For one of our many adolescent pranks, my friend and I planted tips about an obscure young footballer. Then he suddenly started going places. What had we done?
I’m going to tell the story like I’ve always told it. When I was a teenager, my best friend and I played a lot of pranks. We wanted to be like Chris Morris, fooling celebrities, journalists and politicians into absurd situations of our making. Morris, of course, is a genius and his satire remains the gold standard. We were not geniuses. To our 13-year-old minds, his work offered a simple lesson: you could just ring people up, influential people, and lie to them for fun.
So we did. My first go was on the eve of the May 2010 general election, where I called the Hilton Hotel in Westminster, pretending to be David Cameron’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn. I spoke with their private events manager for 45 minutes, ordering a stupendous party banquet for the Conservatives’ imminent victory: hundreds of bottles of Krug, trays of shepherds’ pie, feathers to fall from the ceiling at the moment the vote was called in their favour. All of these requests were sent to the hotel from my school email one afternoon. The following morning, I was pulled out of my geography lesson, and told that the hotel had called my school requesting a £10,000 deposit. I was very nearly expelled.
