Tired Attrition on the Long Road

I feel guilty. I was trying hard to follow the election but I crumbled sometime last week. Without an electronic connection to the vortex during the day I am lost...so as the campaigns limped along somewhere in the distance I lost sight of them behind a clump of trees on the horizon.

And then, and then...last night I hear about a humdinger of a debate on Question Time...all three candidates were grilled by the public and, unlike during Paxman’s point scoring encounters the other week, this programme actually managed to get them to account for themselves.

Paxman is an entertaining interviewer but his questions are fallacious. He savages the interviewee for not giving a straight answer but he does not give them a straight question to answer...his questions imply facts that are, in fact, opinion. Or a venomous insult, whichever gets his dick hardest.

Let us invent a question to illustrate his technique: “Why did you completely muck up your election campaign?”

The question explicitly states that the interviewee mucked up his campaign, despite this being a mere opinion. The interviewee cannot answer the question straight because this implies that he agrees that he mucked it up. But the question does not allow debate on this...it is given as Fact, and any attempt at challenging this is immediately labelled as avoiding the question. Well, in this cases, so what if they do avoid it? It is unanswerable.

Okay, so the slippery shit being grilled probably did muck up his campaign, but we are wallowing in wholesome pools of hypothetics here.

Meanwhile, in the school playground, little Timmy is confronted by big Johnny. No sniggering at the back.

“Hey look, it’s little Timmy!” says Johnny. “Oi Timmy, why do you smell of poo?”

“Well, Johnny,” says Timmy. “That is an unfair question and in context of what I have achieved in the arena of pulling legs off insects over the last two terms...”

“Sorry to interrupt, but you are not giving me a straight answer. Why do you smell of poo?”

“Look, Timmy, the school children of Britain have to face on a day to day basis the very real possibility of dogs roaming the school yard...”

“Get your hand off my arm. Why do you smell of poo, Johnny?”

“Over time I have washed myself every day and have been a stickler for not falling over in dogshit since year 3 and that unfortunate burning bag on the doorstep incident, and...”

Big Johnny chuckles slightly at this. “Now please, it’s a simple question, all I want is the reason why you smell of poo.”

“Little Dave smells of poo even more, you know. He’s over there feeling up little Suzie.”

Voooooom!

“Hello? Johhny? Hello?”

Hang on, we were talking about Question Time. I spoke to a work colleague earlier and she says that the candidate who came across best was Charles Kennedy; this would have been a surprise at the start of the campaign but his manner and constitution has toughened noticeably since then, despite a few mealy-mouthed blips.

When John Kerry and George Bush went head to head, Kerry won and received a solid bump in the polls for a short time. But those debates were weeks before the polling date; this time Kennedy has not only struck a blow with only a week to go, he has managed to get the war back in the mouths of the party leaders just in time for the war legality revelations last night – you know, the information Labour would have raped their own daughters to keep private that worked itself free in an orgy of media self-congratulation. So we all laugh when we hear that the official line is that the expose is a damp squib. Uh-huh. We’ll be the judge of that, you lying turd.

Anyway, Kennedy will poll well this year and perhaps will finally shrug off the curse that seems to leave him rooted to the same 21% he achieves no matter how many babies he saves from drowning or how many pussy cats he steps on. The trouble is his image. Blair and Howard both have precise images that get under the skin of supporter and enemies alike. Kennedy, though, constantly comes across as a Nice Guy. And nice never polls well, except when it comes to the question of “who would you like to share a drink with?” They also struggle in the tactical voting stakes, but this is another issue and I cannot be bothered to think today.

Right. Clearly I have nothing to say on the election and given that last night I missed the only thing that has put any fire under the thing, well...then it looks like the blade has already fallen. Fuck it.

But why would this be a surprise, anyway? What exactly have we seen in the last few weeks? The Tory party have been suicidally obsessed with an issue on which they have now discovered fewer people are thinking what they are thinking; their entire strategy was riddled with woodworm and has collapsed into rotten dust. The Labour campaign has been stuck in a static swamp for weeks whilst fighting the war of insult attrition...a war in which both camps have been wearing down the opposition with a battery of childish personal attacks, hoping the other side will hold up the white flag and announce that “we are above such personal attacks.” Hmm...that is a strange and telling phrase...a sure sign that they have either given up...or if spoken in the early stage of a campaign a sure sign that they are about to contradict themselves in a breathtaking orgy of hypocritical obnixiousness. The political equivalent of a sentence beginning “I’m not racist, but...”

Meanwhile, the media struggle to find a single interesting angle on this goddamn one-note election.

So it is true that I have nothing to say. But I am not alone in this...bollocks to all of us.