Memories of an election: empty barns and debates that recurred like cystitis
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Version 0 of 1. “I do not like elections,” reflected Winston Churchill, “but it is in my many elections that I have learnt to know and honour the people of this island.” These were the exact words running through George Osborne’s head when he went to Somerset to glad-hand a vacuum cleaner (also called George). Anyone who failed to mentally caption this photo “Suck it up, shitheads” simply failed to understand their irrelevance to the three main party leaders this election. They would literally rather touch a dirtbag than you. It was the election of empty barns, deserted business parks, sanitised factory floor visits, and indentured activists waving placards they’d just happened to find in their back pockets after they’d surrendered their passports to a campaign staging official and signed a release form containing statements like “I am happy to be used as a token black person”. You had a better chance of watching George Galloway fight Floyd Mayweather than some events. Nothing says “you can trust us with the economy” like telling journalists there honestly and truly just isn’t room in the venue to accommodate them for this afternoon’s visit. To which the only reasonable reply was: it’s a bleeding car plant. What have you done? Put out an APB to the entire population of Liechtenstein? Thus, for many, the cut and thrust of the election seemed to be happening in a galaxy far, far away – mainly near the rebel base on the planet of Scotland. Luckily, a massive internet defence shield between the two star systems meant no one could see the Scottish Sun telling readers to vote SNP, while the English version of the paper cast them as the enemy. Scotland had the world’s largest collection of political selfies; it had street battles; it had faintly malarial rallies which featured bikers and secessionist rock; and it had politicians who would feed you a lolly with their bare hands. It had people in Bristol and Maidenhead going crazy for a woman who wasn’t actually standing in the general election. Plus, those of us who enjoy the fact that language is vital and metamorphic could only appreciate the fact that Westminster was now a word which could mean anything from “the English” to “paedophiles”. But mostly “paedophiles”. South of the border, David Cameron and Boris Johnson did some finger painting and a puzzle. No one ever found out to which black site electoral liabilities Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling had been extraordinarily rendered, but expect the Tories to keep them there till all public relations danger has passed. Nick Clegg, meanwhile, occupied the centre ground between fighting an election and having a dilettante’s gap year. Yeah, it was awesome. He was learning to cook, doing a bit of art, helping out at a hedgehog sanctuary. Some days would find him twice in a kitchen, knocking up curries, fish dishes, pancakes … He painted a plate at a pottery. He went to Go Ape and had a turn on a zipwire. If it goes tits up in Sheffield Hallam, he’s going to risk half a diet pill at a full moon party in Koh Phangan. The real breakout star of the campaign was the Liam Byrne note, which is believed to be weighing offers ranging from Strictly Come Dancing to its own Sky News interview programme, provisionally entitled I’m Afraid There Is No Room For Jokes in British Politics. Once again, no one talked about immigration, except on the front pages of every newspaper, throughout all the debates, and in countless TV interviews. Also on mugs, and in limestone. And yet, not a single one of the leaders was able to transcend their petty stratagems on this issue and find the words to speak to the nation on the savagely tragic spectacle of dead migrants being pulled from the Mediterranean. Whichever way the result goes, the oratorially inadequate will inherit the earth. The debates themselves recurred like cystitis. The first one looked like the worst ever episode of Take Me Out, and ended with several women hugging each other in relief that they weren’t going to have to go on a date with Nigel Farage, who’d been one shade short of a Chris Morris-inspired riff on “good Aids” and “bad Aids”. The second debate was called the Challengers’ debate, because it had been challenging coming up with a title that wasn’t David Cameron Wimped Out On This. The third and final set-to saw a Question Time audience so completely sick of political bullshit that their interrogation of Cameron, Miliband and Clegg fell only just within the terms of the Geneva convention. All these events featured a backstage spin-room, into which innumerable opinion-formers were released, a bit like when the ghosts escape the containment grid in Ghostbusters. Their effusions formed a psychic pall that now blankets an estimated four-fifths of the country. For the first fortnight, the election was like a box of chocolates, in that you never knew what you were going to get, except that it would definitely involve Joey Essex. The reality star was everywhere, with only David Cameron declining to grant him an audience. Why? Well, the intervening weeks have given the period a sort of dreamlike quality, but it seemed he had been hired to make a programme about politics, at the precise moment Westminster was seeking to understand why fewer and fewer people were interested in it. For sections of the commentariat, Essex – a man who claimed not to have known who the prime minister was a couple of weeks before the election – became the campaign’s Chauncey Gardiner, with his pronouncements on policies such as free holidays to Marbs and the “Liberal Democats” deemed the sole route back to giving a toss for a disengaged youth. Think of this episode as The Emperor’s New Savant. As luck would have it, however, another means of salvation was soon to materialise, in the form of Russell Brand, who invited Ed Miliband round to explain that the creation of the NHS and whatnot wasn’t actually a giant irrelevance. Having spent the best part of 18 months telling people not to vote, Brand eventually ended up handing out some endorsements. “People in Scotland don’t need an English person telling you what to do,” he flattered. Those morons in England did, though, and were instructed to vote for Labour unless they lived in Brighton and could vote for the Greens’ Caroline Lucas. Obviously, this advice came precisely two weeks after the deadline to register to vote, but only the terminally churlish were not grateful for the privilege of having been allowed to watch Russell’s incredible journey. That said, the parties’ own vote warnings were infinitely more irksome. Go to bed with Ukip and wake up with Labour, go to bed with the SNP and wake up with the Tories … Everyone’s advice seemed to be to go to bed with someone to whom you were not sexually attracted, in order that the person you’d rather staple your eyelids to the floor than shag would not end up leering HOW WAS IT FOR YOU? across the pillows. This cast the election as some unfathomably grim wife-swapping event – particularly given Britain is likely to wake up with at least five people in its bed on Friday morning, then be forced to spend the next fortnight watching them argue about which one had their way with it. Still, for those expecting to feel confused when mulling over the ballot paper, there was advice from David Cameron, who declared: “Of course, I’d rather you supported West Ham.” Other comic highlights? In the end, I don’t think any of us is really ever going to get past The Stone. The Milistone. The ’Ed Stone. Ed Henge. Or, as a Thick of It writer observed, a “policy cenotaph”. Whichever way you shook it, it was an instant Hall of Fame entry in the annals of terrible political ideas. It was also the world’s most jaw-droppingly crass piece of garden statuary since Ground Force did Nelson Mandela’s garden and cemented the millstone his mother had left him into a water feature. But the amazing thing about Miliband’s stone, especially in such a dull and defensive campaign, was that it was possessed of genuinely magical properties. Which is to say, it made everyone who told a joke about it funny. I honestly didn’t read a bad gag about it. Even the most radioactive bores on social media couldn’t fail to be amusing on the matter. It truly was a philosopher’s stone, its alchemic powers capable of turning Eric Pickles into Richard Pryor. For one joke only, alas – but still. Yet given how assiduously politicians courted the coveted children and animals demographics, the defining image of the election can only belong to six-year-old Lucy Howarth, whose reading session with David Cameron produced a photo which gives me hope that this Chosen Child will personally – personally! – deliver us from dead-on-arrival electioneering sometime around the year 2050. Speak for England, Lucy! Or rather, head-desk for the entire nation. |