At my secondary school, a friend of mine pretended to be the confidant of the tragic Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, maintaining that time away on family holidays was actually spent visiting the ailing singer at her home in Scotland. He even went as far as appearing to receive and engage in phone calls from Zavaroni, presumably by cutting off the call as soon as he picked up the receiver, and acting out a fake one-way conversation. It wasn’t until years after Zavaroni’s death I learned the relationship had been an elaborate, committed, and entirely pointless hoax. No one was impressed by a friendship with the former Opportunity Knocks singer anyway, just baffled. And yet my friend identified, convincingly, as a personal friend of Lena Zavaroni. For about five years. It was an act of insane genius.
For the past week, the national conversation has been dominated by the idea that a school in Rye had defended a child’s right to identify as a cat, subsequently and cynically extrapolated into the idea that woke schools all over the land were encouraging children to identify as animals. The clandestine classroom recording that sparked this moral panic revealed a put-upon teacher discussing complex gender issues with some combative children, clearly under some pressure and concerned for a distressed class member. But at no point was it clear that anyone was identifying as a cat. Or indeed as a dog. A dinosaur. Or a furry. Because at no point did anyone identify as a cat. It didn’t happen.
But by this point the cat that didn’t exist was out of the bag that didn’t exist either. The falsehood-windsock Nick Ferrari, on LBC, hosted a morning phone-in about it; Kemi Badenoch, the minister for women and equalities, demanded an investigation; the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, condemned schools – as it was now assumed the cat-child phenomenon was spreading beyond the lone Rye cesspit that spawned it – for letting children say they were animals, generally (ocelots perhaps, or shrews); and Sir Keir Starmer condemned the practice of animal-child-identification, even though it didn’t happen, which his advisers must have known. It seems Starmer’s hunger for power is so great that not only will he sell out old-school socialists, he will also throw children who never even identified as cats anyway under the bus. Luckily the cat-children don’t exist, so no one was harmed.
But the imaginary cat-child did what was required of her, tapping into the Tories’ carefully fabricated culture war to fill the internet, the press, and the swamps of barely regulated “news” television with distracting stories about cat-identifiers. Meanwhile, disaster capitalism crashed Thames Water, Boris Johnson’s murky relationship with a Russian intelligence-adjacent playboy became ever more dubious, British beaches ran thick with sewage as the summer getaway season loomed, and Texas threatened to become too hot for human habitation. The news was smouldering. The Tories were putting out fires with cat-people.
The government has made poor progress towards net zero and is now committed to opening a new coalmine in Cumbria. What can be done? On Wednesday, at Lord’s, brave Just Stop Oil protesters invaded the pitch and were arrested. I’m not a fan of cricket, and associate it with standing around bored before having my penis and testicles felt by a breathless old man apparently checking to see if I had showered after games. But the square world’s objection to Just Stop Oil is that they are stopping decent people getting to work. Now they’re not allowed to disrupt a sport game either, even one that moves so slowly no one would notice if it had stopped anyway. So how does one protest exactly, in post-police bill Britain?
The photos from the Ashes, of heroic Just Stop Oil protesters being brought down by uniformed sport primates, in striking clouds of orange dust, are already iconic. And one day soon, as the Earth itself turns to actual ashes, they will take on the same status as all those other unforgettable news images: that lone Tiananmen Square protester in front of a tank; that flag raised at Iwo Jima; that hooded Abu Ghraib detainee; that starving child stalked by an opportunistic vulture; that Saigon street execution; those civil rights Olympics salutes; that napalmed nine-year-old; and that post-party Boris Johnson, clearly still off his tits at an Italian airport, having met a former KGB agent.
Imagine, if instead of carrying that bold dust-chucker off the cricket field to the cheers of the foolish crowd, idly accepting the collective suicide of their species and the death-by-negligence of their planet, the cricketer Jonny Bairstow had made a different choice at this sliding-doors moment of his life. What if the athlete had had the intelligence to take the protester’s hand, present them to the audience, and invite the world to applaud them for their courage? Then he could have made a difference. But instead Bairstow, like so many others, missed his moment, his chance to help. And one day the cricket player’s own children, as they watch the world die in real time around them, will curse his terrible error of judgment, his unwitting role as the unpaid enforcer for big oil and the climate crisis denialists, the worst people on earth.
But never mind. Somewhere, someone didn’t identify as a cat, and the front pages roll forward and the pundits step up to their microphones, with endless comment on something unimportant that didn’t even happen. And as the world of tomorrow burns, when the image of Bairstow carrying a Just Stop Oil protester away from the cricket competition is reflected upon by the dying, only one hero will emerge from the picture. And it absolutely won’t be Jonny Bairstow.
Basic Lee’s Royal Festival Hall run ends tonight; more tour dates are here. A fun-size ™ ® version of the show is at the Stand’s New Town Theatre, Edinburgh, 11-20 August
