On Thursday of last week, an ITV news crew were attempting to film a report on the rat infestation at the Palace of Westminster when the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, suddenly and unexpectedly entered the shot and expressed an opinion about Keir Starmer and the Epstein scandal. The rat that was being filmed, scared of being implicated by association, can be seen making the decision to scurry out of sight as quickly as possible, before hurrying to its laptop to pre-emptively release any emails it may have sent to Peter Mandelson.
Britain, apparently, is ungovernable and Westminster is in crisis, crumbling and sliding into the Thames, both literally and figuratively. But the rats aren’t leaving the sinking ship. In fact they are taking it over, inserting themselves in their thousands into the very heart of government. In Britain as a whole, you are never more than six feet from a rat. In Westminster, you are either right next to a rat or, as is more likely, you are actually a rat and haven’t realised. But how has the Mother of all Parliaments’ historically symbiotic relationship with rats reached this moment of crisis?
Indeed, until fairly recently, a mischief of six rats was deliberately maintained at Westminster in a tradition dating back to the days of Charles II, the folkloric belief soon emerging that should the rats ever leave, or fly away, then parliament would fall. A ceremonial post, held by a rat-keeper known as Black Rat, is paid for by a compulsory donation from each MP’s salary, known as the Rats’ Pence. In the entire history of the fee, only one MP, Michael Gove, has refused to pay, on the grounds that rats should be replaced with six worms, as they would be cheaper to keep in the long run and were “more fun”. Rock music trivia fans will also be delighted to learn that the role of Black Rat is currently held by one Rhod Leakins, who was once the theremin player in the late 80s Camden noise band the Sperm Wails.
Peter Mandelson was said to have admired the rats, and spent many hours alone with them, learning their ways, in their deluxe bespoke burrow near the members’ bar in just his pants.
Winston Churchill is said to have loved the rats, and cavorted with them drunkenly in his trademark boiler suit during air raids. Indeed, his final words were “I’m bored with it all. Goodbye my lovely rats!” Former Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Öpik is rumoured to have secured a first date with the Cheeky Girls singer Gabriele Irimia only by promising to show her the famous rats, a promise which he was, typically, never to keep. And when a new rat was brought into the Westminster mischief in 2011, to replace an elderly rat which sadly died after Lord Heseltine hit it with the mace, a public vote was held to decide on its name, and the reliably amusing British public plumped for, you guessed it, Ratty McRatface.
But the unbroken tradition of the Westminster rats came to an end during lockdown, where some of the copious lines of cocaine demonstrably left by MPs on flat surfaces in their private bathrooms somehow found their way into the rats. Their erratic behaviour caused them to flee their usual pen, support Brexit, and scurry out into the wider Palace of Westminster, where they bred uncontrollably, leading to the infestation we have today, surviving largely on discarded pork scratchings and Bombay mix dropped by Reform UK’s immigration and justice spokesperson Ann Widdecombe.
Peter Mandelson, presciently, was said to have admired the rats, and spent many hours alone with them, learning their ways, in their deluxe bespoke burrow near the members’ bar in just his pants. And doubtless many will see this as ironic given the company he came to keep, though there is no credible evidence that Lord Peter engaged with any of the rats on a sexual level, or forced them to do anything against their will.
Mandelson of course was not alone in his unwise associations with the convicted paedophile and international financier Jeffrey Epstein, though the seismic shockwaves the Epstein files are sending through the global elite seem, somehow, to leave certain figures unscathed. Nigel Farage’s political ally Steve Bannon sought Epstein’s advice on how to fund the pair’s pan-European far-right network, the Movement. Indeed, as well as loving trafficking underage girls, Epstein also loved Brexit, for the opportunities for financial deregulation it offered, and wrote to his friend Peter Thiel, whose company Palantir currently controls all our NHS and defence data, to say the Farage’s Brexit victory was “just the beginning”.
All across Europe, heads are rolling by association with Epstein. It seems that knowing he was probably trafficking women for sex was tolerated, but the fact that various politicians may have had inappropriate financial or political dealings with him really is the last straw! Among those implicated are former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland, former Norwegian ambassador to Jordan Mona Juul, former French culture minister Jack Lang, and our own former Prince Andrew, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who is on the way to having so many parts of his previous name confiscated by the king he will soon be known simply as &.
But while careers crumble in Epstein’s wake all across the rest of the world, in America a series of movable fans continually fail to become the resting place of a lot of endlessly hurled shit, plucked from a seemingly bottomless bucket, on which the Trump administration can just about keep the lid. So far. The Formica-faced US attorney general, Pam Bondi, sits and sneers with her back to Epstein’s victims, filibustering as Rome, so far, fails to burn. But the rats are in the walls now. And eventually they will burst out. And the web of power that links Big Tech, big business, sexual exploitation, and the framework of favours and mutually assured destruction that glues it all together globally will unravel.
In the meantime, do we still want Peter Thiel’s paedophile-adjacent Palantir handling all Britain’s health and defence data? I think there’s a bloke who used to work in the computer department at Curry’s on our local Facebook. Maybe he’s free.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of this year, and is playing at London’s Alexandra Palace until this Sunday, 15 February