OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | The Elon-Donald Comic Soap Opera: Who’ll End On Top? Amid UK Tussle… | Farrukh Dhondy

“If it doesn’t make sense on earth

It might make sense in hell

We give these proverbs birth

And pretend they serve us well

Dispensing wisdom in the hour

Words -- the avatars of thought

Only expression wields the power

Leaving all silence distraught?”

From Jigry Dost to Jig-Jig Dost, by Bachchoo

The quarrel between Elon and Donny is the current week’s best comic soap opera. Oh, how we hope that Musket can publicly prove his so-far-unsubstantiated claim, that Donut was a paedophile client of Jeffrey Epstein.

Gosh, if I was a conspiracywallah, I would claim that Donut knew he was named in the Epstein files, suppressed and destroyed them and had Epstein murdered in jail.

But I am not into conspiracies, so on this one, I hope Musket will muster some evidence to back up what he has said and that self-Trumpet will prove his accusation that Muska-lagao is a drug addict and have him locked up.

Long live the rivalry -- I thought I’d compare it to the falling out of the cousins Yudhisthir and Duryodhan, but I immediately realised that that was, as the Mahabharat intends, wholly on the side of Yudhisthir with D as the villain, whereas in the farce in the United States, both are evil.

The US falling out has absolutely dwarfed, as news, a breach -- albeit temporary -- between two UK political clowns: Nigel Farage, the leader of the rising “populist” political party Reform and its Muslim chairperson, one Zia Yusuf.

How “rising” is this political party? One is tempted to call it extreme right-wing, with its anti-immigrant rhetoric, it’s support for people who attack asylum-seekers, its wild promises of bettering everything that the voters of Britain may want, its parallel aims of increasing the budgets of things that people care about while cutting taxes for capitalists, etc. It’s a party that works on what the Brits call “dog-whistles” -- you get the metaphor. The master whistles a tune or pattern that attracts the pets who come running. The dog whistler is not called upon to indicate how he/she will deliver what was promised in the whistle. Dogs don’t hold the whistlers to account -- until of course it becomes clear that the promises were hollow rhetoric with no means of achieving what they promised.

Will the British, or indeed sensible, human, international public stand by if some Reform “fascist” (and there are, I assure you, very many) comes to power and is in favour of the British Navy gun boats sinking asylum seeker rubber-dinghies in the English Channel?

Is the Pope a Muslim?

The whistle has, in recent months, sort of worked. In the general election of 2024, Reform ate into the Tory and, marginally, the Labour vote. Then in the 2025 “local” (municipal) elections, they won over 600 seats, displacing very many Tories and a fewer number of Labour Party councillors.

Zia Yusuf, who was chairman at the time of these victories, claims responsibility for them. He boasts that it was he who steered the party to these heights.

A byelection for the parliamentary seat of Runcorn and Helsby was held in May and, yes, Reform again beat other contesting candidates and elected Sarah Pochin. In Parliament, Ms Pochin formally demanded that Sir Keir Starmer and Labour immediately pass a law banning the wearing of burqas and the niqab.

Zia Yusuf reacted on the social media saying that Ms Pochin shouldn’t demand that Labour adopt a policy which Reform had not sanctioned, approved of or adopted. He then resigned as chairman of the party.

Mr Yusuf is the son of Sri Lankan immigrants to Britain, his father a doctor and his mother a nurse, both working for the National Health Service. He was a member of the Tory Party before he jumped ship and joined Reform. So why the resignation provoked by Ms Pochin’s demand? Was he apprehensive of the reaction of the Muslim community if he went along with it? Did he anticipate a fatwa of some sort?

Apparently not.

Two days after his resignation he rejoined the party and even declared he would support a burqa/niqab ban. The bigwigs of Reform told the press that Zia was very instrumental in Reform’s plans and that he had only resigned through exhaustion with the heavy duties that the chairmanship imposed on him.

So, there’s Zia, reconciled with Nigel Farage and back in the fold. (No such hope for a reconciliation of Musk and Trump --too much sewage under that bridge?)

Yusuf doesn’t return as chairman though. He has now been assigned the role of cutting expenditure of the councils in which Reform has a majority. He’s been given the task, in imitation of Elon Musk’s role in Trumpistan, of cutting council budgets. Musk called his business the Department of Government Efficiency -- DOGE.

Now Zia, a multi-millionaire through being a banker and then serving businesses with their petty footwork as a “concierge” firm, is in charge of cutting Reform council expenditure. This will, as with Muska-lagao’s task, start with cutting any programmes on “Diversity” and “Inclusiveness”, the pet hates of the dog-whistle supporters who believe that these favour blacks, Asians, Johnny foreigner and other “minorities”.

Every council in Britain is overstretched financially and in debt. Just as Musk-rat came unstuck and generated untold hatred against his dismissal of civil servants and necessary welfare projects, so a similar fate awaits Yusuffer!

Hope and prediction go hand-in-hand.