If a week is a long time in politics, a month in the run-up to an election is like a slow motion version of the life of Galapagos tortoise: something must be happening, but it’s really hard to tell what’s changed.
January got off to a bang with the plot to oust Brown which exploded like a rocket across the media late morning, but spluttered like a damp party popper by teatime. Ministers may have spent the afternoon with their tongues poked out the side of their mouths in concentration wondering which way to go, but once Mandy spoke everyone fell back into line. It’s comforting to know who’s in charge.
The Conservatives did their best to exploit the situation with a poster campaign featuring the renegades saying ‘even we can’t go on like this’ which, while amusing, bought them no favour as everyone knows the only place Hewitt and Hoon are going is down the garden shed to write their memoirs.
Posters have featured strongly for the Conservatives this month. It was startling waking up to Cameron’s face plastered across every blank space in the country. I say plastered because he looked like he’d had his make-up done by Barbara Cartland. Cameron took a fulsome amount of jolly abuse over the ‘airbrushed for change’ campaign due to the touched-up photo showing him baby-faced, tanned and tieless (hey, he’s just an ordinary bloke!). As Labour’s main weapon against Cameron is his inexperience you have to question his judgement in wanting to be seen looking younger than he really is: a triumph of vanity over political sense.
It’s interesting that both main parties are focusing on middle-class, middle England, probably because they think Obama knows something they don’t, despite the Democrats losing Ted Kennedy’s old seat in Massachusetts. The Conservatives have made loud but indistinct noises about tax breaks for married couples, which both the Lib Dems and Labour condemned as social engineering as if that’s something governments don’t do and which we should flee from in horror. If social engineering actually worked we’d all be skinny, non-smoking, five-a-day exercise freaks. The Conservative’s should create a poster campaign featuring Ken Clarke as living proof that we have nothing to fear from social engineering.
The Lib Dems trotted out an old favourite of theirs with Chris Huhne pointing out that Labour are power-mad because they’ve created 4,289 new laws since 1997. Nick Clegg pulled the same stunt on labour in 2006 when he was home affairs spokesman, so I’m assuming it’s in the job description. The problem with this trick is that it gets the media’s attention because it’s fun to laugh at silly bureaucrats but we soon forget who raised the issue as we worry about getting banged up for buying game that was shot on a Sunday and ending up in a cell with someone who accidently set off a nuclear explosion when they disturbed a box of eggs in an unauthorised manner.
Lurking in the background to all these usual *yawn* tactics is the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. At the time of writing the star of the show is yet to appear, but so far it’s been an unedifying spectacle reminiscent of schoolboys wriggling to escape explaining how the little kid in the playground got beat up - they were either in the toilet or off sick that day and those that were there begged Big Tony not to do it. I’m expecting Big Tony to tell us Enormous George threatened him with a dead leg.
Some have predicted that the Chilcot inquiry will kill off labour’s election hopes, but now, as we stumble dazed and hurt from deep recession, people are worried not about the past but about their jobs, their debts, their homes and their futures. So far, judging by a month’s worth of fluff and nonsense, not a single party seems to have realised this.
Added on Tuesday, 2nd February 2010 | This entry has 0 comments
If a week is a long time in politics, a month in the run-up to an election is like a slow motion version of the life of Galapagos tortoise.