Make Schooner Scorer prime minister

The Schooner Scorer is a young man in a gilet with good bone structure, who glugs 2/3rd pints (schooners) in one fluid unbuttoning of the oesophagus. 

This is a talent. Or at least, it is a thing; 440ml is not exactly a yard of ale. Even Therese Coffey could manage a full pint. But if we are all to be famous for 60 seconds on TikTok, we must be famous for something, and it is almost as though SS took a life inventory: ‘What do I enjoy? Drinking beers in widely known taverns. Well then, that shall be my calling.’

Each video is inaugurated by his catchphrase: ‘Schooner Scorer here, sixty second snippet, scoring a schooner…’

At the French House in Soho, he is already several sheets to the wind by the time he raises a schooner of a French cider whose name he can no longer recall. 

Dressed in Patrick Bateman-tier stockbroker togs at the 411 Bar in Angel, he pots a Pravha from the taps. ‘Lovely Czech notes, and forward hops, very typical of the pils.’

‘I’ve been told I’ve got to try the Carling Black Label’, he says, on holiday in Botswana, as he holds glinting in his hand Southern Africa’s most generic supermarket lager. 

Into the melee, many different kinds of character could step

The beer successfully converted from outside to in, the Schooner Scorer offers his collected thoughts: ‘Absolutely fantastic. 4.5 per cent I believe. And it hit absolutely beautifully.’

He gives off the odour of Balham, which is to say: posh, in a striver kind of way. He is TM Lewin. He is Oliver Bonas, Gail’s and Foxton’s. His accent still has burrs of the North, but it is fluted with the RP of a minor public school. 

What explains the breakout success? There’s something infectious in his self-confidence. Then there’s the sense that posh is back in the zeitgeist. In an era where even Clapham has become exclusive, SS serves a perfect cocktail of the blissfully self-unaware and the basically-likeable. Aspirational but daft; not threatening. 

Inexplicable likability is an increasingly dangerous currency in today’s Britain. Since the farmers’ protest, it has been widely floated that Jeremy Clarkson could take political power in Britain. The government is hated. The system itself is the enemy. The people cry out for a Caesar. If the farmers gunge up the M4, year 2000-style, we’re 48 hours of no broccoli in Morrison’s from anarchy. 

Clarkson has since poured cold water on the notion: ‘I’m a journalist at heart. I prefer throwing rocks at people than having them throw rocks at me.’

But if he won’t run, then the principle remains. In fact, Clarkson’s balloon going up could serve as the example for a range of other system outsiders looking to convert fame into power. 

Into that kind of brutal melee, many different kinds of character could step. 

There’s the true demagogue (Patrick Christys). The mad monk spiritual seeker archetype (Neil Oliver). The Estado Novo brutal technocrat (Martin Lewis). Or even the Cristina Kirschner/Corazon Aquino widow of a fallen hero archetype (Pauline Prescott). 

Then there is also the possibility of a gentler glide path. That of the consensus figure. Someone who could bind up the wounds of a broken nation, set the bones, then step away.  

Crucially, much like the Italian habit of appointing Mario Draghi as ‘caretaker Prime Minister’ whenever their politics collapses in a heap of junk bonds, the figure chosen must not be offensive to any party within a grand national coalition. Consensus culture demands someone consensual: likeable, but not intellectually demanding. Neither a true toff nor a class warrior. Someone sexually charismatic, but also not likely to have a wide range of options outside the relationship. Northern, but inexplicably living in Balham. 

At this moment, having done their own sums, the Palace would make the first call:  

‘Send for Schooner.’

After all, from Michelle McManus onwards, through Wagner, Susan Boyle and Jeremy Corbyn, the British public have long maintained a fascination with elevating the ordinary. 

There is something of the inverse of noblesse oblige to it. The impish desire to lean on whatever levers of power they have, if only to emphasise that it is they who ultimately control the jesses.  

This is precisely the mood of the British public today. A kicking against the prigs: what’s the opposite of Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, with their HBOS call centre manners and their sentimental abstemiousness? 

Surely, it is a man who drinks two thirds of a pint in a single necking and makes you feel that his simple score is an event worth watching? 

There would still be the matter of finding 350 MPs to row in behind him, but this shouldn’t be much hassle for a boy with connections in the City. 

In terms of his own seat, even if no by-election were immediately available, elevation to the House of Lords would be trivial enough: Reiss do ermine, I’m reliably told. You just have to ask round the back.

Then, like FDR’s fireside chats, we might get our policy prescriptions on TikTok, with a schooner on the side.

‘I want to build a Britain in which everyone can succeed, whether they come from Stowe, or Shrewsbury, or even Alleyn’s.’

‘I believe in a country where no child goes hungry. Where tuck is freely available to those that most need it.’

‘My fellow subjects, today I have commissioned a report into the preferential loan-making practices of the Bank of Mum n’ Dad.’ 

This would be a temporary measure. A Dictatorship of the People. Things would calm down. House prices would return to 2019 levels. The IMF would fold up their hazmat suits. Rachel Reeves’ remains would be given official permission for reburial. 

Emergency over, no doubt, like Cincinnatus on his plough, the Schooner Scorer would return from whence he came. Scoring Schooners. A humble life, very much equivalent to tilling 100 acres of Buckinghamshire. We await our chap across the water.