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| This week on Twitter: things that didn’t actually happen to Boris Johnson | This week on Twitter: things that didn’t actually happen to Boris Johnson |
| (about 16 hours later) | |
| An ‘anonymous’ letter of support. The prime minister not being laughed at. Who cares about the truth? There’s an election going on, says author Joel Golby | An ‘anonymous’ letter of support. The prime minister not being laughed at. Who cares about the truth? There’s an election going on, says author Joel Golby |
| Much as the police like to analyse the handwriting of serial killers to find clues, so I enjoy peering through the anonymised handwritten notes supposedly passed to politicians on the campaign trail, desperately squinting to see who might have written it – and which tics and “voter voice” cues a clueless spad might have dropped in there to make it more real. Thank you, Boris Johnson, then, for this, which will keep me occupied for about the next 40 years. Nicola, you are my Zodiac Killer: | |
| “Dear Prime Minster,” the letter starts, because, as we know, The People cannot spell. “I cannot let this opportunity go by as I am travelling on the train with you to Birmingham.” This, also, is a normal way in which people talk: they explicitly stage-set where they are and where they are going in the introduction to a handwritten letter passed to someone on the train they already know they are on. | “Dear Prime Minster,” the letter starts, because, as we know, The People cannot spell. “I cannot let this opportunity go by as I am travelling on the train with you to Birmingham.” This, also, is a normal way in which people talk: they explicitly stage-set where they are and where they are going in the introduction to a handwritten letter passed to someone on the train they already know they are on. |
| “My husband and I wish you every success in the coming election. I can not say I am a great supporter of Brexit – ” unclear why you would support the only loudly pro-Brexit candidate, then, but go on – “but I am a committed supporter of Great Britain.” Is it just me reflexively humming Jerusalem right now or are we all doing it? I … I think I love the Queen a good 60% more than when I started all this. | “My husband and I wish you every success in the coming election. I can not say I am a great supporter of Brexit – ” unclear why you would support the only loudly pro-Brexit candidate, then, but go on – “but I am a committed supporter of Great Britain.” Is it just me reflexively humming Jerusalem right now or are we all doing it? I … I think I love the Queen a good 60% more than when I started all this. |
| More letter: “We need clarity in our direction. We need strength in our leadership. We need G-d” – I’m not sure quite how ringing an endorsement it is for the righteousness of Brexit that The Big Man himself needs to get involved but there we go – “on our side to make a miracle majority.” Ah yes, the “miracle majority” that the honest-to-goodness man-on-the-street can’t stop talking about. At this point in the letter, before she’s even reached, “Channel your inner bulldog to be the leader we need”, it’s veering a lot further from “sweet lady on a train” to “subject of a decades-long manhunt”, isn’t it? | More letter: “We need clarity in our direction. We need strength in our leadership. We need G-d” – I’m not sure quite how ringing an endorsement it is for the righteousness of Brexit that The Big Man himself needs to get involved but there we go – “on our side to make a miracle majority.” Ah yes, the “miracle majority” that the honest-to-goodness man-on-the-street can’t stop talking about. At this point in the letter, before she’s even reached, “Channel your inner bulldog to be the leader we need”, it’s veering a lot further from “sweet lady on a train” to “subject of a decades-long manhunt”, isn’t it? |
| I’m not going to speculate any more whether the letter is real or whether Michael Gove wrote it desperately in a Virgin Trains toilet with his finger on the lock button to keep a queue of genuine piss-needers out (“Occupied!” Michael Gove is saying, the sweat from his frantic little forehead steaming up his glasses) because, whichever way you spin it, there is a real person on the end of that pen, whoever they are. | I’m not going to speculate any more whether the letter is real or whether Michael Gove wrote it desperately in a Virgin Trains toilet with his finger on the lock button to keep a queue of genuine piss-needers out (“Occupied!” Michael Gove is saying, the sweat from his frantic little forehead steaming up his glasses) because, whichever way you spin it, there is a real person on the end of that pen, whoever they are. |
| That’s the terrifying thing about this election: for every normal person in your little bubble who is going to vote along the same lines as you, there’s a possibly fictional, possibly real Nicola Murder–Bulldog out there, quietly writing blood letters on the train, creeping around Birmingham eyeing up the next non-believer to bounce bodily into a canal. | That’s the terrifying thing about this election: for every normal person in your little bubble who is going to vote along the same lines as you, there’s a possibly fictional, possibly real Nicola Murder–Bulldog out there, quietly writing blood letters on the train, creeping around Birmingham eyeing up the next non-believer to bounce bodily into a canal. |
| Similarly, and I know it isn’t “cool” or “trendy” to say it, but … I think I believe the BBC. Just as we had #Wreathgate to spice up Armistice Day, we now have #Gigglegate: the straight fact that, in an edited video the BBC uploaded to social media following Friday’s Question Time debates, a small flutter of audience laughter was cut after a question was put to Boris Johnson about the importance of telling the truth. | Similarly, and I know it isn’t “cool” or “trendy” to say it, but … I think I believe the BBC. Just as we had #Wreathgate to spice up Armistice Day, we now have #Gigglegate: the straight fact that, in an edited video the BBC uploaded to social media following Friday’s Question Time debates, a small flutter of audience laughter was cut after a question was put to Boris Johnson about the importance of telling the truth. |
| This has fed into a now gorgeous recurring theme of this election: the BBC messes up calamitously, and amateurishly, highly tuned conspiracy-minded individuals – those who have ruined at least one house party already this year with an Epstein theory and have plans for two more – accuse the broadcaster of fake news, and people who don’t believe that it is fake news sneer at the idea of it being fake news. Everyone is sort of right and sort of wrong at the same time, and the BBC issues a fumbling apology (the clip was “shortened for timing reasons” for the lunchtime bulletin, apparently, which was why it was uploaded to social media: they, simply, had it lying around). | This has fed into a now gorgeous recurring theme of this election: the BBC messes up calamitously, and amateurishly, highly tuned conspiracy-minded individuals – those who have ruined at least one house party already this year with an Epstein theory and have plans for two more – accuse the broadcaster of fake news, and people who don’t believe that it is fake news sneer at the idea of it being fake news. Everyone is sort of right and sort of wrong at the same time, and the BBC issues a fumbling apology (the clip was “shortened for timing reasons” for the lunchtime bulletin, apparently, which was why it was uploaded to social media: they, simply, had it lying around). |
| So what’s it to be: that the anonymous letter passed to Johnson on a train will win this year’s Didn’t Happen Of The Year Awards hands down, and the BBC is now a state-run propaganda machine? Or the BBC made a split-second thoughtless editing decision and Nicola (Mrs) actually exists and actually wants to invoke the spirit of the bulldog? The truth to both is, probably, somewhere in the grey lull between. But who cares about that! There’s an election going on! | So what’s it to be: that the anonymous letter passed to Johnson on a train will win this year’s Didn’t Happen Of The Year Awards hands down, and the BBC is now a state-run propaganda machine? Or the BBC made a split-second thoughtless editing decision and Nicola (Mrs) actually exists and actually wants to invoke the spirit of the bulldog? The truth to both is, probably, somewhere in the grey lull between. But who cares about that! There’s an election going on! |
| Other things to hate or enjoy – delete as appropriate | Other things to hate or enjoy – delete as appropriate |
| It is my grave and sad duty to announce that the youth today are actually very good, as evidenced by the campaign on social media to register under-25s to vote. The trick is this: irresistibly clickbait headlines (“David Attenborough, 93, Taken to Hospital”, “Meghan Markle Expecting Second Child” and, the one I have to admit gave me a jolt of panic and actually made me click on it, weeping, “Nando’s Goes into Administration”) repurposed to forward on to the government’s register-to-vote website, and, lo and behold, there’s been a spike in voter registration. (YouTuber and boxer KSI tweeted a similar link around the same time as Stormzy did – the number of people on the website surged by tens of thousands.) It’s a canny trick – using the language of clickbait against those who simply can’t resist it, like slugs trapped in beer – and weirdly wholesome to see, a sort of mass bonding of the youth on the platform that birthed them as they all come together as an election looms. Finally, shitposting as a force for good. | It is my grave and sad duty to announce that the youth today are actually very good, as evidenced by the campaign on social media to register under-25s to vote. The trick is this: irresistibly clickbait headlines (“David Attenborough, 93, Taken to Hospital”, “Meghan Markle Expecting Second Child” and, the one I have to admit gave me a jolt of panic and actually made me click on it, weeping, “Nando’s Goes into Administration”) repurposed to forward on to the government’s register-to-vote website, and, lo and behold, there’s been a spike in voter registration. (YouTuber and boxer KSI tweeted a similar link around the same time as Stormzy did – the number of people on the website surged by tens of thousands.) It’s a canny trick – using the language of clickbait against those who simply can’t resist it, like slugs trapped in beer – and weirdly wholesome to see, a sort of mass bonding of the youth on the platform that birthed them as they all come together as an election looms. Finally, shitposting as a force for good. |
| If you had “hot mic disaster” on your election bingo card, cross it off now: Ashfield Conservative candidate Lee Anderson has blown bigoted-woman-gate out of the water and into a new postmodern dimension. Basically, Michael Crick found the prospective MP apparently calling on a friendly voter before doorstepping him on camera. I think my favourite part of this Hindenbergesque attempt as self-flattery is the fact that, even if Anderson wasn’t exposed as already knowing the man he was knocking on the door of, the ensuing comments were so erratic and unusable they basically made him look bad anyway. “I think he was a bit soft,” the man says, in response to Anderson’s proposal this week that unruly council tenants should be forced to live in tents. “I’d give them [the] cat o’ nine tails,” he said. “Make them wear a pink tutu.” | If you had “hot mic disaster” on your election bingo card, cross it off now: Ashfield Conservative candidate Lee Anderson has blown bigoted-woman-gate out of the water and into a new postmodern dimension. Basically, Michael Crick found the prospective MP apparently calling on a friendly voter before doorstepping him on camera. I think my favourite part of this Hindenbergesque attempt as self-flattery is the fact that, even if Anderson wasn’t exposed as already knowing the man he was knocking on the door of, the ensuing comments were so erratic and unusable they basically made him look bad anyway. “I think he was a bit soft,” the man says, in response to Anderson’s proposal this week that unruly council tenants should be forced to live in tents. “I’d give them [the] cat o’ nine tails,” he said. “Make them wear a pink tutu.” |
| Ah yes, that famous campaigning trick: call on someone you already know, while mic’d up in front of the press, and get them to say something so bizarre and alien that your threat to make council tenants take cold showers somehow looks reasonable. Ashfield is a crunch battleground seat: we’ll find out on 13 December if they are for or against whipping benefit claimants and making them work the fields in ballet outfits. | Ah yes, that famous campaigning trick: call on someone you already know, while mic’d up in front of the press, and get them to say something so bizarre and alien that your threat to make council tenants take cold showers somehow looks reasonable. Ashfield is a crunch battleground seat: we’ll find out on 13 December if they are for or against whipping benefit claimants and making them work the fields in ballet outfits. |
| • Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant | • Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant |