The Stream Consisting Entirely of Eddies

So what’s going on, then? Prescott is arguing with local news reporters and newspapers are obsessed with polls and their accuracy. Nothing changes in our little island of bile and bilge, especially when the campaigns are lying dead on the shore like a school of beached whales. What is there left to say, to divine from the numbers and portents and silly CGI swingometers?

Most people are treating this election like one of those old Magic Eye pictures where if stared long enough you saw the outline of a sailboat, along with mysterious swirly patches that took hours to clear from your eyes. The theory here is that somewhere there is a narrative to find...an officially story of the election.

Is there? A thousand stories of local campaigning all swooping around and folding in on themselves...can they really be just the leaves on some great tree that can conveniently be condensed into a two-thousand word piece for your favourite broadsheet? Well...if there is no story then you can construct one. Using a hammer and a pair of scissors we can take the jigsaw and assemble it however we want. And if the picture of a postman ends up with three legs and an ear sticking out of his arse, then what the hell? It’s what the journalist calls a fresh perspective...and what Picasso called a living.

Back in November...or was it October? How time slips away from us. During the US election the narrative that began to dominate the reports was one spotted by the politicians and embraced by the media hungry for clarity...so there was an element of self-fulfilling prophecy about it. But the foundation has to be there in the first place...even the flimsiest premise must have its guy ropes otherwise it’ll be out of here on the first gust of wind into the nearest field of hungry cows. And Barbara Windsor would come running, bra clasped against her bosom, whilst Kenneth Williams gurns in shock on the sidelines.

Whoops. That meant nothing and I do not know why I wrote it.

The narrative of the US elections began to take shape once the floating voters were identified and flagged up. Once this was the case then the campaigns took a distinctly different flavour...and we are seeing this happen in the UK. This is not surprising. Elections are fought like advertising campaigns...indeed, great chunks of them are given over to advertising. Notice that the “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” is straight out of a lazy copyrighter’s book... and they should have been more careful given the ease with which it can be satirised. Still...once the battlegrounds were painted up many of the issues went by the wayside. Labour are concentrating on crime and the economy, the Tories on immigration and the Lib Dems on a handful of sweeteners such as the ditching of university tuition fees.

These killer issues are puffed up shamelessly at every turn. Sometimes in subtle ways...such as when Tony Blair was confronted by Angry Shouting Voter #94 in Leeds yesterday, his response was to bang on about how much Labour has achieved with the economy, and to hell with whatever Angry Shouting Voter was talking about. After all, campaigning is not an argument, it is an advertisement. He wasn’t talking to a voter, he was talking to the cameras and reporters.

The economy is a strange subject for the election. Most campaigning is an attempt to light bad rockets aimed at the rotund arses of the opposition. But this time Tony Blair has the chance to dazzle with a lovely, sparkly catherine wheel of an issue. If he can capitalise on an issue that inspires contentment...not joy or despair...then he is laughing. The trouble is that he is unsure how to turn the economy into a killer argument without coming across as arrogant and controlling. The trouble with catherine wheels is that they go nowhere...they are always outshone by the rockets, and these days people are tired of spin.

Indeed...I knew there was a reason for choosing fireworks as the silly metaphor du jour.

The subject of floating voters, which is what I was trying to focus on before that tangent about killer issues, produced a Guardian experiment last year in which they invited readers to write to a town in Ohio to encourage them to vote Democrat. Flash forward to a couple of days ago and the Guardian carried a letter...from Ohio, encouraging Britain to vote Labour.

All very amusing but the writer was taking it seriously and treated the idea without the contempt it clearly deserves. However...with this reversal, however slight, we can explore what we make of somebody from abroad attempting to persuade us to vote one way or the other?

Hmm. I find I do not care in the slightest. Who cares where the opinions come from? We invite them in all the time by switching on the television and taking the morning paper and putting the world to rights in the pub...so one more vampire biting on my neck does not make a difference. Of course, I am not a floating voter. I vote ideologically rather than tactically or on precise political goals (something I suspect I would drop like a vomiting cat if, say, I had previously voted Labour on the strength of its leftist credentials). Furthermore, I do not think we would get the full flavour of the Guardian’s experiment unless we had personalised airmail letters coming into our homes at whatever hour in the fucking afternoon Royal Mail can be fucked to deliver these days.

But even then I would not care tuppence unless the letter came from some American equivalent of one of the puffed-up nitwit famouses that took part in the original experiment. If an American Tom Paulin started tutting and shaking his head sadly at one of our parties, I would be straight on the phone to the nearest talk radio with words like “arrogant”, “yank” and “bastards” on my tongue.

But that’s entirely Tom Paulin’s fault and nothing to do with reasoned debate.

Goddamn it, again with the irrelevance. Right, let us look at a couple of arbitrary thoughts on this to tie it up. First, there is a wide gap at the heart of the election that seems curious and frightening. This is the gap between local and national voting...the one that...

I don’t know. That thought seems to collapse like a bad souffle as I try to pin it down. And what was the second thought I was going to wrestle to the floor? Shit. I lost my train of thought when the cleaner started polishing the desk around me, her lips thinning as I brazenly refused to leave. Well...for almost five seconds, anyway. Seriously...why the hell do they employ a cleaner to clean the office at 3.30 in the afternoon? Some of us are trying to avoid work here, goddamn it.

Well, that collapsed a little at the end, didn’t it? Hmm...I suspect I may be saying the same thing about the election on May 6th.