TILLY'S POLITICS

A little tale of the growth of a political leader

Tilly Jefferson had never had any friends, largely because he didn’t deserve to have any.

His progress through life is as follows, and excuse my brevity but there are only so many words in the English language and I can’t abide too much repetition.

Tilly was born to loving parents and christened Tilford after a character in a porn novel his mother was particularly fond of. The character in the book (Under the Pair Tree by Justin Thyme) was horrible, and so was Tilly, even as a baby, then as a toddler, then as a child.

When he was six he committed his first murder. Killing a kitten may not seem like murder to you, but to him at that age it was. The kitten had scratched him and that had to be punishable, so he punished it. With strangulation.

His mother, who saw the scratch (made deeper by himself with a lead pencil in order for him to prove there was justice behind his deed) acknowledged that the kitten had been killed in a fit of justifiable pain and anger and forgave her son straight away before getting back to re-reading chapter six of her favourite book in which Tilford hangs the father of his latest lover in a woodshed, and performs an extraordinarily graphic ceremony that most decent folk would find offensive afterwards.

Four years later Tilly fell out with Agatha Boniface, a pretty child with long blond hair and a dimple who wanted to keep her underwear in place, and killed her by the stream at the bottom of what had called the Parson’s Bottoms since time immemorial. The sweet child was discovered to be dead, her parents distraught and the police suspected Tilly, but had no evidence, and being a streetwise ten he wasn’t going to be broken by officers of the law.

When he was fifteen he discovered that the best way to curry favour from his teachers was via the gift of blackmail, and he used his old box Brownie camera to capture a slightly blurred image that he claimed was the famously absent-minded science teacher having it away with the English professor (his words). The science teacher worshipped the very ground that the professor walked on but he stuck to science rather than seeking what he dearly wanted, the knickers of the English Professor, and he worked out that he must have sleep-walked into her boudoir one night and committed the dirty deed. He hadn’t, but such is the power of a blurred image in the hands of a wretched rogue that he was easily blackmailed for being innocent.

When Tilly was eighteen he went to University and rapidly gained a reputation as a mighty fine drinker. Many was the evening that he returned to his room much the worse for drink, and even managed to urinate in his wardrobe during the night believing it to be a urinal. It was during a drunken black mood that he murdered Stephanie Broomhill because she wouldn’t remove her knickers for him to sniff, and the police at last had his name brought to their attention.

He got away with it, though. Lack of evidence again, and he kept his mouth firmly shut except for when he muttered no comment at the end of every question. In the end the crime was unsolved and his name kept on record until the records department of the county police force unaccountably was destroyed by fire. This was, of course, before a great deal of the stuff was computerised and when Tilly was coincidentally in the immediate vicinity.

It was while he was at University that he became politically aware during a moment or two of relative sobriety, and joined a right wing party with the stated aims of reclaiming the British Empire and getting rich. Such was his talent when it came to oratory that he quickly became its president. Nobody liked him, though, and even his political friends thought him a scumbag who thought a great deal too much of himself.

After University he got a job as a teacher, but he didn’t last long because three of his pupils fell into an inaccessible ravine whilst on a field trip, and perished in distressing agony. Tilly was dreadfully sorry, but added that they shouldn’t really have worked out the Tilly rhymed with willy and that the latter weren’t always minuscule. It was this comment that was found so distasteful.

He was dismissed, but that merely hastened his climb to fame and fortune. His mother, Irene Jefferson, sadly passed away after an experiment involving a hot water bottle and a corkscrew, and was buried in her back garden (the churchyard authorities wouldn’t or couldn’t accommodate a “y” shaped coffin and Tilly bullied permission for a domestic internment)

He rose at dazzling speed in the world of politics and at the age of twenty nine became the local conservative candidate at a forthcoming general election. It was a close battle, and he might not have won had not the Labour candidate suffered from a bout of food poisoning that was so serious that he died in almost unbelievable agony.

Once in parliament the name of Tilly Jefferson was never out of the news. His mother would have been proud of him because he worked out a way of convincing just about everyone that black was white and one plus one equalled infinity. People couldn’t stand him, but they, curiously, did believe him and his hearty bumbling ways.

And if you need to know who was behind World War Three and who made a real killing from all those weapon sales together with the rise of a brand new body bag empire, you need look no further. It was Tilly Jefferson, and he was bound to succeed because, even though he was one of the worst scumbags ever conceived, people believed him, and that was good enough for them.

And when the bombs rained down, they thanked him for his prayers as they died.

© Peter Rogerson 29.09.19