It’s hard not to feel sorry for Henry Bolton, isn’t it? Following a series of occurrences largely outside of his control, the noxious divorce-enthusiast has achieved the unlikely feat of being unanimously declared too toxic for a party whose previous leaders have included a morose, Benson and Hedges-smoking turtle who only turns up for work every third Wednesday, and a facist Ade Edmondson lookalike who claims to have invented peas.
Bolton, of course, is rightly outraged by the gross miscarriage of justice that has caused UKIP’s NEC to expect him to take ownership of whether or not his penis ends up in a person who lacks the necessary restraint to ensure that the really bad racism stays within the party, and that only oblique, plausibly-deniable references to hating brown people make it into the public sphere. And, if we look at things dispassionately, how could he possibly have been expected to avoid the situation in which he now finds himself?
It’s a tale as old as time itself: he puts on his best Farah slacks and his smartest brownshirt, kisses his third wife goodbye, and goose steps off to his work’s festive party, cheerfully humming “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas,” and allowing himself a malignant little smile at the pleasing double meaning hidden within the lyrics of his favourite yuletide ditty.
Everything seems normal on arrival. He trades a few jokes that Bernard Manning rejected for being ‘a bit tasty’ with Godfrey Bloom, then heads over to the vol-au-vents, sipping contentedly at his second glass of white wine. Then, all of a sudden, he sets eyes on the woman who will change everything. She’s slim, blonde, less than half his age, and possessed of the hot, fiery brand of racially-motivated hatred that brings ‘Little Henry’ to the kind of urgent tumescence he last enjoyed when it was still ok to throw bananas at black footballers.
Fast forward a few days, and wife number three is well on the way to becoming ex-wife number three, as poor, biddable Henry ignores the pleas of his pre-school daughter and shacks up with the objectively abhorrent Kellyanne Conway tribute act who caused him to wander from the path of faithful devotion just a few days before the anniversary of the birth of White Jesus.
I suspect you’re probably thinking that the 54-year-old leader of a political party must bear some responsibility for his life choices, but what the hell was he supposed to do? Honour his marriage vows? Consider the feelings of his children? Not broadcast the fact that he was conkers deep in a Poundland Helga Geerhart all over Twitter like a horny, pant-spaffing member of the 2017 Hitler Youth?
None of this is reasonable. You might as well hold Bolton responsible for the fact that he thought pretending to ‘end the romantic element’ of their relationship would solve everything, as though it’s totally fine to have friends who assert that a mixed-race woman will ‘taint’ the hitherto exclusively white family she’s about to marry into, as long as you don’t shag them.
No, the blame must be laid squarely at the door of Nazi nork-model, Jo Marney, who has destroyed a marriage and a political party, along with, presumably, her own ability to ever close her eyes again without seeing Bolton’s leering, salivating face gazing lustily back at her, and his hairy, mid-fifties mantits bobbing up and down in unison for approximately ninety gag reflex-testing seconds.
I suspect that by mid-March, when the dust has settled and UKIP has finally expired in one last pant-shitting spasm of intolerance, history will judge Ms Marney as being the Eve to Bolton’s Adam, the Delilah to his Sampson. Because, if history teaches us anything, it’s that whenever anything bad happens, it’s ultimately never truly the fault of the well-off, middle-aged white man.
