Not content with moaning about Elon Musk (something they’re told to do by the YouTube channels belonging to US cable networks) or moaning about the Springboks, the English have found another South African to whinge over. Koos Bekker stands accused of dividing opinion in a small Somerset parish town close to the country manor that he built a decade ago, which frequently makes it into the best hotel directories in Europe.
Locals in Castle Cary are apparently obsessed with Bekker and his wife, Karen Roos; according to The Telegraph, these people talk about nothing else with anxiety akin to their being auctioned off at a Libyan slave market.
Bekker purchased Hadspen House in 2014 – because the former owner’s family had spaffed all the cash – and turned it into The Newt. Bekker and Roos did so with the same impeccable taste on display at their South African estate, Babylonstoren, never departing from what must have been challenging conditions imposed by Britain’s notoriously rigid planning inspectorate. The project has cost a reported £120m (brushing up to R3b) to date, and its continued expansion equals more work for locals, thus enhancing a mini-economy that didn’t exist a decade ago.
Curtain-twitching
Now whining, curtain-twitching folk are panicking that Bekker will soon conquer the entire village, but they appear to have forgotten what country they’re in, and the type of people who presently run it. There’s the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, or ‘Rachel from accounts’, who this week stands accused of telling porkies on her CV. She claims to have been an economist, but a former colleague explained that she was an admin clerk on the IT complaints desk, and was caught campaigning for the Labour Party during office hours.
The budget speech by ‘Rachel from accounts’ last month was fanatical; not wanting to leave pensioners alone in the enemies-of-the-people category, she plopped farmers in there too – because it’s always a good idea to persecute the people who put food on your table. Then there’s the increasingly awkward Prime Minister whose ingenious comms team set up a cocktail with Canada’s Justin Ardern or Jacinda Trudeau or whatever their name is at a romantic sunset spot in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday night. Two weeks ago, he insisted his citizens make “tough decisions” before he flew off to the COP jolly in Baku – accompanied by 470 people.
“Many were actually journalists”, his office sneered in defence of the splurge, which must have been nice for Starmer – because it’s always better to have four Guardian reporters sitting on your lap than two. (This year’s COP wasn’t memorable: no sooner had Starmer arrived with his Guardian pets than Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev explained to those assembled that, tempting as it was to destroy the natural habitant of the endangered Persian leopard with windmills, he would be sticking to the black stuff for the foreseeable future).
Muttering little hobbits scurrying around the shire aren’t normally ahead of the curve, and if they grasped what has happened to their country over the past two decades, they’d be begging Bekker to colonise the entire county. Here the golden era of foreign investment in property is nearing its end: there is simply nothing left for Qataris, Emirati, or Chinese to buy anymore. The Russians have been defenestrated, thousands of high-net-worths have gapped it, inflation and unemployment are rising – again – the police are basically all hippies now (certainly insofar as responding to violent crime is concerned) and most high streets are only occupied by Turkish barbers and raspberry vape shops.
Under these conditions, attracting the type of investment required by this insatiable appetite to throw money into a health black hole or civil servant’s pockets appears virtually impossible.
Luxury of choice
The English no longer possess the luxury of choice. The future is bleak with fatal combinations of vindictive, ideological retardation and sorry managerial incompetence flaring daily, if not in the latest machete atrocity, then in the weekly spasm of the uniparty elite – lowering the rising oceans by forcing drivers to pay by the mile, for example. So, they’d be wise to familiarise themselves with people – even those born in Potchefstroom – who can remind them how to do things properly again.
For his part, Bekker is said to be exhausted from all the sniggering − he’s a good man who doesn’t fly private, lives modestly, so who could blame him if he turned around and said: “Look, its either me who invests in this increasingly mad island, or its some dude from the Caucasus who eats the people he tosses off mountains”?
There is a point in the whinge worth noting: locals do not like Londoners, and the fear is that gentrifying the village will lead to an influx of them. Here both parties – Bekker and the villagers – are damned, because when Londoners flee Sadiq Khan’s Kingdom, they take their politics with them, and for the next thing there’s a statue of George Floyd made from recycled bath ducks outside the village hall, or a Pride-themed bouncy castle attached to a 24/7 diesel generator and a sign that reads: “THIS IS NOT A DIESEL GENERATOR, IT IS POWERED BY UNICORN TEARS”.
The demonisation of Elon Musk during the American elections saw American broadcasters – like MSNBC’s Joy Reid – conflate him with Hendrik Verwoerd, and saw white, establishment-left Londoners happily gaslighted to the point of licking their lips in conclusion: “ah, grr, eh, hmm – so it was this Musk guy who invented apartheid, banned the ANC and jailed Nelson Mandela”.
It is not clever to associate with people who think this way, so perhaps one way of meeting in the middle would see the project – which in addition to boosting local employment, has possibly also preserved the surrounding soil for a generation – continue unimpeded, but all Londoners banned. Especially Rachel from accounts.
[Image: https://thenewtinsomerset.com/garden]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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