Jeremy Corbyn stars in his first choose-your-own adventure – play now!
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Version 0 of 1. This week, Netflix announced it would be running trials for choose-your-own-adventure (or at least choose your own ending) content on kids’ and adults’ programmes. And, listen, no disrespect to Netflix – I watch a lot of stuff on there – but no. No thank you. Not for me. That absolutely won’t work at all. Did the choose-your-own-adventure format even really work in book form? Whenever I remember trying to read one, what comes to mind is this: the plot jumped from one to 100 at every viable turn, you have to keep a load of fingers wedged in previous chapters so you had a contingency plan in case you died (because you absolutely did always die: sprinting out into untamable river rapids, or into a gigantic clearing populated by ancient, armed Aztecs, or eaten in one bite by a dinosaur). Choose-your-own-adventure is a nonsense. Anyway: welcome to choose-your-own-adventure, Guardian Opinion-style! Here is a fun and watertight way of delivering content, custom-tailored to you. Consider divisive public figures such as your boy Jeremy Corbyn. It’s quite hard to write about Corbyn, isn’t it, because he’s many things to many people – smirking martyr, extremely tired, lost old man getting quietly angry in a post office, political catastrophe. How, exactly, do you write about him in such a way that pleases everyone? My friends: I have the solution. START You awake in an ANCIENT FOREST CLEARING. You can see FIVE EXITS: to the NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, a HATCH IN THE BOTTOM OF THE FOREST FLOOR, SOMEHOW, and WEST. In the middle of the clearing stands JEREMY CORBYN. He looks like a substitute geography teacher resigned to the fact that he lost the attention of this Year 9 class. What do you do? GO NORTH You go north, to a future where Corbyn maintains his grip on the Labour leadership. This can’t be that bad, can it? Swatting away coup after coup after coup, Owen Smith popping up every four to six months, adding inch after inch on to the end of his fantastical long penis, trying and failing to take a pop at the king, shrinking away to nothing again, boom and bust and repeat. In this future, Corbyn stays, building on the Copeland disaster to more, even more surprising disasters, all the while being A Very Good Man with Some Very Good Policies that frequently get ignored because he sits too politely through weak bodyings by the Tories every single Wednesday at PMQs. Listen, it’s an unlikely path – I’ve always thought a Labour leader should step down when they get the dreaded Stephen Hawking vote of no confidence – but no, you chose NORTH, so we’re going to stick with Corbyn and drive eyes closed into the next general election. Andy Burnham gets turned away from his own hustings event at a local school because nobody can quite verify who he is GO SOUTH You go south, into the reality where Corbyn goes. Thing is, it’s fair to say Corbyn’s ascent to leadership in the first place was due at least in some part to an across-the-board personality vacuum in the entire Labour party, so without Corbyn there is a leadership election between a handful of anodyne, brown-haired, suit-wearing men – Owen Smith goes on Sunday Brunch in an attempt to win the popular vote and does something disastrous with an egg; Andy Burnham gets turned away from his own hustings event at a local school because nobody can quite verify who he is; while the party flirts with its usual let’s-pretend-we-might-elect-a-woman-for-a-bit-but-then-not-actually-do-that trick, which basically just descends into Jess Phillips telling Diane Abbott to fuck off again. This process lasts eight months. GO EAST You go east and emerge in an olde tyme detective’s office, where, atop a leather-inlay writing desk, among a huge slippery pile of paper and files, you uncover a massive, massive anti-Corbyn MSM (mainstream media) conspiracy. You find a note saying “UNDERMINE CORBYN AT ALL COSTS” written in Rupert Murdoch’s handwriting; you find a Telegraph internal document about how to disrupt MSM conspiracy theorists by writing about the MSM conspiracy theory a lot; Tom Watson sits in a jar on the table, burbling slightly-open-to-interpretation epithets into the grey nothing. You knew it. YOU HAVE DECIDED TO TAKE THE HATCH Ah, you’ve taken the hatch. Definitely something tempting about the hatch, isn’t there? How often do you really get to have a go on a good hatch. It’s not often. Anyway that was the wrong choice: you emerge through thickets into an enclave of ancient Aztecs, and they are all mad at you, and they are mounted on dinosaurs, and they were just saying – literally, just then – they were just saying, “Man, we really need to do a blood sacrifice today. Anyone up for it?” You just died three different ways. What have we learned about hatches? Don’t take hatches. Long story short, here’s you being dragged on your knees to the tip of a pyramid-type structure so you can be slaughtered that bit nearer to the sun and the gods. They press a sharp stone into your chest and rip you apart. You die. They throw your body in river rapids. Their Aztec dinosaurs chase after your flopping, floating body and, when you finally land in the mud at the base of a bank, eat your corpse in one bite. You just died three different ways. What have we learned about hatches? Don’t take hatches. GO WEST You go west, on to the most ominous path, where dark, gloomy stormclouds cluster around the tips of distant mountains, and the air crackles with electricity, and the trees shake in the wind, and Tony Blair is back, again, saying bad things about the Labour party and how it’s to blame for Brexit. “The debilitation of the Labour party is the facilitator of Brexit,” he says, Blairily, between New York Times op-eds and starting wars. Can any life survive beneath the looming Blair shadow? No. Aztecs beat you with clubs and drown you in the rapid water. Dinosaurs suck your bones dry of their marrow. THE END |