At the Charleston literary competition earlier this month, two members of Led By Donkeys – Ben Stewart and Oliver Knowles – have been describing their first large act of 2023, which was to rename Michelle Mone’s yacht, Girl M, the “Pandemic Profiteer”. It’s an exciting yarn, that includes a tiny boat rented below the false pretences of a picnic on the Catalan coast, a bunch of fellows who didn’t actually know the way laborious it will be to repair an enormous sticker to a luxurious yacht, and a chase scene on the finish, as they raced again to their van, pursued by safety guards.
However the authentic concept had been to requisition the boat and sail all of it the way in which again to the UK, up the Thames, and ship it to His Majesty’s Treasury. There was an consumption of breath within the book-loving viewers, as a result of this was the most effective concept anybody had ever heard. It had all the things – audacity, symmetry, justice, spectacle, the lot.
Regardless of the Guardian’s reporting, Mone, after all, wouldn’t admit till the tip of 2023 that she profited from the federal government’s Covid VIP lane in any respect. In truth, £28.8m of the revenue made by PPE Medpro, a lot of it on tools that was by no means used, was held in a belief of which Mone and her kids are beneficiaries. Within the ickily self-justifying phrase of her husband, Doug Barrowman, they have been “at all times going to profit … her household profit, my household profit. That’s what you do if you find yourself in a privileged place of earning money.”
The fates have arguably caught up with Mone since then. As detailed within the BBC’s Rise and Fall documentary, which airs tonight, she is on go away from the Home of Lords, having been stripped of the Conservative whip, and has had £75m price of belongings frozen, pending investigation by the Nationwide Crime Company. (Mone has denied any wrongdoing.) Whereas these measures are clearly the crunchy little bit of comeuppance, and can loom a lot bigger on Mone and Barrowman’s minds than a sticker on their yacht ever might, the art-activist occasion is far more vital for us.
I don’t particularly care whether or not Mone has the Tory whip or not, or whether or not she sits within the Home of Lords. If the state finds in opposition to her and claws again some cash, positive, however it can most definitely solely spend it on one thing dismaying, corresponding to a defence funds. “Pandemic Profiteer”, then again, felt like a collective: “This isn’t OK.” It’s not OK to make hundreds of thousands out of a nationwide emergency. It’s trendy now to say that Mone was a symptom of the late Tory malaise, not the trigger. Led By Donkeys proved that it’s attainable, for those who focus laborious sufficient, to assume two issues without delay – each that governments must be competent, and that individuals, even businesspeople, must be first rate.
The Led By Donkeys installations are at all times laced with unhappiness, typically insufferable quantities. Its motion for Gaza in 2024, when 11,000 kids’s outfits have been laid alongside Bournemouth seashore – to “talk the size of the killing”, James Sadri mentioned on the time – was breathtakingly painful, and has solely grow to be extra placing with day-after-day since. But these acts of resistance don’t organize themselves in an orderly manner, in order that dodgy PPE pales into insignificance beside a conflict crime, and Liz Truss’s temporary catastrophe as prime minister seems minor subsequent to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Fairly, all of them create some social safety in opposition to despair. Whether or not it’s a misdeed or a tragedy, the battle solely begins if you look immediately at it.
On the finish of their speak, Knowles and Stewart received a standing ovation, a timeless and typically rote expression of approval, although I’ve by no means seen it occur at a spoken phrase occasion earlier than. It didn’t actually really feel like the tip of a ballet, although; it felt extra literal, like everybody, spontaneously, standing up for one thing.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
