So I’ve been persuaded to start the blog up again for the duration of the general election campaign. This may seem a trifle odd as, to most onlookers, our political leaders seem to do a pretty good job of satirising themselves. This is, however, too good an opportunity to miss. It’s only every five years that the doors to the Westminster asylum are thrown open and the inmates dispatched around the country to remind the populous as to why they were sent to the asylum in the first place. We’re going to be treated to weeks of awkward looking politicians standing in a field / factory / shipyard / school / hospital / pub dressed up as ‘one of the people’ and telling us why farming / manufacturing / shipbuilding / educationising / hospitalising / drinking are so important to them.
At the end of all this we will end up with one of two people taking the controls as the next Prime Minister of this country. Neither of the potential candidates are ideal. In fact, if you were responsible for recruiting the next Prime Minister and, at the closing date for applications, you only had the CVs of David Cameron and Ed Milliband on your desk you’d probably decide to put the advert back on the board for another month or two. You may even give the HR team a ring to find out where exactly they’d been advertising this role and if they’d properly understood the required skill set.
I mean on the one hand you have David ‘Dave’ Cameron who is, in fact, some kind of remotely controlled android. I’ve had this theory for a number of years and have settled on the conclusion that he is a ‘replicant’ of the Blade-Runner type that was created around 2003 by Conservative Central Office to counter the force that was Tony Blair. You see after the disaster (for the Tories) that was the 2001 election (in which they were led by the great method actor William Hague), the Conservatives realised that the only way they could beat Blair was to copy him. The party was taken over by the evil Sith Lord Michael ‘something of the night about him’ Howard who quickly started the research to create Cameron V1.0.
Don’t believe me? Look at the recent debates and interviews when DaveBot is asked an awkward question. His face tenses up, his eyes glaze over briefly and his mouth distorts. It’s what EE would call a ‘buffer face’. He’s waiting for the correct answer to be uploaded into his program from the team of spin doctors frantically searching through the ‘popular answers’ folder of their control computers in the Tory bunker located just outside of Woking. The sad thing is, DaveBot believes he’s human and, at times, can’t understand why other humans don’t like him.
The alternative? Ed ‘I’m well ‘ard’ Milliband.
Oh dear.
Ed Milliband is a self-contained Shakespearean tragedy. As the down-trodden sibling, he’s betrayed and deposed his brother, seized the crown and is now hell-bent on destroying the party that dared vote against him as leader. (Remember kids, Ed Milliband only got elected because of the support given to him by the unions. The party wanted David.) I really think the best possible strategy Labour could implement over the next five weeks is to not allow Ed anywhere near anyone or anything at all. Especially not on television. When he stares down that lens (as he did in the debates last night) he’s definitely got a Demon Headmaster vibe going on. I was slightly concerned he’d resorted to hypnosis to try and get elected.
I’m not entirely sure when the main ‘personal quality’ required for the role of PM changed from ‘statesman’ to ‘numpty’ but I’m pretty certain that New Labour had something to do with it. It seems hard to conceive that the role being sought by Cameron and Milliband is the same role that was once occupied by greats such as Winston Churchill.
Maybe it’s a reflection on the society in which we now live that our political leaders have to be bland and generally boring. Maybe in the world of twitter, social media and rolling news they are so afraid of saying anything controversial that they now don’t really say anything at all. Maybe the rise in the smaller, more ‘wacky’ parties is the start of a general revolt against the beige politics that are currently practised by the ‘big three’ (say nothing, commit to nothing, do nothing). Maybe the only answer is to have a ‘rainbow coalition of doom’ in which the Isle of Man is the controls parliament. Maybe we should all march to London and demand something better.
Or maybe I’m just reading far too much into all of this…. as the media seem to do on a daily basis.
Who knows?
We’ve got five weeks. That should be enough time to find out.
The Muscovy Duck 