Society
Now what? - Cristina Odone sees the tanks roll in to Chelsea
Published 26 May 2003
When the British coup comes, who can we rely on to join the resistance? By Cristian Odone
I woke up with a start at 4am. Outside, the street shook with the sound of a heavy, slow-moving motorcade. My better half sprang out of bed and leaned out of the window. "Ooooh," he whistled. I joined him at the sill; beneath us, just visible in the dawn light, rolled a cortege of sinister green army tanks.
Only two years ago, the sight of Her Majesty's Armed Forces trooping down my street would have passed unnoticed: I live a hand grenade's throw away from an army barracks and I often see the khaki-clad soldiers marching up and down their courtyard. Here in deepest, darkest Chelsea, where Peter Jones and the Chelsea Pensioners are the main landmarks, even a soldier with a machine-gun slung over his shoulder looks more of a strutting Hooray Henry than a dangerously armed man.
Yet nowadays we live in a paranoid new era where we see terrorists and plots everywhere and where the government conspires to increase, rather than to ease, our wariness. A tank on the road could mean a repeat performance of last winter's Heathrow and Gatwick sieges, or some other, as yet undercover, operation.
Edward picked up the phone: "Who are you ringing?" I asked.
"No one. Just checking that the line hasn't been cut." All those years spent as a foreign correspondent in Berlin and Prague during the cold war have left their mark on him.
I was breathing more easily: the tanks had rolled out of view. I joked:"Perhaps it's a military coup, led by Sir Michael Jackson."
"He wouldn't be that bad," Edward mused. "He's not a South American generalissimo or a Greek colonel. He's more in the Wellington mould. And the duke didn't do too badly. Nor did de Gaulle, for that matter. But even if those are Jackson's men, we couldn't accept to be run by a military regime." We lay back in bed, and Edward started to fantasise about a coup d'etat. He would join the Resistance immediately, he pledged. His time in the shadow of the Iron Curtain would come in handy when it came to fighting against a military coup: code names, subterfuges, decoys, hideouts - all were familiar to him.
He started sifting through our friends to see who among them would be ready to join him in taking on the enemy. About half would brave the torture chamber and the risk of death; the others would wimp out. "What about celebrities?" I asked. "If we really needed a Resistance, which celebrities would risk their lives and join the side of the angels?"
Until his treacherous flirting with Real Madrid, you could have counted on Becks; now, I wasn't so sure: he and Posh seem to feel only one allegiance - to themselves. Bianca Jagger, instead, would definitely sign up, and hand out leaflets and deliver some rousing speeches. As would Stella McCartney - though her Pa and stepmother would hotfoot it to safety, claiming that they were too necessary to poor mine victims to risk their lives. We could rely on Richard Branson to finance the partisans' undercover activities - and make a huge song and dance about doing so. And we could be sure that Christine Hamilton would fight on our side - chin jutting out, sleeves rolled up for action, a quaking Neil in her wake.
"Did you have to drag celebs into it?" Edward now sounded less enthusiastic. "They would just squeal: 'I'm a celebrity . . . get me out of here!'"
"If you want to mount a campaign, you need TV cameras," I snapped. "And for those, you need some headline-grabbing names. No Stella, no Resistance." I rolled over and left him to stew over the irrefutable logic of this statement. This was, after all, going to be a very British coup.
Lauren Booth is away
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