Jonnie Marbles: Pie Me a River

One year after throwing a pie at Rupert Murdoch while he appeared before a Select Committee, comedian and activist Jonnie Marbles wrote a hilariously honest blog post about what happened on the day of “The Incident”.

Here are some excerpts from his post:

It’s a year to the day since I threw a plate of shaving foam at a man universally reviled as a twat, resulting in me, too, being universally reviled as a twat, presumably due to the transitive property of being a twat. I realise that during those 365 days the only thing I’ve penned about what I now ominously refer to as “The Incident” is a terribly written and wildly inaccurate piece for the Guardian. This is partly because the bewildering torrent of opprobrium I received rather convinced me that I should never open my big, stupid mouth again and partly because I felt the whole thing was a bit overexposed anyway. As time passed, though, the waterfall of dickheads slowed to a trickle and, more importantly, I stopped caring about them. Sometime around the point where a man said, earnestly, that if he’d been in the Select Committee that day he would have “bummed me to death”, I achieved what Buddhists refer to as “not giving a fuck any more”. So this, as briefly as I can make it, is the true and largely untold story of that day and all of the weird shit that came rolling downhill after it.

On the morning of piegate I woke up in a squat somewhere in South London. I was running late, by which I mean I was running late for getting there 4 hours early, which I’d been told by my parliamentary contact I’d need to do if I were to have any chance of getting inside. Lest you think having a contact inside parliament made this operation in any way high tech or well thought out, here are the list of materials I used to fulfill my nonsense:

1 packet of plastic plates, stolen from Waitrose

1 can of shaving foam borrowed (permanently as it would turn out) from a housemate

1 suit, obtained from one of the “free shops” that dot london squats

1 bus fare, which I did not have

Later on…

I was left with a clear path, a pie in my bag and a list of spent excuses. When people talk to me about The Incident, they invariably ask why I did it. There are lots of possible answers to this question: I did it because Murdoch’s a cunt, I did it for catharsis, I did it for fame, fortune and flan flinging, I did it because I thought it was funny,I did it because I was having a manic episode, I did it to impress my girlfriend. In the moment, though, when I decided to fuck my courage to the fucking place and go for it, my main motivation was the knowledge that, if I didn’t do it, I’d forever wonder what would have happened if I had.

Some more…

The investigation went in a little antechamber beneath parliament which resembled a dungeon only in that it was underground and I was being held in it against my will. The cops reiterated my rightsless status and told me that I’d better tell them exactly how I did it or I’d never get out. While farcical, this threat still presented a bit of a problem. Not only did I not want to spend the rest of my life living in the same house as John Bercow, I also didn’t want to incriminate my friends who, as far as I was aware, had escaped custody. I spent a while stonewalling and arguing points of law which it was clear neither side understood, occasionally demanding to see the statute that allowed them to do this and being pointed to several incomprehensible passages in green leather bound tomes, one of which I’m fairly certain referred to the Law of The Sea. Eventually, though, my refusal to answer questions becomes more suspicious than a convincing lie would have been, so I span one. Despite a few near misses and a horrible Columbo-esque “just one more thing” moment where they asked me about my missing bag, the plan worked – mainly because my compadres were doing an excellent “what a fucking wanker. I can’t believe he did that” routine upstairs. My friends escaped and I was shipped off to Charing Cross police station where one of the officers took the unusual step of advising me not to talk to the cops. This, by the way, is good advice. Unless the circumstances are exceptional and bizzarre, talking to the police will only get you into more trouble. In fact, even if they are exceptional and bizzarre, a shut mouth won’t incriminate you.

You can read the whole post here.