Are you deluded? Are you sure? Not even a little bit?
Don’t take it personally. Everyone is, to some extent. You are, your friends are, and Chris Kirkland’s dad definitely was.
Now if you don’t know the story, Chris Kirkland was an ordinary, not particularly sporty thirteen year old boy who by his own admission was a bit of “a chunky monkey”. The kind of boy who could be lapped in the 100m dash, his boobs jiggling majestically like a Baywatch slow motion scene.
Chris was a substitute for his school team. The goalkeeper got injured during the match and when the coach looked round for a replacement, he saw Chris sitting on the bench, head down, desperately trying not to make eye contact. The coach told him he was going to play in goal. Chris begged him not to put him on as “he’d never played there before”.
Chris’s dad watched him play that very first game in goal. Afterwards he walked round to the local bookmaker’s and placed a £10 bet on his son playing for England. Bit of a strange bet, but the bookie took Kirkland Senior’s business.
The odds for a boy to make it as far as the Premier League is 0.012%. And the odds for them to make it as a full England international are 0.007%. It was a fucking stupid thing to do.
Chris did go on to play for England. Precisely once. But he did make an appearance and he didn’t let in a goal - technically that makes him the greatest England goalkeeper of all time - And Chris’ dad made a cool hundred grand from that little moment of “delusion”.
Or take a story you might be more familiar with, what about Winston Churchill? From one chunky British hero to another. It could be argued that Churchill’s stance against Adolf Hitler was delusional in 1939. The U.K. was still traumatised by the horrendous and pointless bloodshed of WW1, the Americans didn’t want to get involved, and the Axis powers looked very much in their ascendancy. There were many politicians - rational and cool-headed ones - claiming that Churchill’s position was suicidal and that we should be appeasing Hitler or at the very least turning a blind eye to his actions. “Maybe just give him one more country and see if he tuckers himself out.” The PM ignored them, and Britain brought the fight to the Nazis.
The truth is - delusion is a part of life. We need it. When I told all my comedy pals that I was off to start a podcast that’d be the JRE of Europe, they thought I was mental. Turns out, I was: that turned out to be Diary of A CEO.
But even so, if I’d had listened to them, would I have helped build a channel with two million subscribers, interviewed some of my heroes, and become the unspeakable outcast of the UK comedy circuit?
Some delusion is healthy. It makes you a dreamer. Accepting the status quo forever and ever, that’s no way to go about life; you’ll never see what you’re capable of, or how wrong it could all go. And what a tragic thing to miss out.
But delusion isn’t for everyone all the time. Delusion needs to be tempered. Which is hard to do - you rarely know when you’re deluded, and if you do, you’re too deluded to fix it. But when left unchecked, it’s only a matter of time before reality jumps up and bites you on the bollocks. And the more you ignore it the nastier the bite will be.
Have I overextended this metaphor? Probably. But I got a 2:2 in drama from the University of Essex; I don’t even know what a metaphor is.
Politics today is deluded in the worst way. It would be one thing if we had real dreamers. Unfortunately, we seem to have two options.
1) Soul-shattering “realism” that shrugs its shoulders at us and tells us things will never change. That meaningful change is just “too hard” and “not feasible in the current climate.”
2) Hare-brained fantasists who run from evidence and data and say whatever they need to say to win votes.
We’ve been delusional for a while now. The best evidence for that can be found in our economy. We tell ourselves we’re a glorious first-world country. A captain of industry, a hub of culture and creation.
The truth is: we’re about to go broke. We’re one bad Budget away from the King doing Cameos. That’s right. We’ve got a 100% debt to GDP ratio. Our national debt is as much as we earn every year. In 2008, it was 35%. Even in the years of the global economic crisis, we had a healthier ratio. We binge-drank for years, and when the hangover came, we decided we liked it.
We can no longer afford policies that might genuinely help to improve the lives of people in this country. And now our politicians are faced with the difficult choice of having to cut public services in order to keep the country afloat. Except they’re not and every year we spend more and more money as we sink deeper into the financial abyss. And yet we pretend that this isn’t going to have disastrous consequences.
Triple lock pensions, the NHS, unemployment benefits, sickness benefits, schools, roads, defence. We can’t spin all these plates. Cuts need to be made. Something has got to give or we’ll go broke. Which sounds awfully right wing of me. But what other choice do we have?
It’s easy to see where the Left is deluded. We have a Labour PM now who says “we can’t prioritise national security over social security”. What that means is we’re very happy, as a people, to be invaded by Putin just as long as we can continue to collect our sickness benefits for having ADHD. Because that’s going to keep us safe if Putin sends the drones in. And there’s people here watching this going, oh Francis you’re so naive he’s not going to invade. Fine, what happens if he launches a cyber-attack on the NHS and you can no longer pick up your Ozempic. What are we going to do? Go to the gym and eat healthily? No thank you.
But it’s not only the Left who are delusional. There’s a large and growing faction of Righties here in Britain who think the problem – and the only problem – is illegal immigration. As soon as we stab a few dinghies in the channel, we’ll all be living like Scrooge McDuck. Once we stop having to share with those pesky asylum seekers, we’ll be kings.
Meanwhile, they don’t want to seem to spend any less than the previous governments. Triple-lock pensions! Really?! Everyone knows they’re not financially sound – including these politicians – but if they don’t treat the wealthy boomers who vote for them like squabbling toddlers, they might not get in.
Even if we end illegal immigration, lower legal immigration to a sustainable level, deport illegal immigrants and those who are here on a temporary visa who have broken our laws, we’re not even close to sorting out our problems. There will still be disenfranchisement, inequality, and disrepair. Yet, there’s a whole host of people on the Right who believe that we’ll all be living in an Enid Blyton paradise of cricket on the green, warm pints of ale and everyone is a bloody good bloke with a blonde side-parting.
Talking of a questionable blond, and if you really want a good look at some right-wing delusion, you need only peer across the Atlantic. Set your sights on Pennsylvania and see him: President of the USA, Mr. Donald J Trump.
