opponents seems a curious electoral strategy. It is that millions of good and decent people across the country really are Tories, usually for good and decent reasons. They care about their friends, their families, and their country. They want a better future for their children - and for others, too. We may feel that they have backed the wrong horse; but it is our job to persuade them of that fact, not to treat them as traitors and bigots. Most Labour leaders have understood this. Clement Attlee had been a Tory himself earlier in life; Harold Wilson was married to a Conservative; Tony Blair (though this won't help...) was the son of a Conservative. By contrast, Corbyn seems unable even to muster the courtesy to speak to his opponent at the state opening of Parliament. In the most important election campaign for a generation - on a subject they actually agreed about - would it really have killed him to share a platform just once with David Cameron? When Sadiq Khan, who would have better reasons than most for standing aloof, appeared alongside the prime minister, John McDonnell accused him of 'discrediting' the party. We now have a leadership team that shared platforms with the IRA during the Troubles, yet regards contact with Conservatives as a form of ritual pollution. That takes us to the second besetting sin of the left: its capacity for self-delusion. There is no need, we are told, to win over Tory voters. Instead, like the ghost army summoned by Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, a seething tide of non-electors will surge out of the darkness to overwhelm the Tory degenerates. I applaud the desire to reach non-electors: we should be appalled that so many opt out of our democratic process. But the notion that they are all secret socialists, waiting like the Knights of the Round Table for the return of Arthur, is a fantasy. On Thursday, traditional non-electors did come out - and many of them voted for UKIP. Here, too, there is a giant work of persuasion to be done. Finally, we have been treated once again to the historic preference of the left for moral victories over, well, actual victory. Some will remember the dreadful election of 1983, when Labour suffered its worst defeat since the 1930s. Tony Benn told The Guardian that it was a triumph: Labour might have collapsed to its lowest level since the War, but the remnant that remained had voted for a genuinely socialist alternative. It must have been a difficult time for Margaret Thatcher, but she consoled herself with a landslide majority and eleven years of uninterrupted government. Likewise, in spring of this year, Labour actually lost seats in the local elections - but told its supporters that it had made progress on the road to government. Worst of all, on Friday morning, as the party's heartland seats revolted en masse against the party line, a press statement proclaimed that "Jeremy Corbyn has showed that he is far closer to the centre of gravity of the British public than other politicians. He is now the only politician who can unite a divided country". Britain needs an opposition that acknowledges reality; that speaks to those who disagree with it; that is competent to govern; and that can face an election in the next nine months. This is now only possible if Corbyn stands aside. If he does, he will be remembered as an honourable man who made a noble sacrifice. If he does not, as Chris Bryant wrote last night, "I fear you will go down in history as the man who broke the Labour Party". Posted 27th June 2016 by Robert Saunders 1 View comments JUN 26 The Cameron Illusion  On 15 June 1988, the telephone rang at Conservative Central Office. It was answered by the deputy director of the Research Department, who was about to interview a fresh-faced recruit named David Cameron. The call was from Buckingham Palace, and contained an extraordinary message: I understand that you are to see David Cameron. I’ve tried everything I can to dissuade him from wasting his time on politics, but I have failed. You are about to meet a truly remarkable young man. To this day, the identity of Cameron’s royal referee is shrouded in mystery - partly because there are so many contenders. Was it Sir Alastair Aird, Equerry to the Queen Mother and husband to Cameron’s godmother? Or Sir Brian McGrath, a friend of his parents who was private secretary to Prince Philip? Cameron himself had been at prep school with Prince Edward, and the Queen was sometimes to be seen dropping off her children or enjoying a cup of tea with the headmaster. Did Her Majesty spot the potential in the infant Cameron, as he bustled merrily along the corridors? It is a tale that captures much of the essence of the Cameron story. No prime minister of modern times has been so deeply rooted in the Establishment. None has been so routinely tipped for greatness. And yet few retain such an enduring air of mystery. David Cameron has been the longest serving Tory leader since Margaret Thatcher. He has led his party for nearly eleven years and his country for more than six. Yet he remains curiously undefined in the public imagination. He has published no speeches, acquired no nicknames and is associated with no ‘project’. It would be difficult to quote anything he has ever said, and the nature of his Conservatism remains almost wholly obscure. As his premiership draws to a close, who is David Cameron? And what does he believe? I From 1965 to 2001, every Conservative leader was of relatively humble stock. Ted Heath was the son of a carpenter; Margaret Thatcher grew up over the grocer's shop, while John Major's parents worked in the music halls. In this respect, Cameron marked the re-emergence of an older tradition of Tory leadership. His childhood, in rural Oxfordshire, had a distinctly ruritanian character: a world of nannies, country houses and afternoons shooting rooks and pigeons. At his prep school, Heatherdown, the parental roster included two princesses, a viscount, an earl and the reigning monarch. Visitors to the school sports day passed through one of three entrances, marked respectively for ‘ladies’, ‘gentlemen’ and ‘chauffeurs’. It was a place of ‘endless pillow-fights and non-stop ragging in the dorm’. Matron patrolled the corridors, and ‘Cameron more than once felt the sting of the clothes brush’.[1] Yet if Cameron's background appeared quaintly archaic, his entry to Conservative politics was thoroughly modern. Like so many politicians of the Blair era and beyond, he went straight from university to the Conservative Research Department, where he was immediately identified as a star in the making. Maurice Fraser, who worked with Cameron in the 1992 election, was 'totally convinced this guy was going to be Conservative Party leader one day. In drafting or advising on the key point to take, it would just trip off his tongue, the right thing to say in a given context'. Cameron matched an inexhaustible capacity for work with keen political antennae, and he added to this an easy, though apparently selective, charm. Colleagues noted his 'emotional intelligence', his ability to find the right words in dealing with the media, and embattled ministers began asking for Cameron by name. By the time he left Central Office in 1994, to become head of corporate communications at Carlton, Cameron had worked at every great department of state except the Foreign Office. He had worked closely with John Major, Norman Lamont and Michael Howard, and played a central co-ordinating role in the 1992 election. After seven years in the private sector, he was elected to Parliament as MP for the safe seat of Witney in Oxfordshire. He was still just thirty-four years old. From the moment he entered the Commons, in 2001, Cameron was identified as a future prime minister. Yet to the proverbial visitor from Mars, it would not be easy to explain why. As late as 2005, Cameron had no legislative achievements, no experience of office and no significant public profile. Though he had entered the Shadow Cabinet in 2004, he had done so in a party role – as head of policy co-ordination – rather than in a leading ministerial portfolio. He declined the role of Shadow Chancellor in 2005, apparently believing that the education brief would better burnish his modernising credentials. For all his obvious talents, Cameron had shown no evidence that he could run a ministerial department or operate the levers of government. Yet these were not the attributes his party required. Cameron’s talents lay in marketing: he knew how to package a product for public consumption. It was Greg Barker, a fellow member of the 2001 intake, who spotted Cameron’s own ‘marketability’: I had come to the view that the Tory Party needed to skip a generation. We needed telegenic, charismatic, modern – not in a grumpy, tortured, Portillo way, but in a relaxed, effortless comfortable-with-themselves sort of way. And he seemed to fit the bill very closely. Cameron was of the same opinion, and within two or three years of entering Parliament had quietly constructed a leadership team. Yet when Michael Howard resigned in 2005, his support within the party remained thin. When The Sunday Timespolled 100 MPs early in September, it found only nine who favoured Cameron. Recruitment foundered on a perception that Cameron ‘had been over-keen on impressing his seniors’ and ‘aloof and dismissive towards … his peers’. For most of the summer he had fewer than 14 supporters, at least four of whom were fellow Etonians. This wasn't a leadership bid; it was a high school reunion. But as Cameron himself understood, the parliamentary party was no longer the critical audience. If Cameron could establish himself as the frontrunner with the public - and if he could present himself as a potential election winner - the party would reposition itself accordingly. Even in the early days of the campaign, when Cameron's parliamentary support was in single figures, Barker recalls that ‘We were getting by far the best media profile’. The fresh, young and personable candidate came across well on camera; and as some journalists acknowledged, he simply offered a better story than his rivals. As one reporter told the political scientist Tim Bale: David Davis: we were used to him; we were bored with him; he’d been quite high-handed and arrogant with lots of journalists. Dave: we didn’t really know – young, modern; there’d be all sorts of interesting stories about cocaine and drugs … he was attractive, and his picture looked better on our front pages. For the campaign launch, Cameron spent £20,000 on a media event pitched far beyond the parliamentary party. On arrival, journalists were handed strawberry smoothies and chocolate brownies. As they settled in their seats, they took in the room, white and circular, and the ambient music – “lots of little chimes and bells”. It was all very different from David Davis’s launch in the fusty oak-panelled surroundings of the Institute of Civil Engineers. Davis’s message might have been “Modern Conservatives”, but that was just a slogan: this was modern. Having redefined ‘modernity’ as fruit smoothies and groovy music, Cameron engineered a brilliant piece of theatre at the party conference. His media-savvy team managed to reserve the front seats for their own supporters, ensuring that TV footage recorded their muted response to Davis and enthusiastic ovation for Cameron. They were boosted by controversial pollster Frank Luntz, whose Newsnight focus group revealed extraordinary levels of enthusiasm. With successful appearances on Question Time and Newsnight, Cameron overhauled the frontrunners to secure a thumping victory, first in the MPs’ ballot and then among the party membership. II Cameron had established himself as a brilliant public performer, who both looked and sounded like a leader. What was less clear was the direction in which he intended to take his party. Cameron has never laid claim to an ‘ism’ and he wears his convictions lightly. ‘I’m not a deeply ideological person’, he told Andrew Rawnsley; ‘I’m quite a practical person’. Even as a student, his tutor recalls, Cameron ‘didn’t lose sleep over philosophical problems’, and he acknowledges a preference for instinct over introspection. As he once asked Dylan Jones, ‘Is that entirely logical? Not really, but it’s what I feel’. At first glance, this locates Cameron within a healthy tradition of Tory scepticism; a line of descent stretching back to David Hume and beyond. Yet scepticism is itself a philosophical position, founded upon a relentless questioning of established truths. Cameron, by contrast, has tended to drift along behind the conventional wisdom of his ‘set’. Like most Tories of his generation, he believes in lower taxes, less regulation and a smaller state. He has an almost religious faith in markets and competition, which he has applied indiscriminately to the forests, the National Health Service and the education system. Even on gay rights – a subject on which he was ‘surprisingly squeamish’ in the 90s – his position has evolved largely in step with fashionable, metropolitan opinion. From this perspective, Cameron seems guilty not of ‘scepticism’ but of what his biographers call a ‘heroic incuriosity’. He takes no interest in the arts; has only the haziest grasp of history; and cheerfully admits that he ‘doesn’t really read novels’. Far from liberating himself from ‘ideology’, he has simply ceased to ask meaningful questions of it. In an incautious remark to newspaper executives in 2005, Cameron presented himself as ‘the heir to Blair’; another leader who was scornful of ‘ideology’. By a pleasing irony, earlier generations of Camerons lived in ‘Blairmore House’; and one of the more endearing sights of Cameron’s leadership came at Blair’s final appearance in the Commons, when the Tory leader leapt to his feet to lead the ovation. Yet the comparison is less compelling than it appears. Unlike the Labour leader, Cameron is not temperamentally drawn to change. He surrounds himself with familiar faces from his past; likes hunting, shooting and other country pursuits; and is openly affectionate towards his old school. He enjoys ceremonial, and one of the few subjects on which he admits to becoming ‘furious’ is the ban on hunting to hounds. As his friend, Nick Boles, once noted, ‘The fundamental difference between David and Tony Blair … is that David is absolutely, cut right through him, a total Conservative. He was born into it, he loves it, it’s embraced him, he’s not the outsider’. In this respect, Cameron is not by temperament a ‘moderniser’. Though he accepted that his party must change, he was a reformer by necessity, rather than conviction. The result was a curiously ambivalent message. In 2001, for example, Cameron urged his party to ‘change its language, change its approach, start with a blank sheet of paper’. Yet there followed a remarkable caveat: Anyone could have told the Labour Party in the 1980s how to become electable. It had to drop unilateral disarmament, punitive tax rises, wholesale nationalisation and unionisation. The question for the Conservative Party is far more difficult because there are no obvious areas of policy that need to be dropped. In 2005, again, he insisted that the party needed ‘fundamental’ change, not just ‘slick rebranding’. But what was change to mean, if the policies remained the same? The dilemma was sidestepped, rather than resolved, by ‘the politics of “and”’ - a strategy that sought to pair Thatcherite policies on tax cuts and Europe with more fashionable positions on the environment and social justice. Declaring war on Britain’s ‘broken society’, Cameron promised to be ‘as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer’. He visited the Arctic to see the effects of global warming, and promised ‘the greenest government ever’. Yet these were rhetorical positions, not policy platforms. When Nick Clegg made his own pitch for the green vote in 2008, Conservative staffers were scathing. ‘He can have that’, an advisor joked; ‘we were doing youthful vigour a couple of years ago … we’re on to flags and fireplaces now’. Cameron had secured for his party ‘the right to be heard’. But having cleared its throat and stepped up to the microphone, it appeared to have nothing much to say. The ‘Big Society’ was a slogan in search of a policy. ‘Broken Britain’ was a protest, not a programme. The mood was summed up by Rupert Murdoch, in an interview before their relationship turned sour. Cameron, he told the New Yorker, was ‘charming, he’s very bright, and he behaves as if he doesn’t believe in anything. He’s a PR guy’. It was in this context that the financial crisis erupted in 2008. Despite his period as a Treasury advisor, economic policy was not an area to which Cameron had devoted much thought. He had declined the post of Shadow Chancellor in 2005, and made no reference to the economy in a list of ‘the big questions facing our country’ in 2008. Amidst justified criticism of Labour, it almost went unnoticed how chaotic was the Conservatives’ response to the crisis. Likening Gordon Brown to Castro, Osborne warned that nationalising Northern Rock would take Britain ‘back to the 1970s’, while Quantitative Easing was ‘a cruise missile aimed at the heart of recovery’. ‘Printing money,’ he intoned, was ‘the last resort of desperate governments’. Yet the financial crisis temporarily resolved the central dilemma of Cameronism. With the bail-out of the banks and the escalation of national debt, a failure of the private sector was transformed into a crisis of public expenditure. The need to ‘pay down the deficit’ finally gave Cameron the direction he required. It also allowed the party to reactivate its preference for shrinking public expenditure, without having to make the ideological case for a smaller state. As his biographers put it, Cameron was in a sense lucky with his economic inheritance since it gave him a ready-made definition. “If the Fates hadn’t handed him that hand, and he didn’t have the deficit, what would he be doing instead? I don’t think people have got any idea”. III The failure to win a majority in 2010 came as a shock – and posed a graver threat to Cameron than was acknowledged at the time. Cameron had won the party leadership on the strength of his electoral appeal; but faced with an unpopular government and a widely derided opponent, he had failed to deliver. Lacking any particular personal following, Cameron’s leadership depended upon restoring the Conservatives to government. As a colleague put it, Cameron’s ‘bollocks were on the line. He had to think very quickly how he and George were going to get out of this alive’. The solution, of course, lay in coalition. With his ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’, Cameron played a difficult hand with considerable skill - and the results offered rich rewards. By pooling responsibility for the cuts, coalition actually strengthened Tory claims to be acting from necessity rather than zeal. The alliance shielded Cameron from his own right-wing, while shutting down the Liberal Democrats as a repository for disaffected voters. The scale of the deficit – and the willingness of both parties to blame Labour – established a common purpose that went beyond the formal coalition agreement, and which enabled it to hold together despite inevitable tensions. Cameron was also lucky in his opponents. After Tony Blair resigned in 2007, the Labour Party chose three leaders in a row who were unlikely ever to win an election. At a time when economic competence was the central battleground of British politics, it never shook off the perception that it had caused the crisis in the first place. The party had naively assumed that it would benefit from the collapse of the Liberal Democrats; instead, it was the Conservatives who prospered, vacuuming up Tory/Lib Dem marginals where the Labour Party barely existed. Facing an opposition party that was collapsing in its Scottish heartlands, lead by a man whom few voters could imagine anywhere near Downing Street, Cameron succeeded in 2015 where he had failed five years earlier. With victory at the general election, he became the first Conservative leader for 23 years to win a parliamentary majority; the first since 1900 to increase his share of the vote after a full term in office. Standing on the steps of Downing Street, he told journalists that 'I truly believe we are on the brink of something special'. Yet nemesis was lurking with the frying pan. Like Thatcher and Major before him, Cameron has seen his premiership destroyed by the European question. No issue has been more toxic for the Conservative Party or more corrosive of party loyalties. It has been especially destructive for Cameron, because it played to none of his strengths and all of his weaknesses. The first was the shallowness of his modernisation project. Cameron famously said that he wanted the Conservative Party to stop ‘banging on about Europe’ – but this, as ever, was a change of tone, not of policy. There was no question of challenging the Eurosceptics in his party, or of restating what had once been the Conservative case for Europe. Instead, he fed their appetite. He pulled the Conservative Party out of the moderate EPP bloc in the European Parliament, in favour of a ragbag alliance of unsavoury populist parties. He promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, then dropped it shortly afterwards. He introduced the referendum lock, vetoed treaty change on the Eurozone, and repeatedly assured colleagues and voters of his Euroscepticism. Since he kept giving, the sceptics kept asking. And after ten years of speaking their language, his almost missionary zeal for the EU during the referendum campaign rang strangely on the ear. A second problem was his tendency to deal with short-term problems by kicking them down the line. The Bloomberg speech, in which he promised a referendum in 2013, got him over a temporary difficulty with his backbenchers, but there would always come a time when they banked the cheque. His opponents used that time to prepare; Cameron, it appears, did not. It wa…