Where Devils Won't Go

A Walk in the Park with a Reform Candidate

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that James Bembridge didn’t exist.

He is supposed to be English. Nobody believed that he was real. You just never knew. That was his power.

Polanski always said, “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him.” Well, I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is James Bembridge.

Any sensible political pundit will tell you never to mix politics with drugs. On the contrary, drugs should be prescribed liberally in order to reverse the deviant malady that ails the political establishment.

I too am in need of remedy. I’ll make no secret of the fact that I have grown despondent in my sickness. Most of the time I can barely walk. The pain could cut through granite. Some days I can barely even bring myself to commit a hate crime.

Following a fit of doom I found myself convalescing in old London Town. Like many an addict before me, I found myself in the company of Mr Bembridge.

He sat half in shadow with a Klaus Kinski intensity, nursing his morning lager. Probably calculating some preposterous scandal involving cocaine and midgets.

To look at him, you wouldn’t think he was fit for office. He’s likely not even fit to stand trial. Cloaked in a white linen suit, with Panama hat and a thousand-yard stare, James Bembridge is barely even human—and barely an alcoholic.

When Bembridge was announced to stand for councillor of Soho under Reform UK, nobody took his campaign seriously. Least of all James Bembridge.

The Deputy Editor of Country Squire Magazine promises to restore Soho to its former glory as a haven for junkies and prostitutes. Out with the artisanal bakeries and nauseating hipster baristas and in with the sticky red lights and steroid-addled rent boys. I wouldn’t put it past the bastard to convert the mosque into a bathhouse.

Bembridge’s utopian dream of untethered vice and moral decay is no doubt an honourable one. With almost no effort at all, the bastard has rattled the opposition. A symbolic candidate. A glorious two-fingered salute to the old money. The very fact that he could win sends a chill right up the prostate of all the wrong ribbons.

How can you dance with the devil if he dances to a different tune?

He’s become a myth, a spook story that lefties tell their kids at night. “Vote against Reform and Bembridge will get you.”

James Bembridge has been accused of many things. Of being an incompetent bigot. A racist, a misogynist and a transphobe. He is of course all of these things—but they miss the point entirely. He’s a man who doesn’t pretend to know what he’s doing. A man with nothing to lose.

A man that I fed magic mushrooms to.

The stuff went in but had no discernible effect. The calm was unsettling.

Andy Zapp looked at me sideways. “We should get the man some air,” he muttered. Neither of us thought a doctor could help. What medicine cabinet on God’s green earth contains a cure for James Bembridge?

We took him by the lapel and threw him into the afternoon light. His pallid complexion almost smoking in revulsion.

The hoi polloi on Clapham Common that Sunday afternoon had no expectation of the horror that awaited them. Families. Dog walkers. Worthy cyclists in their little helmets. A cosmopolitan tableau of South London’s working class at rest under radiant sunshine.

When we arrived he was fine. That much I recall. Then it happened.

He fixed on a burqa gliding across the grass like a mourning sail.

Something detonated in the man like a nail bomb and tore through the thread that held together his sanity. It started somewhere down in the reptilian brainstem and detonated upward.

There was no containing the man. No pacifying the visceral racism radiating from him like a shockwave.

Eyes were upon us. That’s when the real horror began.

Nobody anticipated the spectacle of West End candidate James Bembridge bent double and cackling like a hyena at the sight of black men playing basketball.

Yet, that’s what they were met with. The immutable memory of a man dressed like Tom Wolfe unravelling and coercing an invalid to piss on migrant children.

“For the cause!” he roared, as if this were some ancient sacrament.

I took sanctuary in a public toilet. Andy Zapp hid from view and watched in awe as Bembridge climbed across the wooden wall like a gecko. From that vantage the Reform candidate who professed a visceral hatred for the NHS scoured the horizon for fat nurses to drown in the duck pond.

Who was this man?

In all the chaos nobody noticed the homeless man. Walking barefoot through the grass picking up cigarette butts. He probably had no idea that there was an election at all. Probably the happiest man in the world. All he wanted was a little sunshine.

As God is my witness, I believe in James Bembridge. When the sun rises on Friday over Soho they’ll have a new king. Heavy is the head that wears the Panama.

May God have mercy on us all.

And if the heat comes down—if the authorities, the press, and the shrieking custodians of decency finally close their jaws and force him to flee this rain-soaked emerald isle—I see his destiny with perfect clarity.

He will wash up on some God-forsaken archipelago in the South Pacific where the natives have never before seen a white man in a linen suit.

There he will declare himself not-so-benevolent dictator and he’ll convert the missionary chapel into the island’s first honest whorehouse.

Bembridge doesn’t campaign. He doesn’t reform. He simply reminds a nervous, sanitised world that no spaces are safe. The devil never had to pull any trick. He simply put on a Panama hat and stood for council.

Portrait of James Bembridge by Sean Bw Parker.