Ecologists observing orchard life have found that, no matter how complex or diverse insect communities are, they can only thrive in civic habitats where everyone contributes. Bees run the pollen economy, ants oversee infrastructural corridors, and wasps keep a vigilant eye on law and order. Beetle larvae turn rotting wood into communal mulch – the orchard’s tax base – which ensures nourishment for all. And, of course, everyone contributes their nutrient levies. Earthworms are the quiet municipal engineers, tunnelling unseen to aerate and redistribute nutrients; their work is the invisible groundwork, funded by these contributions. These enduring arrangements have long sustained the orchard’s common wealth.
Yet in recent seasons, a disruptive ideology has wriggled out of the compost heap: larval populism. Glorifying rot while denouncing evolution, it promises power to the soft-bodied masses by rejecting the very metamorphosis that sustains the orchard.
The foremost advocate of this is the grifting Compost MP Faragius fauxpatriotus, a maggot of unimpressive stature. His talent lies not in serving his constituents but in peddling slogans like “The Orchard is Broken” from a pile of decomposing plums. Faragius proclaims larvae to be the native born heirs to the orchard, casting any insect with wings as the enemies of the writhing classes. He denounces the ants as joyless technocrats, the bees as buzzing bureaucrats, and the dragonflies as aerial snobs who “Couldn’t possibly understand the wriggling classes.” “Wriggling is freedom,” he insists, sniggering at their immaturity, while dodging questions about offshore fruit-hoarding and nectar laundering.
Central to Faragius’s rhetoric is the claim that larval voices are being silenced by left-winged elites. He insists that freedom of speech is curtailed by any creature capable of flight, declaring them an existential threat to discourse in the orchard. Every butterfly becomes a symbol of censorship, every drone of a wasp patrol heralds the suppression of maggot opinion, and every shadow of a bird is interpreted as proof of a winged ‘leftie’ plotting against the writhing masses. At the same time, any sign of scrutiny – whether a buzz, chirrup, or tweet – is swiftly silenced. Larvae are urged to wriggle in solidarity, to reject democracy or see their rights as the soil-bound majority – absurdly cast as an oppressed underclass – being squashed.
Meanwhile, as ordinary larvae dutifully pay their compost taxes, Faragius slips his nectar donations through snail-shell companies beyond the reach of orchard auditors. He rails against the bees’ pollen tariffs – the very levies that pollinate the orchard – recasting the simplest civic duty as tyranny. All the while, he fiddles the system, hoarding surplus plums and starving the mulch fund that keeps the soil alive.
What his anti-wing hyperbole fails to mention is one simple biological fact: larvae are meant to metamorphose. Reform is the very meaning of metamorphosis. Yet larval populism glorifies permanent immaturity. It nurtures extreme nationalism built on simplistic soundbites perpetuated by algorithms, and fake patriotism to a pile of rotting fruit in a biodiverse orchard. By persuading his maggot base to resist change, Faragius denies them the opportunity of social mobility – the chance to spread their wings. In mobilising them to dismantle their own civic habitats, he invites ruin: ant hills will crumble, nectar networks will falter, disorder will spread, and the orchard will collapse in ideological chaos.
The irony is inescapable. Faragius fauxpatriotus will pupate, but not into the butterfly of vision he so desperately dreams of. He will emerge as a common blow fly – buzzing frantically against windows, mistaking invisible barriers for conspiracies, and still dogged by nectar debts and phoney “consulting services”. Reform UK Ltd exposes the absurdity of larval populism: a flag-waving maggot-led mob, blind to how the orchard actually works, doomed to watch its leader’s pitiful metamorphosis into the airborne charlatan he really is.
i n s e c t i n s i d e 