Sir Howard Elston, political correspondent to the stars, recaps the seven headed beast called the election debate.
I am deep inside the Spin Room after the ITV multi-party debate and I can tell my loyal readers that all around me are the eyeball-rotating salivating hyperventilating spokespersons I have known all my adult life as a Westminster insider.
Yes, they are all the special advisors we all know and love who, when first viewed by their mothers, were spurned at birth and given to the devil and denied natural light for the first 18 years of their existence.
Each are frontfolks for the seven leaders who preternaturally thrust themselves into the arid limelight of TV to strut their stuff and parade their cerebral febrile naughty bits to the voters. Here is a rundown:
I begin with Plaid Cymru only because I dig their cur-a-zee name which must have been conjured up by some Welshman on his first acid trip. I mean, who wears plaid now anyways? Last time I saw it was when Uncle Jimmy was in golf gear he nicked from TK Maxx and did the back nine at Bartley Green course a day or two before he was mown down in a drive-by outside a Kings Heath mini mart after a rammy over a bottle of Bells and a multi pack of peanut M&Ms. The leader of this party is Leanne Whatshername.
She stood out as the one person who commendably didn’t look at the dumbo in the handpicked TV audience who had to read out a jacked up ‘question’ that had been written by a junior studio producer and say with dubious sincerity: “Well, Johnny, that is an important question about used contraceptives in public spaces and I am glad you asked that because my team knocked up the answer last week.” Hats off to Leanne whose first name reflects her Appalachian roots steeped in god-awful country music.
Second up is Nik Klegg leader of the Libdems who did himself a real favour by denying he had anything to do with five years of voter betrayal by joining up with the Tories. He’s a real one, Nicky boy, and the quicker he is voted out of Sheffield and sent shuffling off to the EU on some £250,000 pa consultancy sinecure, the better.
Next up is wee Nicola. Aye, lads and lassies, the heather bestrewn SNP boss-ette, with those weird Star Trek shoulder pads, has the media persona of a thistle dipped in arsenic. Cammo didn’t know how to handle this post-Salmond firecracker. Too bad she is a nationalist or she could have had a nice career in Labour.
Cameron: Represents Bullingdon on Sea
And on to our PM, Dave Cameron. Man of the people who can do sad face and sincere face and angry shiny face all within 34 seconds, kind of like the early spring weather we are now experiencing. Cammo is a jerk, there’s little else to say, and he displayed Extreme Jerkiness in this two hour debate that is not a debate but a barely repressed shouting match. He explained away all the government faultlines by blaming it on Brown and Blair, used all his Eton and Bullingdon nastiness on Poor Ed and showed what an ugly offensive little sh*t he is.
And as for Ed Miliband? He toughed it up. But he is a class A backroom boy who should stay in the political wonk smokey corridors and leave the telly stuff to someone who understands how to be sincere without sounding like the President of the sixth form chess club. Huge amounts of folks say: “Well, if it was his brother Dave, I’d vote Labour…”
Hello, planet Britain. Ed adn Dave represent different ideologies of the left – one more centrist and Blairite than the other. They are not interchangeable parts like a set of new earphones on your mobile.
On to the loony-tune fringe now and the man who wants to revert to the niceties of Alabama circa 1953: UKIP’s Nigel Farage…
And how about the Greens? Nat Bennett didn’t suffer a mind-freeze as she did on radio recently. But she does resemble a deputy headteacher out to administer justice to that cheeky Wednesday afternoon geography class that no one can handle.
Well, that’s it, sports fans. Who won? Well, ITV did because their moderator had cool glasses which one wag tweeted made her resemble a 25th century dentist. I like that comment and am stealing it forthwith and donating all proceeds to the Sir Howard Elston Fund for Recidivist Journalists.
The event felt much less real than it should have. In that sense, the Tories got what they wanted. On the theory that the incumbent can’t win and therefore has nothing to gain from a debate, the best outcome is to set up a structure where there is no real clarity, so nobody wins. Nobody won. So Cameron won.
To me the most teeth-grinding part of the show was to see Peter Kellner on the BBC at the close, blurting out a ‘result’, with the added dusting of crap to the effect that there was still some final analysis to sort out.
What on Earth was being measured? A sample size of 50 ‘undecided’ voters pushing buttons when they liked or disliked something they heard said, drawing a thick wavy graph hiding behind a scrolling BBC newsbar and Kellner concluded (n=50, remember), that out of 7 contestants, Sturgeon and Farage were just a couple of percentage points apart. On what?
If confirmation was needed that the pollsters don’t know what they’re doing………. (err, sample size of one, but very high confidence in repeatability – the twit will do this again).
I liked nicola best
many english people seem outraged at the possibility of the scots dominating english/uk politics, at least if BBC questiontime is anything to go by, despite the fact that the reverse has happened many times.
maybe outrage is something you suffer when you no longer have the power to influence events
talking about scots have a listen to mark blyth [below]. he is very good, but what interests me is the bluntness and , coarseness of his style.
i am sure it jarred with his american audience
i wonder if they listened politely because he was scots.
Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea [Mark Blyth – video] Good discussion, in European & historical context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in5M65566iw
Lol
Why don’t we in England have the right to vote for Nicola and her party? Those Scots have a proper choice, a better legal system and none of the crap in the NHS that we have south of the border. We would have a United ‘King’dom and shift power out of London in one move!