Rundle’s UK: David Cameron’s volcanic struggles

Just as Elfofylle… Elofyulla… Ellofyull… Salusinszky… the Icelandic volcano appeared to be calming down last night, and with the prospect of flights being once again permitted from UK airports, the fissure in the earth let out a second blast, and shut it all back down again. Aside from a handful of flights out of northern English and Scottish airports, the country remains cut off by air, with millions of people trying to get back via trains, boats, taxis, paddle-os, etc etc.

I have remarked, ohhhhh two or three hundred times, that the Brits love a queue, but really this is getting ludicrous. The 7pm news bulletin had a tag-team of three reporters showing thousands of tired people lining up at Calais to pay through the nose for a place on a boat, then swoosh, we were in Heathrow, eerily empty, and then swoosh, we were in Dover with tired people arriving. You get the general idea.

By Monday, people had already begun to remark on the possibility that the delays were reminding us of the romance of travel and a kinder, gentler era etc etc, a suggestion that even the fogeyish part of me was starting to get irritated with by the time that Alain sodding de Botton appeared on Newsnight with someone else to talk about the nature of time, necessity, etc.

The point was kinda obvious, the corollary – that it would allow us to re-set our priorities, etc etc – entirely spurious. You could bet that in whatever science-fictive future volcanoes stop us flying as we do, the first thing invented would be a particle-proof jet, pushing ticketing prices well above the Ryanair average, to say the least.

The construction of the eruption thus was a way to co-opt what was by any measure an uncanny event. Not only does a thing such as this – mediated of course through media images, as most of us will never see either the volcano or the ash – act as radically universal, across all it touches, but it becomes almost impossible not to attribute a core meaning to it. The undoubted pleasure of an event such as this is the interruption that makes things visible, like a lightning strike illuminating a city. It throws business-as-usual into radical relief.

Which is bad news for Labour and the Tories, for the most bizarre thing has happened – the Norse earth gods have revealed themselves to be Liberal Democrats. Who knew? I would have sworn they were UKIP.

Four days after the first debate, which launched Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats into equal major party status, the polls have not diminished. Conservative pundits began the spin against by arguing that the whole thing was a flash in the pan. Then they began to realise that there were only 17 days to the sodding election, and the whole kitchen may have caught fire.*

Now, they are in a panic. Why? Let’s have a look at the polls**:

This is too uniform a result to be a fluke, and the fact that it’s held for The Guardian’s Monday poll (all the rest were very soon after the debate), may be what prompted the Tories to throw away their already-filmed five minute free broadcast attacking Labour, and do a quickie job with David Cameron in his lovely garden, talking about the Lib-Dems like a cool dad talking about drugs (‘‘well of course we feel the urge to do Lib-Dems, hell I experimented with minor parties when I…”), and as always another sound came out (‘‘please. Oh please. Dear God please…”).

The whole election has turned on a bad penny. The stuff talked about last week – the debate about a 1p rise in the national insurance tax on employers – is as forgotten as the Chiltern Hundreds****, and the Lib-Dem rise becomes a virtuous circle, their increased likelihood of making a major impression thus drawing in more votes.

The Tories are running round like headless chooks (ironic, since Cameron dealt with a chicken-suited heckler by pulling his head off, i.e. the chicken’s), and no wonder – their campaign is an utter shambles.

The normally sensible Iain Dale has been reduced to whining that no one in the media is remarking on how bad Labour’s campaign is, but can’t stop talking about the Tories’ atrocity – forgetting that Labour has gone from 33 to 28 after the Lib-Demoslide, while the Tories have fallen from 40 down to 31 – two points lower than their 2005 vote, and back at 2001 vote levels.

Why have the Tories campaigned so badly? Someone – I would have written his name down if I did this thing for a living – suggested that Cameron is a smart guy who surrounds himself with idiots, and that seems to be borne out by his addled multi-message effort.

Cameron’s clique of Notting Hillbillies all went to Eton and Oxford (Cameron made a rueful joke against this, saying that his wife, Sam, was quite alternative, as she went to a day school – alas, in the retelling it is no longer taken as a joke), and they moved into the vacuum created by the party’s 2005 loss, just as Thatcher, Tebbit, Keith Joseph and others took over the old patrician Tory party in the wake of the 1974 defeat.

The difference is that Thatcher et al were lower-middle class/working-class origin people taking over a patrician party, and making it more approachable. Now it appears that tranche has been edged out by the new toffs taking their party back. The only vestigially human bloke is Tory party chair Eric Pickles, and he paradoxically looks like a Sontaran.

The Tories have three planks in their campaign: We’re Not Brown, Change etc, and the Big Society. The first is old-school, and many believe that should have been their only message. The third is the updated ‘one-nation’ Toryism as developed by Phillip Blond and others, with a strong anti-statist, pro-community push which has been both over-elaborated and also underthought in the practicalities, and is now attracting ridicule.

The second element is a holus-bolus Obama borrow, and here I think the Notting Hillbillies have been too much at the sangria. How on earth does anyone imagine you could import a style of politics drawn from the American civil rights movement, its religious traditions, and left organising, and apply it to class-raddled, irreligious Britain and sell it as the programme of the boss’s kids? Not only has the ‘‘change” word been around everywhere – fair enough – but so have the Kennedy ‘‘ask not what your country can do for you…” (it’s from Cicero) and the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, in the Tories’ fancy wine-list style manifesto (‘‘…an invitation to join the government of Great Britain”).

Only a group of PR lifers could believe that the Notting Hill clique could sell this stuff – that there was no content to the words and ideas, no unique history they draw from. What could be more un-conservative than missing that? The last two elements of the Tories’ three-part plan have been guff. ‘‘Anyone but Gordon” has been doing all the heavy lifting.

That was until the Lib-Dems became a viable alternative. And that is why I believe that the Icelandic volcano has become a factor in this campaign. Because coming hot on the heels of the Clegg triumph in the debates (or the other parties’ anti-triumph), the simple fact of Eyfefffffffffffffpt has made it clear that things actually change, that the world can be different today than it was yesterday.

The ancient gods of these islands have spoken and lo they have said, ‘‘Vote for the party with a left-liberal social agenda and tight fiscal policy,” although of course it sounds cooler in Norse.

And now (10pm) the airports have re-opened, Cameron will win and none of this will ever have happened.

*yes, I know the metaphor refers to gold-prospecting
**may not sum to a hundred for multiple preferences
***It’s The Guardian.
****I did know, but I don’t now.