Under starter’s order … and they’re off!
And so here we go again – another UK General Election, this time on 8th June. For an avid veteran politician-watcher such as myself there is no such thing as whatever-that-woman-from-Bristol’s-name-was (that gave an exasperated ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!” type reaction to a media camera team when she heard the awful news … that then went viral) or indeed voter-fatigue.
Well, let me explain – it would be a bit rich of me ever to claim voter-fatigue since I’ve only ever voted once so far in my life, and that was in the UK Referendum, and I promise you have no intention of ever visiting the ballot box again.
Let’s face it, the reaction of Westminster politicians generally this week to the announcement that there was to be a snap General Election has been hysterical but also entirely predictable.
The fact that Mrs May had made her decision to go for broke and stepped out of the door of Number 10 to stroll to a lectern to put the cat among the pigeons by effectively either doing a U-turn and/or breaking yet another Tory promise at precisely 11.10am on Tuesday, was exasperating in the extreme to this commentator.
Not because of any politician’s U-turn or broken promise, you understand, but simply because I missed it on the ‘live’ BBC coverage of this dramatic and much-heralded (but as yet purpose unknown) special event.
Mrs May couldn’t even get that right, of course. All Tuesday morning UK media outlets had been told (and been warning it viewers and listeners) to stand by for a special Prime Minister’s announcement at 11.15am, so – just like the media and everyone else – I naturally expected that it was going to happen at 11.15am.
That was precisely why I had set off across the road to my local newsagent’s shop at 11.00am in order to pick up two packs of Marlboro Red, two Magnum Classic ice cream lollies, two Crunchie ice cream lollies and my daily copy of the Racing Post – and okay, I got stuck for a while behind some idiot who was making a bit of a Horlicks of paying for a top-up on his bus pass – and then high-tailed it back home by 11.12am, in good time to settle into my favourite arm chair for the set-piece … only to find that Theresa was already two minutes into her historic bloody announcement.
What kind of proper Prime Minister does that?!?!
And so now we have to go through the runners and riders for this politicians’ Grand National.
We’ve got the Prime Minister herself and the Tory Party. Saint Theresa has already given open season to her braying opponents by going for a snap Election when she’d spent eight months saying that she wouldn’t, by driving a coach & horses through the recently-passed Act that decreed all Governments would serve a five-year term and by indicating from the off that she wasn’t going to take part in the new (traditional) pantomime nonsense of leaders’ TV debates during the election campaign.
The Tories start from the arrogant conceit that if only – like they had – everyone ever got off their fat backsides, jumped onto one of Norman Tebbit’s bicycles and went looking for work, and then grafted, they’d all live in million-pound houses, drive Bentley Continental GT convertibles and have get-away villas in southern Portugal.
The one thing the Tories appreciate – and which those of other political persuasions either don’t and/or won’t admit – is that (economically) 21st Century Britain, with its gigantic NHS, welfare & benefits system and over-bloated public sector, is ungovernable, unsolvable and unsustainable.
The Tories’ Achilles heel is that, with a counter-intuitiveness that never ceases to amaze me, they keep trying to do something about it. And thereby both collectively shoot themselves in the foot and render themselves terminally unpopular with those affected by their tinkering and inadequate measures designed to make sense of it all – to the extent of visceral hatred that makes the Great Unwashed metaphorically foam at the mouth every time the Tory Party and/or its leader is mentioned on the airwaves.
Saint Theresa hasn’t been helping herself, of course, by being a woman and – by her sanctimonious public pronouncements about “making this a country for everyone” and “looking after the weak, downtrodden and disabled” – projecting herself to the nation as a strident version of ‘Thatcher-lite’.
Next the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn.
There’s not a great deal to be said, really, that hasn’t been aired regularly ever since Mr Corbyn won his two leadership elections and thereby consigned the Party to years of self-immolation and derision and then ultimately a possible one-way trip to already chock-full graveyard of UK political history.
Right now, Mr Corbyn and Labour – most resembling from movie legend the leading ladies in the movie Thelma and Louise – look to be heading straight towards the cliff of an Electoral disaster that some pundits are confidently asserting will match or even emulate their infamous ‘longest suicide note in history’ Michael Foot-led General Election of 1983.
If the Tories are damned by their lasting conceit and ‘law of the jungle’ attitude (“I made good, so therefore anyone can if they try hard enough”), the UK Left are similarly hampered by their la-la land presumption that, if only every UK resident was given the same chances in life as those in the Establishment elite had been, they’d all be living in million-pound houses, driving Bentley Continental GTs and holidaying in their get-away villas in southern Portugal.
This whilst, of course, the vast conurbations of the Midlands and North would be flowing with milk and honey, everyone would be terribly nice to each other, all those supposedly nasty foreign superpowers wouldn’t bother to invade and subjugate us just because we’d disbanded our military forces and waved a white flag on which ‘We Won’t Bother Anyone Else If They Don’t Bother Us’ has been etched in black felt tip ink, and life would generally be perfect in Corbyn-land.
Oh, and by the way, if we cannot all have million-pound houses, Bentley Continental GTs and villas in southern Portugal, then nobody should be allowed to.
I spent about forty minutes listening to Nicky Campbell’s morning radio phone-in programme on Radio Five Live whilst driving around yesterday.
The degree of the average UK voter’s delusion about the realities of life never ceases to amaze me.
Caller after caller of a Labour persuasion queued up to assert confidently that Jeremy Corbyn was definitely going to win the Election.
When asked about the Tories’ 21-point lead in the polls and/or Jeremy’s supposed lack of competence and appeal to the voters at large, their stock response was that the right-wing UK media [and presumably also the overwhelming majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party?] had got it in for the Labour leader, never given him a chance, and – now that at last he was going to be able to get across his message direct to the UK electorate – he was going to become, and would make an excellent, Prime Minister.
And lastly, please don’t ask me about Tim Farron and the Lib-Dems, the Greens, the Independents, the SNP – and especially not ancient has-beens like Tony Blair, Lord Kinnock, Nick Clegg and … er … oh no – here’s comes Dracula, sorry, Vince Cable!
Nothing excites the political class more than the prospect an impending Election – i.e. the chance to feel worthwhile and important, get out there, knock on ordinary people’s doors, paint slogans on banners … and, best of all, be given umpteen chances to be seen on television and/or heard on radio.
I’ll give Farron at least this much – since being elected leader of the Lib-Dems, he’s performed far better on air and in front of the television cameras that I ever believed he was capable of. Compared to Jeremy Corbyn, he comes across as a colossus of a world statesman, which of course isn’t saying much. Farron is fluent, affable and annoyingly enthusiastic.
His problem is that he looks about sixteen years old, the sort of cheerful whippersnapper who could just about be trusted to run his local church Easter tombola, chat up the old biddies, retrieve all the hymn books and church newsletters left behind in the pews after the 10.30am Matins service and then do it all again – and not only that, arrive on time next Sunday as per the published schedule.
But running the country? Do me a favour!
There’s no chance of the Lib-Dems getting 30 seats, let alone gaining power.
Nevertheless, because of the UK electoral laws and broadcasters’ supposed imperative to be impartial we, the public, will now have to endure all these hot-air merchants bouncing around like silver balls on a bagatelle board spouting their crap at us for the next six weeks.
Hang on, I’ve just changed my mind.
The first UK political to include an English ‘Yes/No’ Referendum on ridding the UK of the Scots in their official memorandum will get my vote.
