And you see, the thing about snuff is that it can be produced cheaply from the dried end leaves of tobacco that are not of sufficient quality to use in cigarettes. Every plantation finds itself each year with a surplus of this stuff It’s usually just mulched up for fertilizer.

Aha! I hear you cry, the rat is smelled. But what about Political Correctness as a whole? Surely it wasn’t just a callous hoax, played upon a gullible public for motives of profit alone?

Well sorry, my friends, I’m afraid it was. The fear of AIDS led to the abandoning of casual unprotected sex. Shares in condom companies boomed. The fear of BSE led people to give up eating meat and eat more vegetables. Shares in agri-chemical companies boomed. And so on and so forth and suchlike.

No matter what you gave up in the cause of PC, it benefited some rich bugger somewhere.

So what about that snuff?

The first TV commercial was a masterpiece. It featured an actress from one of the popular ‘soaps’. Normally it is written into the contracts of such actresses that they cannot appear in commercials. Except, of course, if the soap itself is sponsored by the makers of the very product that is being advertised. And when the product is ‘the healthy PC alternative to smoking’, where could be the harm in it?

It was the very first TV commercial for a branded product ever shown on the BBC.

And the range of fashion accessories that went with the product! The snuffbox jewellery, the pendants and necklaces, bracelets and brooches. The cufffinks, the hipflasks, the snuff-dispensing pens. All, of course, with their distinctive Gaia logo. What could possibly be more PC?

But for all the design and the promo and bullshit, what of the product itself? Was the snuff any good? Did it smell nice? Did it give you a buzz? Remember, you had to stick this stuff up your hooter and the taking of snuff had formerly been regarded as solely within the province of dirty old men.

Well, come on now, what do you think?

It was bloody marvellous. It smelled like Heaven and set you right up for the day.

It came in fifty different blends, each the product of years of research and development. And he’d left nothing to chance. He had trademarked the name Doveston’s Snuff Which is to say that he had not only trademarked his own name, but the word ‘snuff too. How he did it is anyone’s guess, although I have a few of my own. And what it meant was that no rival could use the word ‘snuff on their product. And there were to be many rivals. Any good idea spawns imitators and I still own in my private collection a packet of Virgin Sniffing Mixture.

It never caught on.

The Doveston began to make his first public appearances: on talk shows, at world premières, society functions and fight nights. He was a natural raconteur and the camera loved him. He would turn up on Newsnight, discussing ‘Green Issues’, and on Blue Peter, demonstrating how you could make a snuffbox for Mummy out of sticky-backed plastic and Fairy Liquid bottles with their names blacked out.

He appeared on the covers of trendy magazines and it wasn’t long before photographers from Hello! were given the secret password to get them through the gates of Castle Doveston.

And it wasn’t too long after that that the first piece of shit hit the wildly whirling fan. Some stills from a video recording found their way into the hands of a Sunday tabloid journalist. The joyful journalist passed these on to his editor. The elated editor passed on the news that he intended publication to the Doveston. The Doveston apparently then told him to publish and be damned.

Or so the story goes. Some, who are better informed, tell it that the words used were actually: you ‘Il be damned before you publish. If these were the very words used, then they were uncannily prophetic, for the editor died the following day, in a freak accident involving his car-exhaust pipe and a stick of dynamite.

The incriminating photographs went up with him. Or should that be down, in the case of the damned?

But the brown stuff always sticks and even as the Doveston was making his way to Buck House to receive his OBE ‘For Services to the British People’ from his grateful monarch, queues of young women were forming outside the offices of the nation’s press, each of these young women being eager to offer details, in exchange for nothing more than large sums of money, of how the man they now called the Sultan of Snuff had tried to coerce them into giving him blow-jobs, or got them to do rude things with cigars.[9]

And it seemed that every miffed ex-employee, or indeed anyone who had ever known the Doveston, had some lurid story they wanted to sell. Even Chico’s now-aged aunty, who still ran the ever-popular House of Correction in Brentford, came forward with a ludicrous yarn about the young Doveston sexually molesting her pet chicken and running off with her favourite teapot.

But all publicity is good publicity and if you are very very rich it doesn’t matter what the tabloids print about you. Or even how true it might be. You sue and you win and the public loves you for it. And the damages make you even richer.

Mind you, there were moments when things got mighty dangerous. Someone — and it might very well have been the same someone who sent the video stills to the tabloid — someone tipped off a prominent investigative TV journalist that the British government was funding the importation of narcotics and that the Doveston was acting as middle man and taking one per cent of the profits.

It chills my very soul today when I recall the ghastly details of the freak accident which took that TV journalist from us. May his tortured body rest in peace.

But oh, I hear you say, enough of this. Relevant as all these details are and necessary to the telling of the tale, we really do want to get on with the guts and the gore.

Well, all right all right all right. I can beat about the beaver no longer, the story must be told and only I can tell it. The real guts and gore and the madness and mayhem occurred at the Great Millennial Ball.

Held at Castle Doveston, this was to be the social occasion of the century. Anyone who was anyone had been invited and anyone who wasn’t wasn’t getting in.

Evidently I wasn’t anyone, because I hadn’t received an invitation. The first I heard about the ball was when Norman told me about the costume he was working on that ‘would really impress the ladies’.

Norman had just returned from the balloon trip. What balloon trip? Well, the one the Doveston had organized for his closest friends to rise above the clouds over the English Channel and view the total eclipse of the sun.

What total eclipse? The one that the rich people watched and we didn’t. That’s what!

‘Good, was it?’ I asked Norman.

‘Bloody brilliant. You should have been there. Mind you, it fair put the wind up the Doveston. He’s expecting the end of the world as we know it. He seemed quite certain that the eclipse was a sign. A portent in the heavens. He wee-wee’d himself. In front of the Prime Minister.’

‘I’ll bet that made you laugh.’

‘Of course it didn’t. Well, it did, a bit. Well, quite a lot really. I nearly wee-wee’d myself, trying not to.’

‘So, he’s still as Richard as ever?’

‘Much more so. How long is it since you’ve seen him?’

‘Four years. Ever since that business with the videos and the vice squad. He pays me a retainer, but I’m no longer welcome at Castle Doveston. I receive press packages, so that I can continue to work on the biography.’

‘And how is that coming along?’

I made the face that says ‘bollocks’.