These days, you can’t claim to have truly honoured the fallen unless you’ve had a poppy-adorned howitzer on display outside your bungalow since at least early October. And you’re rightly smeared as despicable and unpatriotic – unworthy of enjoying the dwindling freedoms our military heroes fought to preserve – if you haven’t scattered a load of limbless mannequins on your front lawn to add that special something to your DIY Somme ahead of Remembrance Sunday (a scene of unsettling thousand-yard stares because they’ve seen some shit in TK Maxx). Is your poppy smaller than a standard hubcap? Well, fuck you if it is!
Are you berating Naga Munchetty on social media for wearing her poppy on the wrong side? Well, I hope you can type one-handed – because you should be saluting with the other hand, you super patriotic legend! (Although, when you’ve finished rage-tweeting about Naga and packed away your Blu-ray edition of The Longest Day, pop over to the Royal British Legion’s website, where you’ll see that there is no ‘correct’ way to wear a poppy.)
Of course, I imagine all the people blathering on about Naga’s poppy looked on with chest-bursting pride as our dishevelled Prime Minister attended a Remembrance service looking like he’d literally been fired from a howitzer, before splashing spectacularly into a vat of Tignanello like a tragic circus act. With a single suit button straining to hold against his corpulence (which no amount of running to Andrew Marr’s studio seems to able to shift), I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d reached for his pocket square to dab away a tear only to find some kebab meat in his breast pocket.
But I guess all that is just fine with Tory voters and people policing acts of Remembrance, isn’t it? Naga – BAD! White poppies – BAD! Worzel fucking Gummidge with the nuclear codes – proud, respectful, dignified. Typical ruddy Boris, eh?!
The fallen must be turning in their graves.
Sublime clip-clops 