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Chapter Three
The room was so quiet now, Mike and Hugh, who had found themselves on either side of the emerging brawl, were both dragged out into the street along with the rest of the writhing mess of green, black, blue and red. Anna had taken the result hard and politely disappeared to go and binge drink in peace leaving Arthur abandoned in the middle of an increasingly empty room. As he stared up at the telly, Charlie Brooker seemed to be sharing in his moment of anguish. “Interesting stuff, I’m hearing that the Polish results will be in shortly but before that I’ve got Catharine Rice, head of Ipsos-Mori, to tell us just how they cocked up the results so poorly. Well, Cathy? Just how did you miss the black tide?”
As the poor woman stuttered and blustered, searching desperately for some logical explanation and seemingly stuck in a loop on the point that “vote splitting and the provinces mean that…”. Exhaling deeply, Arthur found himself once again alone and went to the bar to order a scotch. About a third of the way through his quadruple serving of Laphroaig however, his right pocket lit up and started singing.
“♫Things, can only get betteeeer♫.” Taking the PDA out of his pocket and lifting it lazily to his ear, Arthur clicked the green button on the side.
“AJ here, what’s up?”
“Artie!” the panting voice came, accompanied by two pairs of hurried footsteps. “It’s Jim!” “And Simon!” came a distant shout. “Yeah and Si, we got delayed, had a few pints in the Cape and got distracted." a laugh came from the background and then: "Yeah, "distracted" by that fit girl from Univ you like!"
"Shut up Si. What’s going on, have we missed the exit poll?”
“Yep.” Arthur replied, rubbing his eyes with one hand. “You’re not going to believe it.”
“What did he say?” echoed simons distant voice. “He said we’re not going to believe it! So,” Jim said, “Good or bad?”
“Well, kind of both?” Arthur thought about it for a moment, so far he’d just been despairing but there was a lot of good news to be had. The Co-Ops had been campaigning hard but 300 had been their high target, having nearly 70 seats above that was far more than anyone had anticipated. “A nice chunk of good and then a landfill of bad.”
“Oh Christ,” the runners came to a stop and, panting, went silent for a second. “Good news first?”
“We’re on 368.” “What was that?” came the second voice on the other end of the PDA, “Artie says we’re on 368!” Cheers of joy and what Arthur guessed were hi-fives filled the airwaves and he held the device away from his ear to avoid any damage to his hearing.
“Alright! Fantastic! So, what’s the problem?”
“We’re not the largest party.”
“Oh.”
“Vigilant are.”
A pause, slightly longer than acceptable. “Jim?” Arthur asked.
“Oh.” Jim repeated. “Whats wrong?” “It’s uh, the Blackshirts.” The voices grew quieter as Jim cupped his hand over the speaker of his PDA “They’re the biggest party.”
“Bollocks!” Arthur could almost hear Jim shrug. “Well, we’re coming down George Street now. Be there in a moment.”
Sure enough, the woman from Ipsos-Mori was still floundering her way through Brooker’s grilling by the time that the pair arrived. They were both wearing dark purple “Vote Co-Op” T-shirts from the campaigning earlier but Jim had thrown a suit jacket over his. Both were dripping wet from the rain and still breathing heavily from their sprint across Oxford. Jim was the taller of the two, scraping 6’ 2” with a scruffy beard, messy hair and round glasses, people had joked about Arthur and his’ own similarity since they’d both ran for Secretary at the end of Michaelmas term (Jim had won but didn’t run again in Hillary, so Arthur took it). Simon was skinnier and slightly pale, with short cropped hair and an e-cigarette in one hand, a slight northern accent betraying his Yorkshire origins.
“Alone again AJ?” Arthur laughed despite himself. “I had a little cross-party thing going on but Mike and Hugh-“ “Hugh Lane?” Jim asked and Artie nodded his assent. “Christ I hate him.” “Everyone hates him.” Simon opined. “He’s not so bad. Not that it matters, Mike and Hugh got chucked out for brawling along with the rest of the Commies, Fascists and Cons.”
“I thought it looked a little empty.” Jim said.
“Yeah they’ve culled the nutters. Anyway, Anna was here too but she took the Poll pretty hard.” Arthur glanced about looking for her and, to his surprise, spotted her comforting some poor lad in an orange top who appeared to be bawling uncontrollably. “Ah. Poor Dems.”
“Christ.” Jim muttered under his breath and Arthur turned back to find him staring, fixated at the TV screen where the exit poll was still plastered across the bottom of the screen.
“Four hundred and two?”
“Nevermind that,” Simon cut in, “CPP on 50? They’ve never had less than 200 before.”
“That’s what you get for invading Turkey and deciding that you’d better help the psychopath dictator rather than the rebels.” Jim nodded in agreement. “It's that that fucked them, and the asylum issue, and the economy.”
“It's weird.” Said Arthur. “I’m amazed we didn’t see it coming.”
Back on the EBC, Brooker had finished savaging his guest, who rapidly scuttled out of sight. Turning to the camera, the presenter attempted a smile.“Well, tonight’s a good night for hippies and fascists it seems, thanks for the scoop Louis but we’re about to have our first results in. I believe tonight it’s the Polish Prime Minister announcing their results, now remember Poland has been assigned 50 Council Ministers in the next parliament so we’ve got fifty seats in play, 5% of the whole shebang.”
“He really is a weird choice to replace good ol’ Dave.” Simon said.
The camera cut to a large, marble wall in front of what the caption told them to be the Sejm, the Polish Parliament. Swarming around a central podium, at which stood the Polish PM, journalists and activists had gathered in anticipation. With the exit poll as earth shattering as it had been the camera operators and journos were both flying around at breakneck pace, shoving microphones towards anyone who could talk and taking about 4 million photos a minute. Clearing her throat and holding a large piece of paper out in front of her, the Prime Minister began.
“Za zgodą szefa policji, mogę to potwierdzić…” she started before a EBC dub kicked in and drowned her out.
“With permission from the Chief Counting Officer and with all the ballots cast, I can report that Poland’s votes are as follows:
European Democrats: 11,981
Independents and Unaffiliated: 19,413
Left-Ecologists: 21,656
Marxist Solidarity Front: 93,012
Co-Operative Party: 331,067
Christian People’s Party: 124,899
Confederal Party: 3,131,401
Vigilant Alliance: 5,404,201
50 Council Members will be distributed as follows:
1 to the Marxist Solidarity Front, 2 to the Cooperative Party, 1 to the Christian People’s Party, 17 to the Confederal Party and 30 to the Vigilant Alliance.”
The Warsaw broke into a cacophony of noise as Vigilant supporters cheered their victory. Poland was one of their heartlands, always had been but nevertheless, the VA had never won anything close to a majority here and that 27 out of 50 looked like a big win.
“Well, that is something.” Brooker chimed in. “Not something very good mind you, or at least not something very good for immigrants. If we look to the big stick in front of me – and for once I’m saying that to someone other than your mum – we can see the swingometer is showing a massive 30% swing from the Coalition towards the Vigilant which is quite a lot indeed. We can also see an 11% swing from the Democrats to the Cooperatives and Christ, if these pan out then the exit poll would be spot on. Big, big changes happening here tonight. That’s absolutely crushing for the Dems, whilst they’ve never done awfully well in Poland I don’t think they’ve done worse than the independents well, ever.”
“I can’t believe it.” Arthur muttered under his breath.
“Me neither,” Simon agreed, “but on the plus side, that’s the best we’ve ever done in Poland. Has there ever been a Polish Co-Op CM?”
Arthur shook his head. “No, small mercies I suppose. You think it’ll all keep up like this?”
Before Simon could answer, Jim slammed a pint in front of each of them.
“Chug this, now.” Glancing at each other the two other students blinked, shrugged and chugged back their ale.
“See, nothing like a bit of Gold to dull the pain. I wonder who they’ll have on to talk about this one.
As if in answer, Louis Theroux popped up on screen and shakily declared; “My next guest is a newly reelected Polish Council Minister and Leader of the Polish Vanguard in Parliament, welcome Mr Korwin-Mikke.”
Louis turned to a screen on his right where the beaming face of Janusk Korwin-Mikke stood imposingly in the middle of a hectic office, the Polish Flag and a banner featuring the rampant bull of the VA served as his backdrop.
“Hello Lewis,” he practically shouted, moustache twitching with excitement and thick Polish accent smotheringly the words. “I am so so glad to be talking with you.”
“I bet you are,” Louis responded with a forced smile. “So according to our exit poll its going to be a very good night for you indeed! It looks like in Poland alone you’ve already got nearly as many seats as you won last time.” Swapping the smile out for a frown, he continued;”Why do you think it is that voters would turn to what some call an extremist party? You yourself have been accused of sexism, homophobia and even racism at times.”
The Pole chuckled and rubbed his balding head. “Come now Lewis, come now! People are clearly done with the globalist, mainstream politicians and their cronies and who can blame them? We’ve been forced into an disaster war in Turkey, we have suffered a great much under silly, silly economic ideas and the message that just isn’t getting through to Zurich is that we have had enough! Europe means Europe, their silly plans of expansion to other places are making a lot of people very angry, we have more than enough problems already.”
“Yes,” Louis nodded, “You’ve talked about a lot of these problems before. If I may, I’ve got a list of them right here, do you mind if I ask you about some of them?”
“I would be much obliged!”
“So last year on the election of Chairman Nemtsov, you said – and I quote: ‘We had better invade the Baltic already, there’s no way a man like Nemtsov would fight back,”
“Well I, of course, didn’t actually-“
“I’m sorry Mr Korwin-Mikke, but I hadn’t finished. You then called Mr Nemtsov a slang, rather impolite word for a Jewish person and then said “Semites haven’t got the fire to fight like men”, now whats that all about? Almost a fifth of Poland’s population is Jewish, how do you think they feel knowing that they’ve got a man like you as their chief representative in Europe?”
“Bloody hell, did he really say that?” Simon asked and Arthur nodded, “I saw it live. Right in the Council chamber.”
Back on EBC, Korwin-Mikke was trying his damnedest to be both loyal to the principles of his party and certainly not a bigot. He wasn’t doing very well and his intermittent chuckles were becoming ever more frequent.
“Listen, Lewis!” The Pole was getting agitated now and his once boisterous moustache now drooped forebodingly, “The people of my country and of this continent have had quite enough of your-“
“I’m sorry Mr Korwin-Mikke but I’m going to have to cut you short as I’m being told we have the Hungarian Results coming in and we’ll go to that count now.”
This time, EBC had actually got the dub going on time. The Hungarian setting was a lot more sparse, some odd back room with only a few permitted state journalists and of course the EBC crew present. Some unimportant Hungarian Civil Servant was announcing the results.
“It is my great honour to announce the results of the Hungarian vote for our representatives are as follows. The total number of votes is five million, nine-hundred and sixty eight thousand and sixty one and the results are as follows: Independents and Unaffiliated parties, 3,871; European Democrats 20,145; Left-Ecologist Alliannce, 21,656; Marxist-Soldiarity Front, 89,653; Christian People’s Party, 156,432;”
Arthur frowned, “That’s barely any votes at all.”
“Cooperative Party, 931,067 and the winners of the largest numbers of Hungarian votes are the Vigilant Alliance with 4,706,292. The Council Ministers will be distributed as follows…”
Unlike the chaos from the exit poll, the general reaction to the announcement was stunned silence and a general sense of disbelief. Despite everything, the exit poll was right. Arthur was sure that the ‘Jobbik’ government of Hungary, themselves a key part of the VA, had been involved.
“No way anyone gets that high a percentage of the vote without cheating, not in a federal vote.” he said and Jim shrugged, “I don’t know, if they were going to do it anywhere it was here. Jobbik got a majority in their last national election and hell I think the VA got at least 50% last time.”
Numbers popped up on screen, showing off just how many seats each party received.
Vigilant: 32
CoOp: 6
Confederal: 1
Marxist-Solidarity: 1
Shaking his head, Simon slumped off his stool and, lolloping his way over to the bar, span at the last minute and pointed in an accusatory manner at both Artie and Jim. “Lads. Once Finland comes in,” he paused, allowing the suspense to build; “kebabs.”
The room was so quiet now, Mike and Hugh, who had found themselves on either side of the emerging brawl, were both dragged out into the street along with the rest of the writhing mess of green, black, blue and red. Anna had taken the result hard and politely disappeared to go and binge drink in peace leaving Arthur abandoned in the middle of an increasingly empty room. As he stared up at the telly, Charlie Brooker seemed to be sharing in his moment of anguish. “Interesting stuff, I’m hearing that the Polish results will be in shortly but before that I’ve got Catharine Rice, head of Ipsos-Mori, to tell us just how they cocked up the results so poorly. Well, Cathy? Just how did you miss the black tide?”
As the poor woman stuttered and blustered, searching desperately for some logical explanation and seemingly stuck in a loop on the point that “vote splitting and the provinces mean that…”. Exhaling deeply, Arthur found himself once again alone and went to the bar to order a scotch. About a third of the way through his quadruple serving of Laphroaig however, his right pocket lit up and started singing.
“♫Things, can only get betteeeer♫.” Taking the PDA out of his pocket and lifting it lazily to his ear, Arthur clicked the green button on the side.
“AJ here, what’s up?”
“Artie!” the panting voice came, accompanied by two pairs of hurried footsteps. “It’s Jim!” “And Simon!” came a distant shout. “Yeah and Si, we got delayed, had a few pints in the Cape and got distracted." a laugh came from the background and then: "Yeah, "distracted" by that fit girl from Univ you like!"
"Shut up Si. What’s going on, have we missed the exit poll?”
“Yep.” Arthur replied, rubbing his eyes with one hand. “You’re not going to believe it.”
“What did he say?” echoed simons distant voice. “He said we’re not going to believe it! So,” Jim said, “Good or bad?”
“Well, kind of both?” Arthur thought about it for a moment, so far he’d just been despairing but there was a lot of good news to be had. The Co-Ops had been campaigning hard but 300 had been their high target, having nearly 70 seats above that was far more than anyone had anticipated. “A nice chunk of good and then a landfill of bad.”
“Oh Christ,” the runners came to a stop and, panting, went silent for a second. “Good news first?”
“We’re on 368.” “What was that?” came the second voice on the other end of the PDA, “Artie says we’re on 368!” Cheers of joy and what Arthur guessed were hi-fives filled the airwaves and he held the device away from his ear to avoid any damage to his hearing.
“Alright! Fantastic! So, what’s the problem?”
“We’re not the largest party.”
“Oh.”
“Vigilant are.”
A pause, slightly longer than acceptable. “Jim?” Arthur asked.
“Oh.” Jim repeated. “Whats wrong?” “It’s uh, the Blackshirts.” The voices grew quieter as Jim cupped his hand over the speaker of his PDA “They’re the biggest party.”
“Bollocks!” Arthur could almost hear Jim shrug. “Well, we’re coming down George Street now. Be there in a moment.”
Sure enough, the woman from Ipsos-Mori was still floundering her way through Brooker’s grilling by the time that the pair arrived. They were both wearing dark purple “Vote Co-Op” T-shirts from the campaigning earlier but Jim had thrown a suit jacket over his. Both were dripping wet from the rain and still breathing heavily from their sprint across Oxford. Jim was the taller of the two, scraping 6’ 2” with a scruffy beard, messy hair and round glasses, people had joked about Arthur and his’ own similarity since they’d both ran for Secretary at the end of Michaelmas term (Jim had won but didn’t run again in Hillary, so Arthur took it). Simon was skinnier and slightly pale, with short cropped hair and an e-cigarette in one hand, a slight northern accent betraying his Yorkshire origins.
“Alone again AJ?” Arthur laughed despite himself. “I had a little cross-party thing going on but Mike and Hugh-“ “Hugh Lane?” Jim asked and Artie nodded his assent. “Christ I hate him.” “Everyone hates him.” Simon opined. “He’s not so bad. Not that it matters, Mike and Hugh got chucked out for brawling along with the rest of the Commies, Fascists and Cons.”
“I thought it looked a little empty.” Jim said.
“Yeah they’ve culled the nutters. Anyway, Anna was here too but she took the Poll pretty hard.” Arthur glanced about looking for her and, to his surprise, spotted her comforting some poor lad in an orange top who appeared to be bawling uncontrollably. “Ah. Poor Dems.”
“Christ.” Jim muttered under his breath and Arthur turned back to find him staring, fixated at the TV screen where the exit poll was still plastered across the bottom of the screen.
“Four hundred and two?”
“Nevermind that,” Simon cut in, “CPP on 50? They’ve never had less than 200 before.”
“That’s what you get for invading Turkey and deciding that you’d better help the psychopath dictator rather than the rebels.” Jim nodded in agreement. “It's that that fucked them, and the asylum issue, and the economy.”
“It's weird.” Said Arthur. “I’m amazed we didn’t see it coming.”
Back on the EBC, Brooker had finished savaging his guest, who rapidly scuttled out of sight. Turning to the camera, the presenter attempted a smile.“Well, tonight’s a good night for hippies and fascists it seems, thanks for the scoop Louis but we’re about to have our first results in. I believe tonight it’s the Polish Prime Minister announcing their results, now remember Poland has been assigned 50 Council Ministers in the next parliament so we’ve got fifty seats in play, 5% of the whole shebang.”
“He really is a weird choice to replace good ol’ Dave.” Simon said.
The camera cut to a large, marble wall in front of what the caption told them to be the Sejm, the Polish Parliament. Swarming around a central podium, at which stood the Polish PM, journalists and activists had gathered in anticipation. With the exit poll as earth shattering as it had been the camera operators and journos were both flying around at breakneck pace, shoving microphones towards anyone who could talk and taking about 4 million photos a minute. Clearing her throat and holding a large piece of paper out in front of her, the Prime Minister began.
“Za zgodą szefa policji, mogę to potwierdzić…” she started before a EBC dub kicked in and drowned her out.
“With permission from the Chief Counting Officer and with all the ballots cast, I can report that Poland’s votes are as follows:
European Democrats: 11,981
Independents and Unaffiliated: 19,413
Left-Ecologists: 21,656
Marxist Solidarity Front: 93,012
Co-Operative Party: 331,067
Christian People’s Party: 124,899
Confederal Party: 3,131,401
Vigilant Alliance: 5,404,201
50 Council Members will be distributed as follows:
1 to the Marxist Solidarity Front, 2 to the Cooperative Party, 1 to the Christian People’s Party, 17 to the Confederal Party and 30 to the Vigilant Alliance.”
The Warsaw broke into a cacophony of noise as Vigilant supporters cheered their victory. Poland was one of their heartlands, always had been but nevertheless, the VA had never won anything close to a majority here and that 27 out of 50 looked like a big win.
“Well, that is something.” Brooker chimed in. “Not something very good mind you, or at least not something very good for immigrants. If we look to the big stick in front of me – and for once I’m saying that to someone other than your mum – we can see the swingometer is showing a massive 30% swing from the Coalition towards the Vigilant which is quite a lot indeed. We can also see an 11% swing from the Democrats to the Cooperatives and Christ, if these pan out then the exit poll would be spot on. Big, big changes happening here tonight. That’s absolutely crushing for the Dems, whilst they’ve never done awfully well in Poland I don’t think they’ve done worse than the independents well, ever.”
“I can’t believe it.” Arthur muttered under his breath.
“Me neither,” Simon agreed, “but on the plus side, that’s the best we’ve ever done in Poland. Has there ever been a Polish Co-Op CM?”
Arthur shook his head. “No, small mercies I suppose. You think it’ll all keep up like this?”
Before Simon could answer, Jim slammed a pint in front of each of them.
“Chug this, now.” Glancing at each other the two other students blinked, shrugged and chugged back their ale.
“See, nothing like a bit of Gold to dull the pain. I wonder who they’ll have on to talk about this one.
As if in answer, Louis Theroux popped up on screen and shakily declared; “My next guest is a newly reelected Polish Council Minister and Leader of the Polish Vanguard in Parliament, welcome Mr Korwin-Mikke.”
Louis turned to a screen on his right where the beaming face of Janusk Korwin-Mikke stood imposingly in the middle of a hectic office, the Polish Flag and a banner featuring the rampant bull of the VA served as his backdrop.
“Hello Lewis,” he practically shouted, moustache twitching with excitement and thick Polish accent smotheringly the words. “I am so so glad to be talking with you.”
“I bet you are,” Louis responded with a forced smile. “So according to our exit poll its going to be a very good night for you indeed! It looks like in Poland alone you’ve already got nearly as many seats as you won last time.” Swapping the smile out for a frown, he continued;”Why do you think it is that voters would turn to what some call an extremist party? You yourself have been accused of sexism, homophobia and even racism at times.”
The Pole chuckled and rubbed his balding head. “Come now Lewis, come now! People are clearly done with the globalist, mainstream politicians and their cronies and who can blame them? We’ve been forced into an disaster war in Turkey, we have suffered a great much under silly, silly economic ideas and the message that just isn’t getting through to Zurich is that we have had enough! Europe means Europe, their silly plans of expansion to other places are making a lot of people very angry, we have more than enough problems already.”
“Yes,” Louis nodded, “You’ve talked about a lot of these problems before. If I may, I’ve got a list of them right here, do you mind if I ask you about some of them?”
“I would be much obliged!”
“So last year on the election of Chairman Nemtsov, you said – and I quote: ‘We had better invade the Baltic already, there’s no way a man like Nemtsov would fight back,”
“Well I, of course, didn’t actually-“
“I’m sorry Mr Korwin-Mikke, but I hadn’t finished. You then called Mr Nemtsov a slang, rather impolite word for a Jewish person and then said “Semites haven’t got the fire to fight like men”, now whats that all about? Almost a fifth of Poland’s population is Jewish, how do you think they feel knowing that they’ve got a man like you as their chief representative in Europe?”
“Bloody hell, did he really say that?” Simon asked and Arthur nodded, “I saw it live. Right in the Council chamber.”
Back on EBC, Korwin-Mikke was trying his damnedest to be both loyal to the principles of his party and certainly not a bigot. He wasn’t doing very well and his intermittent chuckles were becoming ever more frequent.
“Listen, Lewis!” The Pole was getting agitated now and his once boisterous moustache now drooped forebodingly, “The people of my country and of this continent have had quite enough of your-“
“I’m sorry Mr Korwin-Mikke but I’m going to have to cut you short as I’m being told we have the Hungarian Results coming in and we’ll go to that count now.”
This time, EBC had actually got the dub going on time. The Hungarian setting was a lot more sparse, some odd back room with only a few permitted state journalists and of course the EBC crew present. Some unimportant Hungarian Civil Servant was announcing the results.
“It is my great honour to announce the results of the Hungarian vote for our representatives are as follows. The total number of votes is five million, nine-hundred and sixty eight thousand and sixty one and the results are as follows: Independents and Unaffiliated parties, 3,871; European Democrats 20,145; Left-Ecologist Alliannce, 21,656; Marxist-Soldiarity Front, 89,653; Christian People’s Party, 156,432;”
Arthur frowned, “That’s barely any votes at all.”
“Cooperative Party, 931,067 and the winners of the largest numbers of Hungarian votes are the Vigilant Alliance with 4,706,292. The Council Ministers will be distributed as follows…”
Unlike the chaos from the exit poll, the general reaction to the announcement was stunned silence and a general sense of disbelief. Despite everything, the exit poll was right. Arthur was sure that the ‘Jobbik’ government of Hungary, themselves a key part of the VA, had been involved.
“No way anyone gets that high a percentage of the vote without cheating, not in a federal vote.” he said and Jim shrugged, “I don’t know, if they were going to do it anywhere it was here. Jobbik got a majority in their last national election and hell I think the VA got at least 50% last time.”
Numbers popped up on screen, showing off just how many seats each party received.
Vigilant: 32
CoOp: 6
Confederal: 1
Marxist-Solidarity: 1
Shaking his head, Simon slumped off his stool and, lolloping his way over to the bar, span at the last minute and pointed in an accusatory manner at both Artie and Jim. “Lads. Once Finland comes in,” he paused, allowing the suspense to build; “kebabs.”
- Major Crimson
- Word Count: 2.4k