It’s been a busy seven days for Laila Cunningham, Reform’s 2028 candidate for London mayor.
A Londoner investigation just exposed her as the author of a pro-diversity, pro-immigration poem posted shortly after the 2017 Westminster Bridge terrorist attack. “Tears stream from my eyes/From the terror and it’s lies [sic],” it read, in Comic Sans. “I am Vietnamese/I am Palmer’s Green/I am Greek/I am free/I am Gay”.
But things have changed since. The politician, who defected from Conservative to Reform last summer, has dubbed herself “the new sheriff in town”. “I will declare an all-out war on crime,” she announced in a column for the Daily Express. “Against knife gangs, drug dealers, phone thieves, shoplifters and those rape gangs that have been ignored.”
She will be the first to do it alongside a penguin. There’s one next to her in a new ad posted on her X account: Laila and her amphibious friend walk together hand-in-flipper, leaving a confusing trail of footprints across the city. This is a parallel world: London has turned into Antarctica, and Tower Bridge sits beyond its snowy peaks.
“Choose a new path for London,” reads the image. “Before it’s too late.”
Cunningham has stolen this bit of symbolism from the White House, the White House originally stole it from TikTok, and TikTok stole it from Encounters at the End of the World, a 2007 documentary directed and narrated by Werner Herzog. Cunningham’s penguin is AI-generated and of no discernible species: Herzog’s is an Adélie male who lives in Antarctica. The director describes the penguin as “deranged” in the film, afflicted with a case of “penguin insanity”. His friends stick together for warmth; he waddles alone through the snow, a tiny speck on the white expanse.
“He would neither go towards the feeding grounds at the end of the ice or return to the colony,” Herzog says sombrely. “Shortly afterwards we saw him heading towards the mountains, some 70 kilometres away… even if [the scientist] caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would immediately head back to the mountains. But why?”
Ignore the bits about his mental illness and the penguin becomes a useful hero of romantic nationalism. Its smart dress and stoic disposition give off undertones of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, the windswept and influential painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Its backstory brings to mind the last Japanese holdouts of the Second World War, who loitered in Philippine jungles into the 1950s in the belief that they could avoid Allied capture. Like Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, the penguin refuses to follow the crowd: it has visions of its own, instincts so big and scary they leave its peers quaking in the dust. Maybe it isn’t having a penguin breakdown. Maybe it’s on a penguin crusade.
The US’s most important figures want in on the action. The penguin might have something to teach them: they are in the middle of a crusade of their own, against immigration and bureaucracy and medicine. “THE MAINSTREAM MADE US SICK,” went the caption on a video posted by the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. “CHOOSE THE HEALTHIER PATH.” Herzog’s suicidal penguin walked next to him. “Embrace the penguin,” implored the White House on X, as it waddled towards the mountains, Donald Trump in tow. The flag of Greenland sat in the distance; in one flipper the penguin grasped the Stars and Stripes. (A fact-check for the government of the United States: Adélie penguins do not live in Greenland, or have opposable thumbs).
“The penguin,” announced the White House in a retweet, “does not concern himself with the opinions of those who cannot comprehend.”
Then came the video version, put out through the official X account of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Herzog’s original clip, with serif subtitles. Then a montage of recent footage, all shoved through a retro filter: riot police, and a deportation, and several helicopters, and someone holding a sign that said “GOD BLESS ICE”, and an eagle, and a New York Post headline about Trump, and the man himself, grinning in his red trucker hat. In the background was an organ cover of Gigi D’Agostino’s 1999 Eurodance hit “L’Amour Toujours”. The song showed up in the German right-wing meme universe in 2024, when Alternative for Germany-aligned listeners rewrote its chorus to feature the phrase “Ausländer raus”, or “foreigners out”.
“Americans have always known ‘why’,” went the caption.
The DHS almost has a leg to stand on. US history is made up of a mixture of self-determination and sweeping delusion. Its founding fathers had a vision for the nation. The country later became the birthplace of Mormonism and Scientology, new religious movements strewn with self-important pageantry. “Manifest destiny” meant a divine right to ethnically cleanse the continent; early Hollywood was all about sustaining the illusion of grandeur; and plenty of people have ignored impediments to meritocracy to fulfil the American Dream. The Wright brothers were silly to think they could fly, but it turns out they knew what they were doing all along.
We’re different in Britain. Our constitution is only sort of written down, we have little regard for those who hold themselves in high regard, and when we watch someone from behind walking hand-in-hand with an anthropomorphic creature, we get the feeling they’re about to die. It all started on the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. She’d just shared marmalade sandwiches in a comedy sketch with Paddington Bear; an artist drew the two together wandering on to the horizon. Then Paddington comforted King Charles. Then he served as psychopomp to the Pope, Kim Woodburn and Coolio.
Herzog’s deranged seabird is the new Paddington. It is impossible to look at Cunningham’s ad and ignore the similarities. Mozart wrote his own requiem; Reform’s mayoral candidate has put herself into a death portrait with a suicidal penguin. This is an ill omen: the party thinks it’s going its own way by copying Trump’s Doge-and-Ice drive, when it’s really walking straight into destruction. Vote Laila and follow the penguin to its icy doom.
[Further reading: The Ice killers are Donald Trump’s secret police]
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