Someone asked me who Percy is.
It's a fair question. I've been using him as a shorthand — for the way blame travels, for the pattern of provocation and denial, for the invisible hand that arranges things so that the people who should be facing the same direction end up facing each other. But I haven't said what kind of thing Percy actually is. Whether he has a name, a face, a payroll. Whether you could arrest him.
My first instinct was to say he's not Satan. Not a cabal of genius super-wealthy conspirators meeting in a basement somewhere, though there are plenty of those and they do their bit. Not the CIA, though the CIA has done more than enough. Not any single government or ideology or class.
The more I think about it, the more Percy seems to me like Puck.
Robin Goodfellow. The mischief-maker in the forest. Not evil — evil would be too simple, too clean, too easy to refuse. Puck doesn't want to destroy you. He just wants to see what happens when he moves things around a bit. He is amoral rather than immoral, which is worse, because you can't appeal to his conscience. He doesn't have one to appeal to. He has an appetite for disorder and an endless supply of raw material, and the raw material is us.
Puck doesn't create the lovers' quarrels in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He finds them already there — the jealousy, the rivalry, the pride — and he amplifies them. He arranges the forest so that the people who love each other end up lost, and the people who are lost end up in each other's arms for the wrong reasons, and everyone wakes up in the morning wondering what happened. Shakespeare makes it comic. History makes it less so.
Mick Jagger had a problem.
He was writing Sympathy for the Devil in 1968, a song in which the devil narrates his own appearances throughout history — the crucifixion, the Russian Revolution, the Blitzkrieg. He had a line about the Kennedys. Then, while the song was still being recorded, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Jagger had to change the line. It had said who killed the Kennedys — singular, past tense, closed. He changed it to who killed the Kennedys — and then added: after all, it was you and me.
That addition is the whole argument.
The devil in the song is not an external force that descends on innocent humanity. He is the thing that lives in the gap between what we know and what we're willing to admit. He was at the storming of the Bastille. He was at the Blitzkrieg. He was there when the Kennedys died. And he keeps showing up because we keep inviting him — not deliberately, not maliciously, but through the ordinary failures of attention and courage that make us human.
After all, it was you and me.
I want to say something about Paul.
Paul was born in Bridport, the son of a local doctor. He studied law in Germany. The woman he married was East German, and she obtained (at the fourth time of asking) the right to leave thanks to a trade deal between the British and East German governments — thereby joining the ranks of the so-called "freigekauft", by which, in the pursuit of economic expediency, the freedom of the individual was reduced to a unit of currency exchange.
Paul lives in Bridport now, with his wife. He is not an outsider witness to the things this book is about. He is someone whose life took him into the middle of them and who came home carrying what he found there.
He has taken the time — recently, and over years — to speak with authority and to love me enough to give me his experience. That deserves more than a footnote. Where Paul's thinking has shaped mine, I want to say so. Where we still disagree, I want to say that too. He has also told me that some of his ancestors owned slaves. He carries that knowledge without making a performance of it. But he carries it, and it belongs in this account.
My own ancestors were in China during the years when British merchants were bribing officials and flooding the country with opium because it was good for the balance of trade. I am the beneficiary of that, at several removes. I did not choose it. I did not do it. But I am not untouched by it either, and it would be convenient — it would be Percy's work, in fact — to pretend otherwise.
Tony Blair took Britain to war in Iraq on a prospectus that was, at best, a serious misreading of the evidence and, at worst, a lie. A million people marched against it. I was one of them. And then we re-elected him. Not by a huge margin. But we re-elected him. The people who marched went back to their lives, and the calculation at the ballot box was made, and Blair won.
After all, it was you and me.
Percy is Puck. Percy is the accumulated logic of systems that benefit from division without anyone needing to intend it. Percy is the media atmosphere that teaches people what to be afraid of before they've had a chance to think. Percy is the path of least resistance that runs through all of us — the instinct to blame the brother, to find the foreigner, to reach for the story that makes the complicated thing simple and puts the fault somewhere else.
He doesn't need a headquarters. He doesn't need a budget. He needs us to be tired, and distracted, and just comfortable enough not to look too hard at how the comfort was arranged.
There's a question underneath this that I haven't fully answered, and I want to be honest about that rather than paper over it.
If Percy is Puck — if he's the spirit of mischief already present in the material rather than a force that arrives from outside — then where does responsibility lie? You can't put Puck on trial. You can't vote him out. If the problem is structural, if it's the accumulated logic of systems, then what exactly are we supposed to do about it?
I don't have a complete answer. What I have is this: naming Percy doesn't let anyone off the hook, including me. It doesn't mean there are no actors, no choices, no moments where things could have gone differently. The people who lied about the weapons in Iraq made choices. The people who designed the opium trade made choices. Puck doesn't make your choices for you. He just makes sure the consequences land somewhere else.
The first thing is to stop letting them.
Draft — Percy Did It. March 2026. For discussion.
David Partridge · mail@stpd.net · Bridport
This site is updated when something stupid needs saying. Started February 2026. For things that might actually work, see snsbl.org.