Fear And Loathing on The Campaign Trail ‘06

 

We were somewhere round Beaconsfield on the edge of the M40 when the drugs took hold. I remember the skies melting into an endless tartan picnic blanket with every free lunch ever eaten in the western world laid out upon it. Hams and cheeses, pies and pastries, there was such a bounty there that I felt hungry for the first time since ’77.

The WWST election was approaching and I’d been asked to follow the twisted procedure. Three candidates and one aim, a spot in the directors box at every game and a golden toilet pan three miles underneath the sports ground. There are prizes and there are prizes. This was a prize.

So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

From what I was told in a motel room near Maidenhead there were three children of God looking for the cash cow. Incumbent Keith Blagbrough, and two challengers, Reg Rundle and Graham Smith. I had photos of Blagbrough, sneaking into games under the cover of machine gun fire and children dressed as angels singing medieval chants. I knew nothing of the other pair. I liked them already.

The Hustings
I arrived late, not late enough, to see the dreary procession of chunter and backchat as the candidates outlined their views for the 22nd century. Blagbrough had crumbs all round his mouth and his right hand shook and pointed like a jackhammer. Rundle came next, all tweed coat and lickspittle. I tried to take notes but my pencil was not sharpened. It was in good company.

All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, sex, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way. Smith did not say this but he didn’t need to. His droning pitch made me dream of laying in a copper bath with an electric current pulsing through my chattering teeth. These men were dancing corpses as far as I could see. Their eyes lit up occasionally like a seaside town in the 1950s but the audience were already bored. I saw a fat woman on her knees looking for a hotdog roll that had fallen under a chair. People watched her strain eagerly, each one playing bookmaker to their own mind and wondering what would give out first.

As I looked outside I noticed a shooting star, either that or some space hardware.

Aftermath
I spent the next few days trying to spend time with the three men but security was so tight around them that it would have been easier to knock back a quart of Wild Turkey with the Prince of Wales. A supposed meeting with Rundle in a grimy restaurant called the Tuck-In was scuppered after a mescaline session that left me a little jumpy. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.

Panicking after a call from the One-One editor put me straight about the precise ratio of payment to word count, I determined to start with renewed vigour. An hour in the town centre drinking steadily focussed me and I purchased a copy of the Bucks Free Press, looking for an angle in this infernal story. Big mistake.

Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

That night I received a phonecall from Blagbrough, the man was gibbering and howling like a lunatic, pleading with me to rig the vote, to get rid of the other candidates. I’ve had enough he said, democracy is too unpredictable, there are too many angles, too many options, these people don’t need a choice, they need a leader. I couldn’t help but agree. This was a man you could do business with, like Meyer Lansky or Captain Caveman.

The Vote
The votes had been coming in slowly, like fishing boats filled with narcotics, but some semblance of finality was taking shape. The pretenders, Rundle and Smith had split the opposition vote like a watermelon and Blagbrough’s fears of defeat were fading fast. On the day of results he was wearing a new suit and it had a lapel pin that I could not identify. Everytime I got close he covered it up, his left hand as effective a shield as the Maginot Line. It looked like this. No, forget it.

The result came through the newswires late on a Sunday night, more of the same, Keith was saved! He will follow in a line of great Keith’s at the club: Ryan, Scott and Blagbrough. The boardroom will always represent that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the English character that we all crave like freshly cut ham. Blagbrough is our representative in this world and we can trust that he will continue as before, another year of rolling with the waves, of knives and forks, of pipe smoke rising into the winter air as the weak sun breaks through the clouds like hangover urine into a freezing bowl.

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. I’ll come back to Buckinghamshire one day but I’ll be falling down in a duststorm or a nuclear bomb. I mean, if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

Hunter S Thompson, October 2006