I see you, Great Britain.
I see you, Great Britain.
The relief! Ask over and over and over again and eventually - when you are gulping on the parched ground, begging endlessly for the sweet release of death - ye shall eventually receive. Or alternatively, if you’re a Conservative MP facing almost certain oblivion, don’t ask - and yet receive regardless. Good old Rishi Sunak really has his finger on the pulse of the Tory party, doesn’t he? It’s not his fault that he doesn’t realise he’s pressing so hard on the carotid artery that he risks causing them permanent brain death.
Not that any us should be baffled by this apparent total lack of strategy, or the blind panic with which the Tory campaign has faceplanted out of the starting blocks. We’ve had front row seats to the public buildup of this catastrophic implosion for fourteen years. This is Chekhov’s toff apocalypse, foreshadowed by the giant red button labelled TRIGGER REFERENDUM we all saw David Cameron’s greasy finger hovering over in the first act. There is no twist here, no sudden flash of inspiration that will revitalise an utterly spent force. This is the culmination of a tragic farce that’s already dragged on for years longer than any of us signed up for.
Announcing a general election like Rutger Hauer’s replicant, lamenting your own looming death in the pissing rain? Check. Yet another awkward food-themed political photoshoot for the ages, looming like a carby pervert over a loaf of bread in one shot, gurning with the word MORON spelt out above your head in the next? Check. Pulling compulsory national service for the nation’s disaffected youth out of your arse on Day 4, the day after the Labour party promise to lower the voting age for the first generation it would impact? Check. Way to lock down the young vote, lads. If this is the party’s greatest tactical minds working at peak efficiency I’d hate to see what it looks like when the Tories fumble the ball.
I’m joking, of course. We already know exactly what it looks like, thanks to the rotating cast of talent we’ve burned through over the years. A parade of dismal, utterly unlikeable no-hopers taking desperate swings at departments they either failed to understand or actively attempted to destroy. The never-ending scale creep of greater and more incompetent horrors, like a Tyranid hive fleet evolving in reverse. A death spiral of plotters and narcissists devouring each other, all for the biomass to fuel the spawning pits of the next generation. Each new birth is more horrifying, more impossibly thick, more inefficient and malignant than the last, until eventually you get Jonathan Gullis.
Just six weeks of this to get through, Great Britain. Just a few wilted leaves short of a full Truss and we’ll be out the other side, dealing with whatever outcome we choose to inflict on ourselves next. There will be no grand revolution, no seismic tide of social change to wash away the great injustices of our system. But we will, at least, finally be shot of this lot - the most grasping, corrupt, shameless and abusive set of grifters and wannabe authoritarians in living memory.
This is Sunak’s final gift to all of us. A surprise election in which he has yet again proved just how spectacularly off each and every one of his political calculations can be. He’s a man who couldn’t read a room even if Audible transcribed it and paid Ian McKellen to personally narrate it directly into his eardrum. With each flailing new policy announcement he’s polishing the silver platter upon which he’s going to gift Keir Starmer an almost certain victory.
Sunak’s already given up trying to win over the centre ground, pandering instead to the spiteful reactionaries of the rightwing bloc he’s terrified about losing to Reform. Yet lose them he almost certainly will, given that the press barons wafting lead fumes into their brains through their newspaper columns and cable news stations have never fully believed in him. Even their most fawning coverage plays over the top of Sunak’s head, gazing longingly at the actual fascists lurking in the background. Whatever way you look at it, the Conservative party in its current form is utterly doomed.
One final disaster, failing to conserve even themselves. Whatever rises from the ashes will be infinitely more spiteful, more inward-looking, and more divisive than what came before. The vultures are already circling, with those who fancy themselves as Europe’s next far-right leader hungrily eyeing the walking corpse as Sunak shuffles it ever further into the desert.
The choice now is important. The choice that comes later is even more so, and it’s down to the next government to head it off at the pass. If, in five years’ time, they can’t point to a significant enough revitalisation of the country - in our public services, in our economy, in our prospects for decent wages and dreams of home ownership - then we will inevitably see our own version of the nationalist and populist surge now sweeping Europe.
The far right have never had a problem making false promises to a desperate electorate offering them everything they’ve ever been denied. It is a thin, small hope indeed that a man as embarrassingly mercurial as Keir Starmer is likely to be the man holding the front line against them for the next five years. Lucky him, that his tenure hinges on a contest against the single most disastrous set of bastards imaginable, who have checkmated themselves with their first move out of the gate.
What a choice, eh? Sometimes I feel like our political establishment is just spoiling us.
I see you, Great Britain. I fucking see you.