How do you do, fellow Georgian period political assassins?
You probably won’t remember Spencer Perceval, British prime minister, as he was only in office for three years. And those three years occurred at the beginning of the 1800s.
Still, you should be aware of his existence, if only because he is – to date – the only British prime minister to have been murdered. No, touch wood isn’t a thing, Theresa. Stop knocking those ghoulish white knuckles of yours on the dining table. It’s real mahogany, yeah? Stop it. Please. Now then.
Why am I telling you this? I’ll tell you why I am telling you this, you ungrateful shit, I am telling you this because a) knowledge is power, and more importantly; b) his assassin has now been digitally reconstructed using computers and his actual skull and it turns out he looked like this, the most fundamentally disturbing man to ever live:
Right. I have some observations and comments. Let’s just fire through these, shall we?
- His eyes, in the ‘being too close together stakes’ are, whilst not touching, are at a maximum rating of ‘being too close together’.
- His jawline comes in and then, when it goes to his chin, goes upwards? Upwards???
- Why is his entire face so pointy? Like, every single one of his features is really aggressively pointy. I don’t like that
- Apart from his big, stupid chin
- He looks like a Football Manager regen you’ll see crop up in the year 2028. Just from his face, this guy would be a Romanian left-back called something ludicrous like Jeff Petrescu with a free-kick rating of 20. You sign him £4 million and five years later he captains your Macclesfield Town side to the Champions League
- The hairstyle is: Pigeon Detectives indie raver circa 2008 who was going bald very suddenly and very quickly
If you look at the bottom half of his face, which is this, a Sylvester Stallone in Judge Dredd/Buzz Lightyear jaw:
And then the top half, which is this, Abraham Lincoln crossed with every single CEX employee you’ve ever encountered:
It doesn’t make sense. None of his face makes sense. Literally none of it. But what do I know? I only see tens to hundreds of different faces every single day of my entire life. You’d find this guy sticking his head out behind a wardrobe in The Haunting of Hill House but would you see him on the tube, or in Pret, or anywhere in real world except stood at a fruit machine in a Yates, sweatbands on his wrists, pint of Strongbow in one hand and a Motorola Razr in the other?
The answer is no, no you wouldn’t.
The image is the work of museum technicians at Queen Mary University of London, who used the skull of John Bellingham – which is the most famous item in the collection at their Pathology Museum – to digitise what the assassin would have looked like.
This is his skull, btw. I know some of you are into skulls. Some of you out there are really disturbingly into human skulls. And that’s ok. As long as it doesn’t develop. Keep it in check and we won’t have a problem.
If you want a bit of background on John Bellingham, the new face set to haunt your nightmares, and are keen to wade, balls deep, into the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Spencer Perceval, fear not. I’ve got you covered. Here: wikipedia.org.
No, but seriously, he literally just shot the then prime minister in the chest with a pistol. BUT, but, he did it in, frankly, the best way possible.
After shooting the prime minister, John Bellingham, the guy who shot the prime minister, did this:
In the pandemonium that followed, Bellingham sat quietly on a bench.
That’s a baller move. I don’t care if it is the Georgian era and he has just shot someone. That is sick. And then there’s this.
After being shot by John Bellingham, the guy who shot the prime minister, the prime minister, upon being shot, reacted as follows:
Perceval staggered forward a few steps and exclaimed: “I am murdered!”
Imagine that. You’re in the process of being murdered – you have quite literally just been shot in the chest – and blood is pouring out of you and your body is slowly growing weaker and weaker to the point of destruction and all you can think to do is exclaim the fact that you are being murdered.
Truly, a 10/10 political assassination by all concerned.
He was then arrested, trialled, hung, and his remains atomised so his terrifying remorseless stare could never be seen again.
You thought his terrifying remorseless stare would never be seen again. You thought.
