A little over a year ago, I somewhat injudiciously wrote an article for AOL News (now absorbed by the Huffington Post) about gun control in the United States. I admit it wasn’t a terribly intelligent thing to do, not for a vaguely left-wing Englishman hoping to flog a few books in America. The vitriol elicited by my modest proposal was as violent and vituperative as it was predictable.

A lot of people seemed to think I should ‘go home’, apparently unaware of the fact that I was home already, but the star turn among my critics, at least for my friends, was a certain Mr. Skullcrusher. The honorific is my own attribution. The pseudo was simply ‘Skullcrusher’. But I think he must have been a man. Mr. Skullcrusher was really very cross indeed. At least, I think he was. It was a bit tricky to work out what he was on about. But he wasn’t happy about it, whatever it was.

At this point I had intended providing a hyperlink to a discrete document containing the collected wit and wisdom of Mr. Skullcrusher, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t think that anyone who hasn’t gone out of their way to provoke the man in the manner that I did should be exposed to the unexpurgated Skullcrusher.

So, in brief, I believe the basic thesis (and it really was very basic) maintained that there is a globalist conspiracy of lefty scum ‘socilalists’, corporate ‘lobbiests’, malign foreign interests, the liberal media, and rich fat bastards that claims the cold weather is a consequence of global warming (which doesn’t exist but, if it did, would be caused by Al Gore farting, apparently) and that this globalist conspiracy wants to confiscate the guns of good law abiding citizens so that America will be destroyed and the lefties and liberalists and globalists and ‘socilalists’ can emerge from the shadows to boot Mr. Skullcrusher in the teeth and it will be like England and anyone who talks about politicians will be thrown in jail. I think that was the gist of it, at least. Oh, yes, I almost forgot, the man behind all this is President Obama

Searching for Mr. Skullcrusher’s other considered contributions to AOL, I was flattered to discover that the only article that had agitated him as much as mine was a piece about President Obama holding a reception in the White House for Hu Jintao, Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic of China (a silly title, to be sure, but nobody’s perfect). I think the colour of the house was significant. That and the combination of an ever so slightly brown man and an ever so slightly yellow man glad-handing one another in the ‘white’ house. Sinister, you see. Anyway, it was all rather gratifying. It had never occurred to me before that I could be as irritating as the two most powerful men in the world. I’m rather proud of that

Approaching the anniversary of this sorry foray into self-promotion (the sole consequence of which, according to a friend who became particularly fond of Mr. Skullcrusher, was that there were record gun sales in the United States over the 2011 Christmas season of goodwill-to-all-men), I felt I owed it to Mr. Skullcrusher to track him down and engage in some sort of dialogue. I’m not quite sure why I felt this, but I have peculiar turns sometimes, and this was definitely one of them. Unhappily, or possibly happily, I could find no way of contacting Mr. Skullcrusher, so elected instead to get in touch with the sort of organizations I felt he might favour. I wrote to the Ku Klux Klan.

Assuming the alias of M. V. White, I explained that I was a great admirer of their movement and wanted to open a European office for them. But apart from sending me formula emails inviting me to look at their website, they didn’t enter into the spirit of the thing at all. Even when I admitted that my first name was Mohammed and I hoped they weren’t being racist because I was a little bit brown, they didn’t respond. Narrow minded, I call it. I told them I was only a tiny, tiny bit brown, not very brown at all really, that I was often complimented on my tan, and that people used to look at my mother in a funny way when I was a child, but they weren’t having any of it. I think my mistake may have been asking them for money in my first email

I was severely disappointed by the KKK, I can tell you. But then I happened upon an interesting neo-Nazi outfit called The National Alliance, the principal qualification for membership of which is that your ancestors were all white and non-Jewish. In light of what science has to say about the common origins of mankind, I can see certain drawbacks to these criteria, and I wasn’t hugely surprised to discover that the Alliance isn’t exactly the most oversubscribed organization in the world.

Undaunted, though, I . . . sorry, ‘M.V. White’ got in touch with them and heard back from a gentleman who was really most helpful about trying to find a white supremacist organization that accepted Moslems. It all got quite embarrassing. I mean, he was really very, very helpful. Told me I should read Heritage & Destiny magazine, and steer well clear of “pseudo pro-Aryan associations like the British National Party, which accepts non-Whites as members, and the English Defence League which is a pro-Jewish organization promoting Israel's interests at the expense of Islam”.

Confronted with such candid and kind-hearted advice, I let the matter drop for a few days, but when I next checked out M. V. White’s account, my correspondent was still there, still doing his best to set me on the straight and narrow. Apologizing for not getting back to him earlier, I explained that there had been an awkward episode involving the neighbour’s cat and that, though I had told them we didn’t actually eat cats where I came from, the police hadn’t been at all understanding.

The gentleman from the National Alliance was most sympathetic.

This was very unsatisfactory. White Supremacists are not meant to be nice obliging people doing their best to help strangers. I’m sure Mr. Skullcrusher wouldn’t have been half so accommodating.

Our correspondence only came to an end when I confessed that I was a little bit brown and might have to consider the British National Party after all.

Life can be complicated sometimes. All I wanted was a little harmless fun.

Where are you Mr. Skullcrusher when we need you?

By the way, did you ever buy my book?