Poole, England seldom makes the news. It’s one of those unremarkable mid-sized cities along Britain’s southern coastline, like Eastbourne or Bognor Regis, with a population of around 151,000 people and a lot of seafood restaurants. But last year, everyone in Poole woke up to find their hometown transformed. In the dead of night on August 10, 2024, someone defaced dozens of signs around the city, erasing the last two letters in the word “Poole” so they instead read “Poo.” Highway signs greeted visitors to the “Historic Borough of Poo.” A large mural of a sailboat said “Welcome to Poo Harbour.” Other signs marked the locations of the “Poo Rail Station,” the “Poo Museum,” the “Sainsbury’s Poo” grocery store, and even the “St. James’ Poo” church. Even tiny “Borough of Poole” engravings on fence posts didn’t escape being revised with a black marker. The culprits were thorough, hard-working, and utterly committed to their juvenile toilet joke.
Photos: pooharbour.com, via the Internet archive
Except, as it turns out, it wasn’t so juvenile. A few days after they, well, Pooed in the Poole, the people responsible came forward—and they had something serious on their minds. Speaking to the Somerset Live news website, local residents Joe Foale-Groves and Gagandeep Jhuti explained that they’d painted and plastered over all those signs as an act of protest, in order to fight pollution and environmental injustice.
You see, a private company called Wessex Water operates the sewers in and around Poole, and it has a foul reputation. The firm used to be the Wessex Water Authority, a public utility—but it was privatized in 1989, at the tail end of Margaret Thatcher’s crusade to demolish public services generally. Soon after it became a for-profit enterprise, the pollution began to flow. In 1998, the Independent reported that the firm “discharged 1 million gallons of raw sewage into a Dorset marina,” but was fined only £5,500. In 1999, Wessex was ranked as the fourth worst polluter in Britain by the government Environment Agency. And in 2023, an investigation by the Liberal Democratic party found that it was responsible for more than 41,000 individual sewage spills across the U.K. in a single year, with human feces getting into people’s bathing water on more than 12,000 occasions. Meanwhile, the CEO of Wessex Water made a salary of £982,000—roughly 1.3 million U.S. dollars.
On their website, Foale-Groaves and Jhuti complain that “our once sparkling water is more brown than blue these days,” describing Poole as “Wessex Water’s largest toilet.” They’re right about that. In 2022, several swimmers complained to the BBC that they’d gotten ear infections, “stomach upsets,” and other illnesses after encountering sewage-clogged waters near Poole. But the company’s representatives were callous and dismissive, telling local councilors that people simply shouldn’t “go swimming with your mouth open.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government wasn’t much help, either; when it fined several sewage companies for illegal dumping in August 2024, Wessex Water wasn’t on the list. So the two activists took matters into their own hands—and it worked, because the “Borough of Poo” made headlines in the Daily Mail, the largest tabloid in Britain. You literally can’t buy that kind of publicity, especially if you’re just two guys with a point to make about water quality.
This was a perfect example of something we might call the Great British Political Prank. It’s a phenomenon peculiar to the British Isles, in which perfectly ordinary people pull off all kinds of absurd public stunts to make a political point, often making a mockery of elected leaders and well-heeled private executives in the process. These days it’s popular to make fun of the British, and the history of their empire is certainly a grim one. But the Great British Political Prank is a marvelous thing, and the rest of the world could stand to adopt it too.
For another example, consider the mysterious individual known only as “Wanksy.” Inspired by the famous graffiti artist Banksy, Wanksy is a construction worker from Manchester, and he’s a crusader for public safety. It seems the Mancunian local government, like a lot of municipalities around the world, can be slow about fixing potholes, which is dangerous for everyone. In an interview, Wanksy says he knows people who’ve been hospitalized because of this dereliction of duty. So when he spots a pothole, he gets out a can of spray paint and draws a “giant comedy penis” around it. The local bureaucrats might not care whether their citizens wreck their bicycles or sprain their necks, but the cartoon phalluses are obscenity, which has to be stopped immediately. So the potholes get filled in “within 48 hours.” Wanksy remains at large.
Photo: Wanksy VIA INSTAGRAM
The Great British Political Prank is effective at the local level, but it can also reach the highest authorities of the land. Charles Windsor, sometimes referred to as “King Charles,” found that out when he got Wallaced last year. In the wake of his very expensive coronation ceremony, the “King” had used a few hundred thousand pounds of everyone else’s money to commission a portrait of himself by artist Jonathan Yeo. The result was a masterpiece, but possibly not in the way he intended: it showed Charles in a field of bright, glaring red, as if emerging from a cloud of blood shed by the British Empire across the centuries. It only took protesters a few months to improve the painting, gluing the head of Wallace from the claymation Wallace & Gromit films over Charles’s. They added a speech bubble, too: “No cheese, Gromit. Look at all this cruelty on RSPCA farms!”
Photo: Animal Rising
What were they talking about? Well, like with the “Borough of Poo,” there was a serious political point behind the silliness. “RSPCA” stands for “Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” and it’s the biggest animal-rights group in Britain. As the “Royal” name suggests, Charles Windsor is its biggest public sponsor. The Society runs a scheme called “Assured,” which gives an “Assured” stamp to eggs, milk, and other groceries that are supposedly produced in a “humane” way, with animals getting “more living space” and “responsible antibiotic usage.” (It’s a bit like the green frog stamp on goods certified by the Rainforest Alliance, which you also shouldn’t trust.) But when an activist group called Animal Rising launched an investigation, sending scouts to 50 of the farms covered by the Assured program, they found serious violations of the cruelty standards at 45 of them. They even rescued a pig named Charlie, who had a large abscess and was being kept in a filthy pen without medical care. But it’s hard to get people to read a PDF of your report about animal welfare. So the activists Wallaced the King, and the BBC ran national headlines about it, making millions of people aware of the issue who otherwise wouldn’t have been. The tactic completely worked.
Windsor is a popular target, as anyone who parades around in a velvet robe calling themselves “King” deserves to be.1 There’s also Chuck the T. Rex, a giant wood-and-cloth dinosaur puppet wearing a crown who’s deployed at a lot of royal events. Chuck turned up at Westminster Abbey for a Commonwealth Day service this March, but he gets around; among other places, he’s also been spotted at Trafalgar Square for Republic Day, and at a Pride festival in Reading. He’s the largest member of the anti-monarchy group Republic, and everywhere he goes, he’s accompanied by human protesters carrying signs that say “NOT MY KING” and “DOWN WITH THE CROWN.” The symbology has a couple of levels, because “Tyrannosaurus” literally means “Tyrant Lizard” in Latin, and Chuck is a fossil who shouldn’t still be around—just like monarchy itself.
Art by Luke McGarry from Current Affairs Magazine, Issue 54, July-August 2025
You’ve got to imagine that when Charles sees the big reptilian galoot from his balcony or limo, it might give him pause. In any case, it’s memorable for the British public, for whom the approval rate of monarchy as a concept has never been lower at 54 percent. Along with prominent anti-monarchists like the late Christopher Hitchens, Chuck the T. Rex has a vital part to play in driving that number down.
For some Britons, though, the Great British Political Prank is a lot more quick-and-dirty. They just hold insulting signs behind politicians they dislike, usually ones from the Conservative Party. The YouTuber Niko Omilana did this to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last year: when Sunak conceded his landslide defeat at the hands of the Labour Party, Omilana snuck up behind him at the podium and held a big piece of paper with a capital “L” for “loser” behind his head, adding insult to injury. (Don’t feel too bad for Rishi, though. With an estimated net worth of £651 million, he’ll be just fine, unlike the millions of people who fell into poverty and had to use food banks during his time in power.)
Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss, got this treatment in an even grander and more humiliating form. When she took the stage for a speech in Suffolk last year, somebody dropped a gigantic banner with the words “I CRASHED THE ECONOMY” and a photo of a head of lettuce wearing googly eyes—a reference to the fact that her tenure as Prime Minister, just 49 days, didn’t last long enough for anyone’s lettuce to expire. Truss went ballistic, raging about “far-left activists” and insisting, in the tones of a censorious headmaster, that “what happened last night was not funny.” But it was, and her wounded indignation only made it funnier.
This gets to the heart of why stunts and pranks like this work. They puncture the pomposity of political leaders, elected or hereditary, who think they’re grand and important. Or as Matt Forde, a British political podcaster, puts it:
It’s the pomposity of the Brits that makes this funnier[…] Parliament and all its traditions and all its arcane language and its grand setting. There’s an element of the class system. These are people who genuinely believe they’re better than us, and it turns out they’re fucking idiots.
Politics, especially right-wing politics, is all about image. To be successful, a politician has to craft an image of themselves as extraordinarily capable and charismatic—an almost superhuman figure, in whom voters can place their trust. Right-wing leaders have to endlessly project toughness and authority. That’s why El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and shows off his horrifying CECOT prison camp. It’s why Donald Trump posts Photoshopped memes of himself as a muscular boxer. It’s why Hitler banned jokes about himself as a form of treason, and why Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Spike Jones’ “Der Fuhrer’s Face” helped people see through his schtick and gain the courage to defeat him. Humor works that way today, too. When someone nails the Great Strong Leader with a puerile prank, the image comes crashing down. If Rishi Sunak can’t stop a YouTuber from holding an L behind his head, how could he possibly lead anyone? If the emperor has been nude the whole time, why should anyone obey him?
In this way, political silliness is a compelling alternative to political violence. Apart from the moral and ethical issues involved, the problem with political violence is that it doesn’t work very well. Assassinated potentates and corporate executives just get replaced with others similar to themselves, and the machinery of power keeps moving. Worse, political violence generates sympathy for its targets, especially when it fails. The best thing that happened to Donald Trump in the 2024 election was when Thomas Crooks tried to shoot him, but only clipped his ear. It gave Trump an iconic photo and let him talk about being “saved by God to make America great again” for months. (Apparently God wasn’t so fond of the Trump supporter behind him, who died.) The same was true for Jair Bolsonaro when someone stabbed him in 2018—it only enhanced his image as a tough guy, and gave him an excuse to crack down on the Left when he eventually gained power.
But consider some alternate history: what if, instead of a rifle, Thomas Crooks had smuggled some audio equipment into that arena in Butler and doctored Trump’s microphone so loud fart sounds came out when he spoke? What if, instead of a knife, Bolsonaro got hit with sneezing powder or a rubber chicken? Instead of right-wing martyrdom, they’d be in the position Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are now: global laughingstocks.
The British really are in the lead here, but there are signs of life across the Atlantic, too. Here in the States, we have Matt Buck, the American hero who followed a Ku Klux Klan march with a tuba and played obnoxious honking music, making the white supremacists look ridiculous instead of threatening. We also have perennial protest candidate Vermin Supreme, who likes to dump glitter on homophobic politicians and yell “HE’S TURNING GAY!” But there are a lot of odious politicians here, and since they insist on treating everyone with contempt, they ought to be treated as the jokes they are. Nobody has yet zapped Donald Trump or JD Vance with a joy buzzer, or gotten them to read a message from “Seymour Butts” on camera. But any day now, someone could. Remember: there’s no metal detector on Earth that can spot a whoopie cushion.
1. Note: If you like to parade around in a velvet robe as a private citizen, that is different, and I won’t judge you.