The circus had rolled into town like a partially masticated colourful bolus, its lurid banners enticing feckless souls to part with their money in exchange for titillation and unprincipled amusement. A glimpse, if you will, into natural perversion, or its cynical fabrication. Quotidian drudgery exchanged for the ephemeral delights of freakish sights. Within the dimly lit environs of many a gaudy tent, horrifying mutations, as exotic as they were bizarre, awaited the enthralled gaze of curious punters, certain to be duped, but eager to be so!

Josiah P. Trich smiled as the crowds snaked through his grubby turnstiles like faecal matter slithering along a sewer pipe. His smile was of the variety likely to send panic-stricken arachnids scuttling to dark corners, or tax dodgers to hastily ram HMRC letters into the nearest shredder.

Trich had monetised mankind’s vilest traits, callously leveraging his victim’s stupidity and gullibility, his cupidity only eclipsed by his absolute disregard for decency. Trich’s belief that the public were fools worthy of nothing, but exploitation conditioned his every action, lacing all with the disgusted contempt one feels towards dog dirt inconveniently adhering to the sole of a shoe. By modern standards, he’d have been a shoe in for a safe Tory seat and on close, possibly even intimate personal terms with Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Jeremy Kyle.

As European nations had spread their influence across the globe during a period of unapologetic rapacity during the nineteenth century, Trich had seen a money-making enterprise crawl from under the rock of decent sensibilities. The Western public ever curious to witness the unfamiliar cultures of those they blithely subjugated, esuriently gobbled down examples of unnatural phenomena. Cruelly motivated by their unmoored lust for anthropological aberrations, deviations both exotic and horrific, the masses sought perversion in others as a nepenthe to quell their own frail insecurities.

Zoological gardens and parks exhibited non-indigenous peoples in a greedy bid to draw profit from the zeitgeist’s craving for Orientalism. By the first half of the nineteenth century these ‘freak shows’ had inveigled their way into circuses.

Darwin’s evolutionary theories had been co-opted in a flagrantly chauvinistic fashion in order to divide the world outside of Europe into colonies of savages, physically anomalous humans to be compared to monsters, or debased animals. Dr Moreau would have approved, though Wordsworth had described Bartholomew Fair as a “Parliament of Monsters”.

P.T. Barnum and J. A. Bailey licked their slavering lips and capitalised on the public’s obsession with freakish mutants to create The Greatest show On Earth. If the punters wanted shocking deformity, hideous grotesques and sensationalist deviations from Nature’s ethnocentric plan, Barnum & Bailey would gladly oblige.

Rather like the awarding of a PPE contract, the details were of no import and desire for profit sanctified the most blatant exploitation in the name of self-aggrandising reputation and its dark lord, profit. Possessing a conscience, no more morally unhinged than Matt Hancock, or a noble peer on the take, both men amassed sickening fortunes.

Keen for a share of the pie, Trich had created The Cabinet Of Curiosities, into which he mendaciously crammed his malformed exhibits. He honoured two rules. His ‘freaks’ must either defy nature’s normative designs or be artfully wrought facsimiles of the creatures most likely to inspire revulsion, or its sister response, fear-based contempt.

His second rule was even more malefic; the sideshows must empty the purses of his punters, but never give them cause to regret the purchase of a ticket, however deceitful his intentions. His Biography, Smoke and Mirrors, The Life of A Charlatan has since become required reading for any ambitious Conservative MP aspiring to high office, or a grossly sybaritic life funded at the tax payer’s expense. Aspects of the work are now deemed somewhat antiquated in that Trich occasionally expressed remorse, though never on the public record.

So, dear reader we find ourselves outside Trich’s canvas cave of infamy, its red and white stripped walls gently shivering as a cool spring breeze flutters across the litter-sown showground. The acrid smell of burnt candy floss lingers in the air, the sticky stench of popcorn clinging to the gentle wind like the nauseating whiff of respectability emitted by a Tory donor.

William McGonagall’s works have been recited to amuse the impatient crowd. Trich calibrating his entertainments with exquisite care. Caligula has slain a wounded tramp, eliciting the adulation of his febrile audience. A Conservative backbencher has detailed the multiple positions he juggled in pursuit of illicit booty, and a Russian oligarch had generously provided all with an Uncle Vanya burger, though the meat tasted like donkey flesh fried in blood. These amusements presage the show before giving way to the music crowning them …

The dolorous paradiddles of a steam powered musical organ now fill the ears of all with their discordant charms, whilst children squeal excitedly and their parents try to forget the brown envelopes and bailiffs awaiting their return. Distraction is a dish best served up with both pomp and circumstance, and the better savoured when those dining on its hollow calories are both hungry and complicit. The Barker is atop his podium, resplendent in a gauche suit made of human skin, his top hat still wet from the scalps of those used to form it. Let’s tarry no longer, the show is about to begin!

“Rollup, roll up …come one and all ! Behold The Cabinet of Curiosities! For your amusement and sublime delectation, feast your unbelieving eyes upon sights never before seen. Marvellous mutants, the hideous runts of Nature’s litter, sinister metamorphosis rudely displayed! Quell your curiosity for the price of a ticket and prepare to investigate the abyss from which foul distortions of all that you know have been harvested for your express delight!

Look upon these exotic specimens and rejoice in their grotesque affront to decency, propriety and all that you hold dear …Friends, bask in the certain knowledge that all you see is as it appears and schadenfreude frees you of all guilt !

At great expense to our esteemed proprietor, Josiah. P. Trich, I offer you a cornucopia of craven curiosities. We have awaiting you, Joyce Heth, the 161 Year old Woman. We have Myrtle Corbin, the Four-Legged Girl, we offer you Josephine Clofullia, the Bearded Lady, Isaac W. Sprague, the Human Skeleton and Grady Styles, the Lobster Boy !

Ladies and Gentlemen, an embarrassment of riches and the banquet is set! Yet, I hear you are craving yet further titillation. Fear not, disappointment will not darken your depraved spirits, for we have more ! Wang, the Human Unicorn, Stephan Bibrowski, the Lion Faced Man, Felix Wehrle, the Elastic Man and Miran Dajo, the Invulnerable Man”.

“Silence” ! The Barker’s stentorious tones boom across the herd. When all had fallen gravely quiet, the voice of our tempter resumed his infernal address …

“Ut supra are as nothing to our main exhibit, for they are the unfortunate products of laws you have neither the heart, or the intellect to comprehend. True deformity is not to be found in form, but in the invisible, dank depths of moral depravity. Our main attraction is no mere exotic offering for your unsavoury entertainment, he is Mephistopheles in human guise ! A specimen devoid of compassion, so detached from the plight of others that he routinely feeds upon their woe, whilst lining the pockets of the elites who cherish his venal duplicity.

A hellish ghoul rotten from within, though fresh faced and sartorially slick. A fiend who serves those who seek to dismissively subjugate the poor and serve the rich. Friends, such is the rank villainy of this most wicked demon, he gleefully sends those he governs into the gutter, though sanctimoniously safe from its unjust embrace thanks to matrimony, and elitist privilege”.

The crowd hushed in reverent awe, their delighted abhorrence straining to be satiated like a rabid dog seeking flesh to bite. The Barker withdrew the image, holding it high above his blood-stained hat for all to see. A multivocal gasp swept simultaneously through the terrified customers.

The picture showed a slim man, sporting an even slimmer tie filling a Kia Rio with petrol at a Sainsbury petrol pump.

“Friends, I give you our most detestable abomination, hypocrisy in human form …The Billionaire Everyman!”