Endless flow of predictable bollocks on stilts (Brown, Cameron and Clegg)

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Maybe it’s schadenfreude but it’s better fun following other Angophone elections. One is spared a more personal embarrassment and dismay. The British campaign is a blast – of the 646 seats an extraordinary 144 MPs are retiring, rendered untouchable by the MPs’ expenses pandemic. Make way, make way! Pestilence and disease!

The government is barely upright under its three years of post-Blair muckup, the edifice like a huge chunk of promontory a mouse-crack from caving into the sea; the Tories were crowing and supposedly coasting to victory on its leader’s Etonian coattails and … and eh, who invited this Clegg fella to the party? (Ah, that would be you Mr Cameron, you invited him.)

Before the TV debate last Thursday, Radio National’s Mark Colvin conducted an interview with the delightfully direct British historian Peter Hennessy. The politics Professor was utterly unimpressed by his country’s current crop:

“I don’t know about your government white papers and policy documents but ours always reek of management consulting now. You know, a country that gave the world Shakespeare, Milton, what did we get? Bloody management consultant speak. We’ve done it to ourselves, isn’t it ghastly? It’s one of the unbearable things about an election you see, you get this kind of endless flow of bollocks on stilts but it’s not just bollocks on stilts, it’s predictable bollocks on stilts.”

“I’m not wildly optimistic about those debates, I think they’re a good thing, but they’re going to be hugely over-rehearsed you know. The 76 ground rules they’ve laid down for these boys, or their people have insisted; 76 ground rules!”

Hennessy’s prediction for the three: “Gordon will do what he always does; it’s like a recitation of a Cicotti (phonetic) telephone directory in Scotland where he lives, you know Labour’s achievements. Cameron, who’s very quick on his feet will do the boy wonder and Nick Clegg will do the Importance of Being Earnest, you know.”

You can see if he was right about the first debate, above. Amazing to think it’s the first time the Brits have ever seen their leaders do it live on TV. This in a country with 2.4 million CCTV cameras recording its citizens moment by moment. It is fascinating to watch. The immense rolling stock of political cliche and transparently ingratiating anecdotes. Bollocks on stilts, and, right Prof., predictable too. Except for the outcome.

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The Man in the Dusty Pink Tie – Mr Brown:

(Wonderful how they all agreed to toe the tie line.)

He’s like your uncle’s ancient unremembered set of Encyclopaedia Britannica: hernia-inducing bricks crammed with information – between the leather covers thousands of thin tissues of text riddled with silverfish. Unplugged and un-upgradable.

Steve Bell, the Guardian cartoonist, notes that Brown’s eyes have bags under their bags, and curiously full sensual lips. (See Bell’s funny and informative little video on sketching and grasping the leaders’ features.) Brown looks trapped by his once-longed for ambition to be PM, his fleshy body cruelly bound by the dark suit and his mouth mechanically spouting pre-laundered talking points. He really is heavy.

One can imagine him released by failure, ungroomed at last and cheerfully dour, his much reported inner compassion blooming outwards to make him a free man, put diamonds on his soles. They should have a chant for him, as the Specials had for Nelson Mandela: Free … Free Gordon Br-ow-n! Vote him out! Free … (It would be an Amy Winehouse version: “Thirteen years in captivity, shoes too small to fit his feet, his body abused, but his mind is still free …”)

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The Man in the Blue Tie – Mr Cameron:

A very blue tie indeed, a blue of deep conviction unlike Brown’s apologetic I’m not really red tie. Steve Bell has explained how Cameron evolved into a red condom/balloon in his cartoons, left. There is something of the pink over-filled sausage about Cameron, his glossy skin too tight from the neck up.

During the debate he kept stepping back from the lectern as he made his remarks, his hand and facial movements signalling, “can you believe these two?” I kept expecting him to shake his head, shoot his cuffs and fiddle with his tie knot. But on the night, this wideboy (5th) cousin to the Queen also looked frustrated, his footwork making obvious that he was stuck between the immovable object of Gorrdon Broon and the unexpected and unstoppable new force of nick clegg. Cameron is quick, but he also looked like he had dropped the reins and was grimly riding bareback. Amidst the endless parade of anecdotal persons that all three leaders had recently met, Cameron did manage to recall this singular individual during the immigration question:

“I once met a black man…”

Little Britain couldn’t do it better. A reader comment to a news article nailed it: “Liar! David Cameron has never met a black man.”

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(Politics junkie aside: Andrew Sullivan, the redoubtable, hi-passion, Washington-based, neoTory and Obamafan, has been hot on David Cameron for a long time. See this 2007 article comparing Cameron to US pollies, titled: Cameron has Hillary syndrome: he’s scared of what he believes, and subbed: Cameron needs to remind voters that despite his more liberal policies, he is still a Tory. Then see how Sullivan’s friend Johann Hari takes Cameron apart: If you’re looking for class war, you can find it – in David Cameron’s policies. It’s an evisceration.)

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The Man in the Golden Tie – Mr clegg:

How Guy Rundle put it in last Friday’s Crikey: “Nick Clegg, Lib-Dem leader spoke first and was quite dynamic but had the disadvantage of not mattering, so everyone was at the bar while he was talking about the deficit, can’t afford anything, haven’t acknowledged, living in fantasy etc.”

As it turned out the Brits, all 10 million tuned in and everyone else at the watercooler the next day paid rather more attention than Guy. And they liked fresh-faced Mr clegg. So Olympically did his polls vault that the Guardian have sent up (as it were) posters of clegg as Obama (Hope) and Churchill with whose popularity clegg’s has been compared, and, ooh, Che! Not so helpfully they also compared him to Tim Henman, poor chap.

This is change they can be relieved in. Bland, slightly dorky clegg stood there on the left side of the screen in his golden tie and projected a shivery mirage of hope. I am not like they, them, these two. They sound alike do they not? I am your hope. I am like you. I am you.

Making it explicit, at one point clegg said: “What makes me so angry is that there has been so much tough talk from so many parties for so long  … I’m like everybody else: I just want a fair, workable …”

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Oops, I have to run. Will finish this later…

Okay, am back.

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The Tories have decided to go for the jugular and kill him by sarcasm. Head of the conservatives in Scotland, Amanda Goldie, made the pun on clegg, Scottish for horsefly: “I know a Clegg bite swells up and is immensely irritating for a few days and then it goes back down and leaves a nasty little blemish as a perpetual reminder of how tiresome it once was.” Clegg, interestingly, also means gadfly, or a small breeze.

So, the British Press – each part splendidly and vocally partisan – have hailed nick clegg as hero and villain, correction and digression. They love him for saving them from boring themselves hoarse. A gadfly buzzing on a small breeze.