Election Fever
It's finally happened. Yesterday, Rishi Sunak called an election, in the most Rishi Sunak way imaginable.
On a miserable, rainy day in London, Sunak - a man who was part of the government that built itself a multi-million pound press briefing room - insisted on an outdoor press conference.
There are so many ways the Prime Minister can see if it's raining - checking a weather app, looking out the window, calling the police minion inside to see if he's damp - but Rishi managed not to think of any of them, and didn't think to bring an umbrella, and then asked the public to vote for him because he's great at planning.
Today in London it was dry, for whatever that's worth.
Having listened to the election coverage most of the day while working, here are a couple of things you probably won't hear from proper (paid) journalists.
Cam-pain.
Doomed though the Tories may be, Rishi Sunak will nonetheless be hitting the campaign trail. In less than twenty four hours, it's already going badly.
Even if yesterday's weather had held off, making the announcement outside No.10 meant making it within shouting distance of a public street. Half way through Rishi's speech, someone on said street began playing D:Ream's "Things Can Only Get Better" at full volume. This was the campaign song for Labour in 1997, the last time the Tories suffered devastating losses.
Rishi, a man with no friends and less sense of humour, has never had anyone take the piss out of him regularly enough that he could have seen that coming.
Today, Rishi visited a McVities biscuit factory, where he took questions from the workers. The workers obligingly asked him questions about his flagship policies.
You've probably guessed that the questioners were almost immediately unmasked as Conservative party plants.
When confronted with actual working people, Sunak didn't do so well. On a stop in Wales, he asked brewery workers if they were looking forward to "all the football," presumably in reference to the upcoming European tournament. Wales, a nation whose people care infinitely more about rugby than football, is not participating in Euro 2024.
We have six more weeks of this shit, and even a man of Rishi Sunak's bombproof obliviousness surely can't humiliate himself for that long without having some sort of breakdown.
Although I'm giddy with excitement at the prospect of watching him try.
Make America Hate Again.
One man who won't be getting elected come July is Nigel Farage. The honourary head of the Reform Party has said that he will not stand for election, as he will be focusing on getting Donald Trump elected in the states.
Odious, slithering Nazi that he is, I at least have to give Farage credit for a shrewd move, there. He probably wouldn't have won a seat - never hads - but his main talent is blaming imaginary enemies. For years, this was the EU. Everything would be fixed if Britain simply left the European Union like Farage advised, which was a safe scapegoat because nobody ever thought we'd actually do it. Now we've been out of the EU for eight years, everything is demonstrably worse, but Farage knows that he's not popular enough to play the "everything would be fixed if you elected me" card.
So, rather than run for election and highlight how unpopular he is, he's going international and (if my crystal ball is working) planning to say "all of the problems in the West would have been solved if they'd just elected Trump like I told them to..."
Incidentally, this means that Farage is expecting Trump to lose.
The Liberal Media.
In spite of Farage’s refusal to stand, BBC Radio 4’s evening news program spent since time discussing whether the Reform Party - which, at Farage's behest, stood down to give the Conservative party a clear run in the last election - will split the right wing vote this time around.
It's galling that there was no comparable mention of, say, the Green party doing the same to the vote on the left. Only the right wing, who constantly screech at the top of their line that they're being silenced, get bonus air time.
This is in part due to the fact that there isn't a solid voting block on the left in the UK anymore. Keir Starmer, a man who somehow looks like every “mum’s new boyfriend” in history got trapped in a teleporter and fused together, has pulled the Labour party so far to the right that actual leftists are now deeply uncomfortable with voting for him. This means that with polls predicting a Labour landslide, nobody is actually happy about it.
The die-hard right-wing loons are furious that Labour will win. The casual Tories that Starmer’s march to the right was intended to court are probably planning to vote Labour, but feel uncomfortable. The normal Labour voters are also uncomfortable and the left wing of the party are refusing to back Starmer at all.
It's a pretty perfect encapsulation of how things are going in the UK, although none of the above will be acknowledged in conventional news media. Which might mean that I'm now the most reliable source for election coverage.
I'm deeply concerned by this thought, and you should be, too…