The Old Bailey has witnessed extraordinary scenes this week, as the trial of ice cream vendor Bertram Fullock, the man accused of attempting to assassinate London Mayor Boris Johnson, unfolded. Although Fullock does not deny attempting to ram Johnson with his ice cream van as the Mayor cycled down a West London street, he claims that his attack was fully justified. “Believe me, Boris Johnson has to die in order to save future generations from jack-booted dictatorship,” he told the court under cross-examination by the prosecution. “What’s one life now, when balanced against the future suffering of millions?” Despite his despairing defence counsel’s attempts to silence him, Fullock continued, alleging that the capital’s Mayor and former Tory MP Boris Johnson had been deceiving the British public. “Don’t be fooled by his shambolic demeanour – to the casual observer he may seem to be a harmless, floppy-haired, upper class buffoon, bumbling his way through various political crises, but that’s just what he wants you to think,” he told the court. “In reality, beneath that upper class idiot exterior, he’s actually a ruthless, right wing extremist, hell-bent on establishing a fascist dictatorship! I know – I’ve seen the results with my own eyes!”

According to his extraordinary testimony, Fullock has actually travelled through time to the future, where he was able to witness, first hand, the terrible dictatorship which, he claims, will be established by Boris Johnson, if he is allowed to live. “It was during a freak electrical storm last Summer, I was driving my ice cream van through Streatham when there was this huge flash of light! It nearly blinded me and I was so startled I swerved off of the road and crashed into a bus stop! Not surprisingly, I lost consciousness!” he claimed from the witness box, as his counsel sat slumped at his bench, head in hands. “When I came to, I found myself in a strange new world!” His first realisation that something was amiss was when he noticed some nearby advertising hoardings. “They were plastered with these huge photographic portraits of Boris Johnson, all shot from a flattering angle and portraying him wearing a laurel wreath on his head,” Fullock recalled. “At first I thought it was to do with the forthcoming mayoral elections. Then I realised that his face wasn’t just on the hoardings, it was bloody everywhere! There were banners hanging from lamp posts, the fronts of buildings, the sides of buses, everywhere! And all depicting him as some kind of Roman emperor – laurel wreath, toga and all!”

The sudden appearance of a phalanx of black clad, jack-booted ‘policemen’ marching down the road toward him, finally alerted the ice cream man to the fact that something was terribly amiss. “I decided to scarper sharpish – they were pointing at my crashed van and gesticulating in an alarming way,” he explains. “I managed to get it started again, put it in reverse and headed back toward central London, where I thought I might get some answers!” In Trafalgar Square he encountered a huge crowd gathered around a massive plasma screen, broadcasting live Boris’ latest speech. “I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but the crowd were loving it,” he recalled under oath. “I think it had something to do with denouncing foreigners, fat people and northerners – I gathered that his forces had just crushed the last pocket of resistance to his rule by razing Liverpool to the ground.” Speaking to members of the crowd – as he sold them ice creams – Fullock gleaned that he had travelled more than ten years into the future and began to learn how Boris had come to power.

“Following the inevitable failure of Osborne’s economic policies and with the existing political parties and their leaders discredited, the country was on the brink of chaos, with people looking for a strong leader to unify ‘broken Britain’. Someone untainted by the partisan parliamentary politics of the past decade, someone with a record as a populist, someone who could do the basic things, like make the buses run on time,” he explained to the incredulous court. “Inevitably, people turned to Boris Johnson who, following his re-election as London Mayor in 2012, had further distanced himself from the Cameron coalition government, portraying himself a patrician ‘One Nation’ leader, championing ‘traditional values’. Naturally, he stepped in, dissolving parliament, declaring a state of emergency and suspending democracy for the duration. Apparently people were out on the streets in their tens of thousands, cheering his triumphal procession, as he travelled down the Mall on an open-topped double decker bus, mumbling to the crowd.”

Whilst the Johnson regime presented itself as a benign dictatorship, patterned after his running of London as a personal political fiefdom, focused on making the country fit for a return to democracy, and trumpeted its successes, such as making the buses run on time, providing cycle lanes and reducing litter on the Tube, it soon became apparent to Fullock that it also had a far darker side. “There were no rough sleepers on Britain’s streets, for instance, because they had all been forced to participate in a popular new blood sport for the nation’s entertainment,” he alleged. “It was like a cross between a gladiatorial contest and Britain’s Got Talent, with down and outs forced to perform awful ‘entertainment’ acts against eachother, until one of them couldn’t take it anymore and decapitated or disembowelled themselves.” The nightmare future Britain which Fullock found himself in had been, he claimed, modelled on the Imperial Rome which former Oxford scholar Johnson was so enamoured. “Parliament had been replaced by a Senate, filled with wealthy business-types and financiers, but with no real powers, whilst the executive lay exclusively in the hands of ‘Emperor’ Boris,” he informed a clearly bemused Judge Julian Fruitnutt, presiding over his trial. “Everything was on the basis of patronage, with every privilege having to be bought.”

Finally spotted by the police, Fullock was forced to flee Trafalgar Square, fearing arrest for trading without an appropriate licence. “As I was high tailing it south of the river, I ran back into that electrical storm,” he claimed. “Once again, there was a huge flash and I blacked out and lost control of the van.” He awoke to find his van entangled with a bus-stop in Streatham. “Just remember, in a few years’ time, when you’ve got Boris Johnson in your cross hairs and you’re wondering if you’ve got the nerve to pull that trigger – I warned you!” he screamed as he was dragged from the dock by prison warders, following the inevitable guilty verdict. “Just remember, I told you that all you had to do was vote for Ken Livingstone in order to avoid that dilemma!” Next week the court will hear the trial of thirty-six year old Geoff Wrinkler, who is accused of trying to assassinate former London Mayor Ken Livingstone with an exploding frog. In his defence, Wrinkler has claimed that whilst in a three week coma – the result of a freak accident involving a piano – he was transported to a future London which had been laid waste by giant mutant newts created by Livingstone in a secret lab funded by the capital’s council tax payers, following his re-election as Mayor.