Letter From London: Bully for You
The Roosevelt Coup d’Etat, Assisted by John Hay. Cartoon by Charles Green Bush, New York World, 1903.
My first ever fight was with a bully of sorts. I was seven years old. His was a case of cruelty over animals rather than humans. The fight took place in woods close to my grandmother’s house in Scotland, where we lived in the winter, in a small lone fortress-like building, a dovecot or home for pigeons. It was after I mentioned the building to a boy at school who asked me to take him there that the two of us were suddenly using nest-boxes as footholds as we climbed inside to the top. This was when he spotted baby pigeons in the last of the nest-boxes. Blowing hair from his face, he reached inside and tossed one of them out, watching it fall with glee. Then another, and another, tossing each one the twenty feet or so to the ground, unfazed about the fact they couldn’t fly. ‘What are you doing?’ I screamed at the top of my voice, still clinging on to the slippery lip of a nest-box. But there was more still to come from the boy whose cruelty was so obviously strongest when he thought he had the upper hand. Basically, once we completed our descent, he began stamping on them all, some of them still alive. This was when, if you forgive me, we came to blows, the two of us soon rolling about in the mulch, right there with the dead baby pigeons, pinching, punching, straining. Okay, the boy marched off in a huff in the end, and it was the last time we would ever speak, but I hated him for what he did. As for the baby pigeons, I couldn’t eat my supper that night. In my head, they had reincarnated as the sausages on my plate.
Talking of bullies, not for the first time did we experience some pretty strong anti-British sentiment last week from our so-called big brothers in arms in the United States. President Thomas Jefferson, born a British subject, warned once before of unhelpful anti-British hostility. This was during the Napoleonic Wars, presumably brought on by the American Revolutionary Wars. This latest assault however was far more bizarre, much of it coming from a man actually born in Pretoria in South Africa, a Boer city founded in 1855 by the leader of the Voortrekkers, several years after our own country had decided in 1834 to abolish slavery in all colonies—a largely Boer city which in the end would surrender to British forces in 1900. Elon Musk is of course the South African with Canadian and now American citizenship in question. As everyone knows, he is about to become part of the incoming US administration. Despite the responsibility normally coming with that, one of his recent posts stated that the US should ‘liberate the people of Britain’ and overthrow our government. Overthrow? Spicy language, mate. Extraordinary language, in fact. The Financial Times claimed as breaking news on that same day that he and some undisclosed team wanted to topple our government mid-term. Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, responded by saying he had had enough of this person interfering with our country’s democracy ‘when he clearly knows nothing about Britain.’ Davey went on to say it was time to summon the US ambassador to ask why an incoming US official was suggesting our government be overthrown in the first place, adding that this dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric was ‘further proof’ that the UK can’t rely on the new administration, ‘and it’s in our national interest to rebuild trade and security ties with our allies in Europe.’
As day descended into night, Musk upped his support for the Right-wing AfD party in Germany, tallying neatly with his calls for the release of notorious far-Right activist Tommy Robinson, in prison for contempt of court and for what felt to some like the effective bullying of a teenage boy. TV in Blighty meanwhile spoke of senior officials in Downing Street wondering if the UK should now distance itself from the new administration as long as Musk was a part of it—hinting mischievously that it could effect Five Eyes intelligence-sharing with our so-called American cousins alongside Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Even the Home Office’s Homeland Security group was said to be monitoring Musk’s posts. Not to mention the fact that there was now a mysterious surfeit of AI-generated anti-British posts coming from a fictitious ‘Musk’ and ‘Trump’ on Chinese-owned TikTok. Rumours even began to circulate of Boris Johnson’s former Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings being in the mix. It certainly felt an age since I first mentioned anti-British rhetoric from JD Vance. Today, I have to say, with not one but two volatile superpowers chomping at the bit either side of us—both going for our baby pigeons, so to say—I found myself reaching last week for that line from Buddha when he said holding onto anger was like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
And what of dear old Greenland? No one here is saying it is not of great strategic importance, but going at it with a blowtorch and a bully’s grin and no apparent respect for international law? Shortly after Trump refused to rule out taking Greenland by force, which he could so easily have done, his son was there as if advertising an upcoming ice show. My Danish grandfather had family on Greenland so maybe it earned me the right to enjoy a subsequent post that day from essayist and writer Eliot Wilson who registered surprise at the president-elect’s subsequent notion that Denmark had no legal claim to Greenland: ‘I mean,’ said Wilson, ‘it dates back to 1397, and if that’s not long enough, or if imposition by force is illegitimate, I have some very bad news about the whole concept of the United States.’
Finally, there was a boy in my House after I had been sent away to school who didn’t like sport. Nor was it his fault that the school was unsympathetic to non-sporty types. Anyway, some of the boys had given him a derogatory, possibly racist, nickname, and I felt sorry for him, even though he was a few years older than me. We used to chat about philosphy. One day, someone slammed this boy against the wall, aggressively accusing him of being illiterate. Illiterate, I was thinking? ‘At least I’m more illiterate than you!’ he snarled back to the bully. And with that, everyone cheered. It really was that simple. He was bullied no more.
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