Anarchy on Oxford Street: Donnie Delinquent hits town

Is Donald Trump a dirty rotter? Maybe he's a fink, a scoundrel or even a bounder? I ask the question because one of the home-made banners at a Trump demo in London today used the marvellously quaint "dirty rotter" put-down, part Steve Jones on Grundy, part ... er, well, part "polite protester uses archaism in an ironic fashion to stand out from the crowd". "Dirty fucker", "fucking rotter": today's banner is Steve Jones with the swear words removed. Grundy restored to its tea-time, pre-watershed wholesomeness. If only you could turn the clock back. No filth and the fury, no media-fuelled moral outrage, no banned gigs, no sudden mainstreaming, no early death of punk. (No future). Today's Trump protest was interesting to punk fans/critics like me because of the way the Sex Pistols percolated through parts of it, fragments and remnants stitched back together, re-done, remodelled. Almost the first banner I saw ahead of the protest march was none other than this cheerful little Jamie Reid knock-off.

Never mind the policies, here's the spray tan

Then, within the hour and quite coincidentally, I was hearing Anarchy In The UK played from a loud-but-heavily-distorting mobile speaker as the protest headed towards Oxford Street, a location which itself has quite a bit of dimmed-but-not-entirely-eliminated McLaren-esque charge. And then, in Parliament Square, the "rotter" banner, very close to the Churchill statue, once famously green mohican-d by anti-capitalists. I reckon of course it's quite possible the author of the dirty rotter sign might not have been channelling Jones at all. There were a lot of these playfully over-polite messages at the protest - they're quite in vogue. Others included "Not usually my thing, marching - but honestly" and "Well this is bad on so many levels". Maybe the rotter person was thinking Terry-Thomas and Ealing comedies, not Grundy and "go on, say something outrageous". Either way, with his strange orange hair, camp mannerisms and ability to cause mayhem, I think Mr Trump is kinda punk himself. Never mind Johnny Rotten, here's Donnie Delinquent ...