Has Jonnie lost his marbles?

An interview with the comedian and ex-Royal Holloway student who threw a foam pie at Rupert Murdoch.

The comedy begins early with Jonnie Marbles, as he puts a small espresso cup under the nozzle of the coffee machine and watches nervously as it rapidly overfills. He dives in to try and save the situation, rescuing just enough coffee in a larger cup to settle his nerves. I’m instantly struck by his soft and tender nature – “He’s not quite the overbearing galactic hero come to destroy Rupert Murdoch’s empire I thought”, I tell myself.

As we go up to the London Student office he recounts details of the busy week he’s had and it’s evident that the media frenzy is taking its toll. I’m keen to know whether he has any regrets but I leave that question for a while, hoping to flesh out some of the issues that may have induced regret during the interview.

Hesham Zakai: What is the background to this incident?

Jonnie Marbles: Well, I had the idea a few days beforehand when I realised Rupert Murdoch had a face and that I could get into the same place as him. I spent a couple of days preparing for it, thinking about how I was going to put things in my bag to make it look as innocuous as possible.

In the end, he tells me, there wasn’t much difficulty getting past the security and he took his seat not too far away from the Murdochs. He isn’t excited or energetic as he talks about the build up to the incident, but maintains a calm demeanour.

HZ: What was going through your mind as you prepared to throw the pie at him?

JM: I was really hoping I’d get some excuse to not do it [he laughs]. Initially there was no possibility of doing it as there were people to my left and right, but to my horror one-by-one they got up and left. I sat there in abject terror for about 10 minutes. When I got up, my legs felt heavy, my hands were shaking.

It was clear that he didn’t want to do this up until the moment he did, and there was no sense of joy in it for him. So I pressed him on why he had still gone through with it.

JM: It might sound silly to some people, but I saw it as a responsibility. Once you realise you can do something like this – and there aren’t a lot of people who have the opportunity to – I felt that I had to do it because I knew there were lots of people out there who would have relished the chance. It was a bit of catharsis for everyone who’s ever looked at the front page of The Sun and felt absolutely sick with the state of the world.

He can’t quite suppress a smile as he revisits the precise moment he threw the pie on the face of “the most powerful man in the world”. The smile turns into a laugh as he praises Wendi Deng, the wife of Rupert Murdoch, for her quick reaction. Deng hit him on the head and threw the pie back at him. Looking back, he jokes that handing himself over to the police was going into “protective custody”, to spare him the full force of Deng.

Amidst the laughter, I ask Jonnie whether this was an act of comedy or an act of activism.

JM: It’s both. Activism informed me of what’s possible. I think most people go through life thinking politics is a bit of a spectator sport, but it’s really not; you can get involved. You can go out there and make direct change to your world.

Tired of what he sees as an illusion of democracy, Jonnie has been involved with UK Uncut and supports creative protests, but insists that he selected the foam pie as his form of protest not for its comedic effect but because of its political and historical significance.

JM: I’m not a violent person, I wasn’t going to hit him over the head with a brick. It was an opportunity to humiliate him a bit, bring him down to size. Pieing him in the face has this historic political tradition, going back nearly 100 years. In the 60s and 70s it gained a lot of traction again…it’s a really effective political statement because it re-humanises people, and humiliates them; it says ‘whoever you are, it you don’t treat people with dignity and respect, you don’t deserve to have those things yourself’.

Microsoft business magnate Bill Gates and former director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, are just two notable individuals who have been ‘pied’. Despite it being a political decision, I wondered whether Jonnie had faced opposition to his actions even from his political friends.

HZ: Did you unwittingly lend Murdoch sympathy?

JM: Everyone I know in the real world has been incredibly supportive. I’ve had a lot of people online being very unpleasant. Looking back on it now, I think one of the reasons for that is I had no faith in the select committee process at all from the start. Basically it was a mock trial being held so that we had the impression of justice…but I understand that some people thought we would actually get justice so I see why they’re upset.

He proceeds to impressively go over a brief history of select committee hearings, focusing particularly on the case of Robert Maxwell in 1992. It’s clear Jonnie’s an intelligent individual who did a lot of research before packing his bag with foam and a paper plate in quest of justice.

HZ: Have you had a response from any politicians, particularly those that were present at the hearing?

JM: Louise Mensch called me a loser, and then apologised to losers for comparing me to losers – [he takes this in good humour] – and I apologised for giving her and the other members of the select committee an excuse for their abject failure. So very polite, yeah, we’re going for coffee next week [he laughs]. I’ve also heard through some channels that Tom Watson thought it was very amusing.

Jonnie has amassed a very large Twitter following but is under no illusions about this. “Let’s be honest, it’s a fifteen minutes of fame thing”. He continues to use his Twitter account in the regular way he did before, “putting up political stuff and funny things”, but plans to make the most of the extra followers whilst they last by retweeting friends’ fundraising attempts and other philanthropic causes.

Following the incident, Jonnie was kicked out of the Labour Party, or so it seemed anyway.

JM: I bought membership last year in May simply so I could vote in the leadership election and I let it lapse this May. A rumour started that I was a member of the Labour Party and so they, for PR reasons, kicked me out.

So if he didn’t renew his Labour membership, what politics or political party did he subscribe to, I asked.

JM: I’m in an anarchist in the sense that I believe arbitrary power structures should be torn down and rebuilt, and we should reclaim space for human beings rather than corporations.

Nonetheless, he doesn’t find the term anarchist particularly useful because of its misinterpretation and its restrictiveness. He suggests that the term autonomist might be more useful or, better still, for him to have no label at all. His belief in the lack of restriction extends beyond political nomenclature; he’s part of a movement called NoBorders, campaigning for the rights of migrants.

JM: We live in a system of international apartheid. The moment you start to think about the international migration system, you start to see that something’s not right; it’s just grossly unfair. It’s comparable in many ways to slavery in the US before the civil war. It’s just one of those things which, when you take a step back, when you stop listening to the Daily Mail nonsense that comes out of this country, you realise we’re living in a system of international apartheid. That’s the sort of thing I feel very strongly about. Throwing a pie in Murdoch’s face is a stunt, it’s a bit of catharsis, but there are much more important and much more serious issues out there.

Jonnie is a former Royal Holloway University student but doesn’t look back on his time there too fondly; he cuts a somewhat forlorn figure as he tells me that he doesn’t have too much to say about it. During his time at the University he wrote for The Orbital and the editor at the time, Mario Creatura, said:

“[Jonnie] was a funny, and articulate guy. He was very morally impassioned. We disagreed in a friendly way during a lot of political discussions but there was never any hint of aggression on his part. Just odd-ball and eccentric humour.”

During his time at the paper he had a droll column titled ‘Out of Loo Roll’. That was then and Jonnie is now focussed on social media. He sees it as an important step in reducing the “incredibly destructive influence [of the Murdoch press] on democracy and on peoples’ lives”.

JM: Luckily, I think we’re in a position now where what’s increasingly replacing all mainstream media is social media. I genuinely think we’re at a point in history that could be compared to the invention of the printing press. Everyone’s got their own blog, everyone’s got their own Twitter account if they want one, and you can just completely bypass those big institutions which tend to be very corrupt.

Jonnie has been charged by the police and is due to appear before a Magistrates Court on Friday 29^th July. Upon hearing the news, one of Jonnie’s old teachers said they were “shocked, but not surprised”. As the interview comes to an end, his teacher’s assessment seems to ring true. Beneath the fame and furore the incident has fanned, Jonnie has maintained his reasoning rigorously and offered it to those willing to listen articulately. I’m left with only one question to ask, but fairly sure of the answer before I’ve even asked it.

HZ: Has Jonnie lost his marbles?

JM: [He laughs] Erm, the question is whether I had any in the first place! I’ve always liked to work outside the boundaries, I’ve always been a little bit eccentric and a little bit unusual, I don’t think this is at all out of character for me. No.