Already Bloodied

I was two-and-a-half pinted, merry, passing by Downing Street on the way to meet my little dealer friend at Nelson’s Column when it occurred to me that Number Ten might be available to squat, what with the hung parliament and me being out of a place, so I went up to the policeman at the gate and asked him if he knew when the present tenant was leaving.

‘No one’s leaving Number Ten just yet, sir,’ he replied, with a slight smirk.

‘Do you happen to know who the landlord is? I’d like to write him a letter,’ I said, hoping to extract his address from the bobbie with as little suspicion as possible.

‘Well, it’s the government, isn’t it,’ he replied, looking like he might start toying with me. ‘Write to the government.’

‘I was actually wondering if I might be able to live there rent-free once Gordon’s gone, seeing as none of the others can live there.’ The policeman just stood there as I pursed my lips in a bashful way. ‘Do you know if anyone else is interested in the place?’

But that had an awful effect on the policeman, and he approached me as if he hadn’t moved a muscle.

‘Sling..your..hook,’ he said slowly, looking deep into my dopey eyes, edging his face ever closer to mine.

‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘I was only asking.’

After a short silence, in which I was meant to move away from him and go on my way, I stood there and so the policeman slung me into the back of an unmarked BMW and sat next to me as the driver reversed and screeched down Whitehall with a very loud siren blearing out.
People stopped and stared and I think a photographer got a shot of me.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, but the policeman wouldn’t say.

The journey only lasted a few minutes, after which I was pulled out from the car and thrown to the floor.
When I tried to get up, a boot hit my face with such force that it broke my jaw.

I was then bundled into a cell.
I lay on the bed for hours in agony until I had to get up because all the blood was sticking to the sheet.

The policeman then dragged me to an interrogating room and interrogated me.

‘Why did you ask if you could squat at Number Ten, Downing Street?’ he enquired with shifty, beady eyes.

‘I just thought if no one was going to be there that maybe I could look after it until a new Prime Minister was elected,’ I replied. ‘I know I’m a bit naïve but I was only asking. You know what they say, if you don’t ask you don’t get.’

My jaw was screaming at me and I was salivating with blood all over the floor.

‘Well,’ said the policeman. ‘If that’s all it was, you can go.’

So he led me up some stairs and booted me into the street, where a crew of cameramen and reporters were waiting.

As I flew through the air from the top of the station’s steps to the bottom, hitting the ground in front of the crowd with such force as to fracture my skull and crush my shoulder into bits, a massive flash of neon followed my trajectory like I was a shooting star.

Already bloodied from the broken jaw, I must have looked a sight for sore eyes, because I saw that all the reporters had gathered around the cameramen to look at the quality of the pictures on their screens.
They were laughing at ‘the claret’ and all nodded affirmatively that they’d got the ‘money shots’ they needed to go home.

Still splayed across the police station forecourt and covered in blood, one reporter came over to me and asked me a question but I couldn’t hear him because of all the laughter and the blood in my ears.

Cameras flashed in my eyes as I hopelessly held out my hand to be helped up.

The ambulance came and picked me up and asked me lots of questions about who had done this to me but when I told them it was the police, they didn’t ask any more questions about that and started to deal with my injuries, which I was happy about.

I was in hospital for twelve weeks and had three quite major operations, all of which were successful, although I slur a lot now and my memory isn’t what it used to be.

A lawyer begged to represent me in court and I was awarded a massive payout as compensation for the beatings.
The policeman was given the sack on full-pay for five years. I believe he now works as a security guard.

I then met a literary agent at a drinks party and she told me to write a book about what happened so I did that and it received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

As there was still no Prime Minister at this time, I made an offer to look after Number Ten for a while and they wrote back saying that I could live there so long as I agreed to say no more about the beatings to the press.

Of course, I accepted.

A few days after I moved in, I had a massive soiree and all the rock stars and actresses in the world came and did drugs.

Bono said that it was the best party he’d been to, ever(!)

Then, one morning, I had an idea while I was being served breakfast in bed and decided to write a letter to the Queen asking if Her Majesty’d stop all the wars and put an end to parliament and all the corruption and she said yes!

All the army and navy people sold all their equipment and stuff to people and came back to Britain on Easyjet and Ryanair.

After that, they gave me the Nobel Peace Prize, so I took a holiday to Corfu but when I got back I found all my stuff strewn all over the road in front of Number Ten.

I asked a policeman who happened to be passing by what was going on but he didn’t know anything about it.

When I went to put my key in the door, I found that the lock had been changed.

‘The lock’s been changed!’ I cried. ‘Surely you can do something, officer. Can’t you break in for me?’

‘No, sir,’ he nodded. ‘Can’t do that. If a lock’s been changed, we have no right to enter without a warrant.’

‘But that’s ludicrous!’ I yelped. ‘You know who I am, surely. Can’t you get a warrant?’

‘Yes, I do, sir,’ he replied. ‘But no, I can’t just give you a warrant. I’ll have to call the station.’

‘I demand to speak to the superintendent!’ I said, shaking with anger.

Once the warrant had been issued, we broke in and I found David Cameron in one of the rooms.

‘What are you doing in my house?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’ he replied. ‘This is my house! I should be here.’

‘Should stinks, David,’ I said.

He tried to reason with me, saying that he had the most votes and that he had to get on with the job of running the country and that, perhaps, considering I had the tenancy agreement for the place, we could live together, ‘as one happy family’.
He said he’d even pay half of all the bills, and that his constituency would take care of all my requirements.
He then had the gall to suggest that, as he had children and a wife, he should take the ground floor up and I could have the basement, with all parking permits going to him (he knew I didn’t drive).

Obviously, I had to give him a good beating and the policeman joined in when he realised what a twerp he was.

When we threw him out into the street, a crowd of photographers had gathered and lit up the air as he spewed on to the pavement like old scrag from the butchers.

Reporters started asking Cameron a lot of questions about the justice system but he was a bit dazed, and found it difficult to put across his insistence that I had absolutely no right to be there.
He told the press that he was the rightful inhabitant of Number Ten and that it was completely undemocratic and ‘out of order’ for me to be there, so I offered him a referendum and he accepted.
Moments later, bloodied and broken, he fell unconscious and the ambulance arrived to take care of him.

He did lots of interviews with the TV people to get me out of Number Ten and even Gordon Brown came to his defence, saying what an utter mess the present political system was if they couldn’t get a tenant out of Number Ten. He finished by saying that it made a mockery of the British that we would live to regret.

European leaders soon found out that their time, too, had come to an end.
French squatters took Le Palais de Versailles and Le Bois du Boulogne whilst the Italians decided to pitch up at the Vatican. In Germany, six army bases were in the process of being turned into villages constructed by the people.

The police just let it happen, as if it was all meant to be.

Once the people voted for me to stay at Number Ten for as long as I wanted, I did another party with lots of stars and musicians who did drugs and partied hard.

After the party, I took another enjoyable and tranquil holiday, only to return to find that someone else had broken in to the house.

This time, a Nicholas Clegg had smashed one of the windows at the back of the house, dressed as a gardener, and was found in one of the rooms. He seemed sure that he should be living there, having been instrumental in causing a hung parliament, which, he said, was the reason that none of the leaders could live there in the first place.

‘So that’s why you reckon you should be living here? Because none of the others can have it?’ I asked, holding up the shorthold tenancy agreement for him to cast his eyes over. ‘This is a legal document and, if you will read it for one minute, you will be sure that I am the legal tenant to this house.’

The argument went on for a while with Nick, who I found quite agreeable, but when he started banging on about the need for change and compromise with his hands spread out in front of me, telling me that maybe, just maybe, we could live together at the house, I lost faith in his words.

He reckoned that, as he had children and a wife, he could take the ground floor up and that I should have the basement.

I got bored and booted him out in the end.

With those two out of the way, I knew it would only be a matter of time before Gordon came knocking and, sure enough, I didn’t have to wait long.

He had a plan, he said, holding his hands together and swinging them up and down as if he was trying to hypnotise me. This plan would change the world forever, he reckoned.

As wars around the world petered out, the City responded by strengthening its global placement which in turn led other major countries to follow suit by disarming.
Brown said that he wanted to scrap the present system of currencies and start all over again with one global currency, once each individual country was back on its feet

It was a ‘grand plan’, he told me.
Whole continents were hailing the idea as the best way forward, hope in the midst of fear, success in the jaws of defeat, but I thought it was a load of old codswallop and told him to sling his hook, so he skulked off and murmured something under his breath about democracy.