Brexit supporters are surely among the most likely to get out and vote, especially now Jeremy Kyle isn’t on in the daytime any more. It was impossible to predict that the whole country would be thrown into crisis by middle-aged men outraged about Europe making decisions for them (these are people whose wives buy their socks)
[...]Essentially, Brexit has proved impossible to deliver: turns out it’s tricky for English voters to take back control of their borders when one of them is in someone else’s country.
[...]The Conservatives seem to have focused on the phrase
“Get Brexit Done”, which has all the conviction of your dad hitting the arms of his chair and saying, “Right…” We also seem to be hearing a lot about “Unleashing Britain’s potential”, despite most of our potential being for food riots, and perhaps some kind of race war. The Conservative manifesto contains elements of both Thatcherism and Reaganism, in that it seems to have been written by someone with dementia. There was probably a discussion about whether to release a manifesto at all or simply airdrop scratchcards over key marginals.
[...]Boris Johnson, who looks like something you’d keep your pyjamas in, and who no reasonable person would choose to lead them into a chorus, has a strangely hunched demeanour; perhaps from all the time he spends crammed inside married women’s wardrobes, like a randy jack-in-the-box.
[...]It’s perfectly obvious why Johnson has been able to take power: he has an instinctive grasp on Brexit as rightwing eschatology, and he’s used to getting his own way, be it in the halls of Westminster or elbowing siblings off of nanny’s nipples.
[...]Someone else who will still be here after the Rapture is the Brexit party’s Nigel Farage. I thought one of the advantages of the Brexit vote was that he might disappear; having him back in public life is a bit like watching a suicide bomber doing a comeback tour.
[...]As for the Lib Dems – well, I thought we’d really miss Tim Farron, bumping around the country on a deserted coach and performing Blue Peter tasks in front of people terrified that he might start talking about gay sex.
[...]Jo Swinson has grown on me, and seems to exist as a satisfying, subtle and damning satire of humanity. Swinson’s election started out relatively positively, possibly because people hadn’t heard her speak yet. It quickly became clear that she had the gravitas of a re-education camp supply teacher, and was launching a kind of charm retreat that seemed to involve loans for renting flats and permanent austerity. Some might see misogyny in this reaction to her, but I’m fairly sure I just hate her for being from Milngavie.
Labour’s idea to run an election campaign on policy in the middle of all this is a little bit like reciting your poetry at an orgy.
Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps weighing up whether he could have more influence by simply dying and haunting his successor, has benefitted from becoming slightly calmer over the course of the campaign. Aggression isn’t a good look for him, shifting Corbyn from Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh towards the territory where you’d expect his face to be captioned with “police suspect the real figure may be much higher”.
[...]Before the campaign, there seemed to be a belief among Labour party members that it fared better in elections because of rules about electoral media balance, perhaps because they misconstrued the establishment complacency at the last election. Of course, Labour has been monstered in the media throughout the campaign, and largely been judged by different standards than the Conservatives. Even the
gold standard of scrutiny that Johnson dodged was just being interviewed by his
former boss at the Spectator.
Media plurality is an issue we need to address in this country: the alternative is living in a timeline where, because Corbyn has wonky glasses, in a couple of years you’ll be living in a tent city outside an Amazon warehouse trying to GoFund a tonsillectomy. The Tories calling Corbyn a communist and a threat to national security after handing nuclear power plants to the Chinese is a bit like getting a bollocking off Charles Manson for putting down slug pellets.
[...]You won’t be surprised to learn that I won’t be voting Tory on Thursday, for much the same reasons that I won’t be spending the day kicking children and pensioners into traffic. It’s depressing to think how many polling stations are in schools, and how many people will vote Conservative after walking past a motivational rainbow.
