This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Bippi Strangeways’s first volume, a furious, starveling pamphlet called We Comin’ For Ya Tessie May, appeared shortly before the 2017 General Election.
It attracted particular controversy for its title poem, which gave detailed instructions on how to dismember, deep-fry and garnish the body of the then Prime Minister, and a long, misty-eyed sequence headed “Jeremy He Da Man”.
Ms Strangeways was subsequently interviewed on the Today programme and commissioned to supply an expletive-filled “improv” to Poetry Please, which attracted no fewer than 117 complaints to the Broadcasting House switchboard.
Most critics agreed that Bippi’s early work gave notice of an undeniable zest and energy. “In these howls of pain from the fractured cityscape, the reader will be conscious of having stumbled upon a freshly-minted and turbo-charged urban demotic,” the Guardian declared.
The author tour arranged to promote Boss Chick (2019) featured a somewhat uncompromising figure, shaven-headed and usually dressed in black, although there was one legendary appearance in a kind of Bacofoil jumpsuit. In this garb, invited on stage at the close of Stormzy’s Glastonbury set, she is supposed to have startled her sponsor by urging all the “motherfuckers” present to “tear down the walls”.
It was then that the trouble began, with an inquisitive Daily Telegraph journalist
After this Bippi calmed down a bit, wrote a reasonably sensible review of a book about Greenwich Village for the Times Literary Supplement, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature — she arrived at the ceremony in a dress made out of lumps of meat — and began work on a memoir of her early life in Kennington entitled Ghetto Girl.
It was then that the trouble began, when an inquisitive Daily Telegraph journalist, casting an eye over the Oxford class lists from ten years before, discovered that a certain B.D.A. Strangeways (St Hugh’s) had been awarded a first-class degree in PPE.
Further enquiry revealed that the same woman had, some months later, been elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls and in this capacity submitted a highly regarded DPhil thesis on the structural imperfections of the post-war Louisiana cotton industry.
To make matters worse, a photograph was retrieved from the Cherwell in which, alongside a man later identified as the heir to a marquisate, she was shown disporting herself in the May Morning celebrations on Magdalen Bridge. The principal of St Hugh’s, interviewed by the Daily Mail, described her as “a model pupil”.
Naturally, Bippi fought back, telling the Observer, “It don’t matter whether you’re on the street or in the Codrington Library — you can still tell it like it is.” Her father, tracked down to an address in Kensington High Street, would say only that “Belinda” had a vivid imagination.
A third collection of poems, Street-Walking Cheetah, for which messrs Faber outbid several other publishers, mysteriously failed to appear. All this was three years ago, after which sightings of Bippi, or indeed, B.D.A. Strangeways, have been pitifully sparse. She is currently thought to be working for Deutsche Bank.
