The sterility of the Beatles and all they stood for is best summed up in their hymn to nihilism ‘Imagine,’ and some idea of their political values and attitudes to Britain was revealed in their thinly disguised sympathies for Irish Republicanism. One Paul McCartney song was so ‘over the top’ in its support for the IRA’s propaganda line about ‘British imperialism in Ireland’ that it was banned by the BBC – and for the BBC to ban anything for being too pro-IRA it has to be pretty extreme.

Yet as contemptible as McCartney was it is surely John Lennon who, above the other three Beatles, personifies the sickly degeneracy that the Beatles stood for.

Although the Beatles, especially in their early days, leant heavily on their ‘ordinary working-class kids from Liverpool’ image Lennon was not particularly working-class and was known to despise his home town.

When he died – shot dead by a lunatic who had the dubious distinction of having been expelled from an American neo-Nazi group for being too ‘extreme’ – several million dollars worth of animal furs were found in a specially air-conditioned room in his hotel suite. They were apparently for the use of his wife, Yoko Ono, prompting the popular, if suitably tasteless joke to the effect that it took an awful lot of dead animals to keep one old dog warm.

An insight into the sick, and supremely uncreative mind of John Lennon can be gauged by some of his ‘art’ reproduced here. We understand that this is the first time these drawings have ever been published, – a Vanguard “Exclusive World First!” as the gutter press would put it, that is likely to be more of interest to psychiatrists than art-lovers.

John Lennon is mercifully dead but his influence lingers on, a sick memorial to a sick age.