Middle Class Holes 17 - Led By Donkeys

Hot four-man action

Surprisingly, there isn’t - in the English language, anyway - an exact antonym for the word ‘surprise’. This can leave you struggling when you need a succinct way to react to … well, a revelation that isn’t a revelation at all. ‘Non-event’ isn’t specific enough. ‘Nothing burger’ is just annoying. The best we can do is the sarcastic exclamation ‘what a surprise’.

The ‘political street art collective’ who call themselves Led By Donkeys began in late 2018 as a Banksy-style, anonymous ‘guerrilla’-style operation. After six months of enlarging politicians’ daft tweets about Brexit and pasting them up on billboards, to no great effect but the knicker-wetting delight of Remainers and an avalanche of crowdfunding, they revealed themselves - to somebody called Harriet in The Observer. ‘They are hitting back against claims by rightwing bloggers and trolls that they are a shadowy, anonymous group,’ Harriet blinked excitedly, overlooking their self-vaunted status as a shadowy, anonymous group, ‘by revealing their identities and motives’.

And who were these present-day Pimpernels? Some Greenpeace employees (and former employees) - namely Oliver Knowles, Will Rose, James Sadri and Ben Stewart. We learnt their origin story. How one night at their personal Batcave - a nice pub called The Birdcage in Stoke Newington - they decided to embark on a ‘Brexit accountability project’ to expose ‘thermonuclear hypocrisy’.

All four had spent years generally sticking their beaks in to the great irritant causes - starting off at the freelance end as hunt sabs (there is nothing the middle class loathe more than the ancient, faded trappings of the upper class) but moving on into the professional realm as busy-bodying charity workers, and power station chimney ascenders.

Specific details of their personal individual class backgrounds are hard to pin down - but oh, for goodness sakes just look at them.

Great bunch of lads

Now, we all correspond to stereotypes. And that’s fine. We have to, for human socialisation and interaction to function efficiently. Such assumptions are a way of imparting information about each other quickly and efficiently. And tribalism is a very natural thing (which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing), because quickly identifying a stranger as friend or foe makes all the difference in the life-or-death Neolithic world where our species spent a long, long time. It’s only when there is leisure to spare that we can truly discern the individual, and appreciate his or her characteristics.

So, we inevitably flatter ourselves, scoffing about ‘them over there’ and how emotional and illogical they are, compared to ‘us over here’, and how marvellously sane and rational we are.

But there must be more to life than stereotypes, surely.

Led by Donkeys look exactly how you’d expect. They instituted their endeavour in a place that is exactly what you’d expect. They have never, ever, surprised anyone. (Except for being crasser or less funny than even their biggest detractors thought was possible.)

We all trickle down predestined ruts and channels. An event like the Donkeys’ self-unmasking makes one question one’s own individuality - any human being’s individuality. Led By Donkeys are a better illustration than anything else that free will is an illusion. That we flatter ourselves with our grand dreams of autonomy, when we are all just rivulets.

Oliver, Will, James, and Ben! (I add the ‘some of my best friends’ caveat here.) That moustache! The raddled, tired dad look. The basic bloke ‘landfill indie’ clobber; they look like the Bluetones have reformed. The craft beer in the sad, smokeless pretend-folk hipster London pub, which could be bloody anywhere from Brooklyn to Bilbao.