Eighty years ago today, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of England and Colonies for the first time.
His second term, eleven years later, made him the very last Prime Minister born before the Forth Bridge was built.
But WC-Day was definitely not WC's Finest as it was also the day Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg while England barely noticed as they were too busy invading Iceland at the same time.
© David McWilliams, 1967
additional verse by Marc Almond, 1991
Rising upwards and onwards into the sunlight of tomorrow
(Andrea Riseborough as Margaret Thatcher, The Long Walk To Finchley, 1959 election campaign)
© Chris Riddell, The Guardian, 2020
God writes paperback books in his underwear.
And like all writers, he churns out draft after draft.
My world? This world? Nothing but failed drafts.
And when he realizes that they're flawed, he moves on and tries again.
Because he doesn't care. Not about you. Me. Anything.
(Dean Winchester, Supernatural: Nihilism, 2019)
During the pollsters' unusually long post-election retreat earlier this year, I sought solace in the 'Our Friends In The North' DVDs which, believe it or not, I had never seen before. It was quite fun to see Christopher Ecclestone and Daniel Craig made up as some Spinal Tap impersonators and Mark Strong with hair and looking like a young Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 1970s episodes. And of course Eccleston's 'Young Corbyn' look in 1979 was priceless even if it was unintentional as Corbyn was a complete unknown when the series was filmed. There is an interesting side-plot in there when voters openly say they'd rather have the Tories in charge than Militant, and already back then a number of supposedly safe seats were lost by Labour. Bis repetita…. Then of course real-life events have now moved on a few episodes past that.
We're back to the Dark Ages
Anything's possible except the things we really want
(Our Friends In The North: 1974)
Today, five months after Their Friends In The North have again taken one big fuck of a drubbing, Keir Starmer has finally become Labour's Fearless Great Leader. Which comes as no surprise to me as I saw this coming from far away and far ago if you remember my earlier articles. First I singled him out as a credible Deputy PM to a victorious Corbyn when polls hinted at a Labour-led hung Parliament, which was just a year ago, admittedly an eternity and a generation in British politics. Then, when it became clear Labour were doomed to lose and Corbyn to resign, I had Starmer as the compromise candidate that could coalesce all factions. And now Sir Keir, as he reportedly begs people to not call him, has won by rebranding himself as the Great Unificator of post-Blairites, post-Brownites and post-Momentumers, which of course lends credibility to the theory that the once-reluctant Starmer has not just morphed into an ambitious Starmer but was indeed playing the long game all along. Someday someone will write a book about how he slyfoxed his way to the top rung of the food chain, but right now the question that matters is: will Starmer be the next Tony Blair or just the next Neil Kinnock?
If we're going to be ruled by Tories
Let's be ruled by proper Tories, not Tories in drag
(Our Friends In The North: 1974)
Of course the overall picture supports the latter, like in 1983-2019 and Foot-Corbyn and Kinnock-Starmer. Then it is very unlikely now that the handling of Covid-19 could end up being Boris Johnson's Falklands, when even The Times rips the English Government a new one. Johnson is definitely in a very precarious situation even if the Tory-sucking billionaire-owned fish-wrappers spin Covid-19 into a tour de force by Oor Boris, single-handedly taking Britannia from the humiliation at Dunkirk to victory in the desert sands. 'Remember The Alamein', as they say in Texas, or whatever. Boris might think he has the oven-ready scapegoat for any mishap in Matt Hancock, who definitely graylinged himself into redundancy when making a dog's breakfast of PPE procurement and made-up tests statistics. But it's highly unlikely that even throwing Tigger Matty under the bus will be enough of a response to public calls for a thorough investigation into what happened, and what did not. And the incoming Brexitocalypse won't help either when people realize the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is the Brexit runaway train coming at them at flank speed.
But despite all the Tories' abject failures, Starmer's dilemma over the next few years will be: can history repeat itself? Which it doesn't except when it does. And then first time's a tragedy, second time's a farce and third time's a charm. Just what happened to Labour in the olden days after the 1983 debacle: 1987 a tragedy, 1992 a farce up to and including the BBC's exit poll, 1997 a charm. Now Starmer definitely needs the electorate to be kinder to him than they were to Kinnock. If he doesn't make it on the first or second strike, he won't get a chance at a third strike and some younger slyer fox will thatcher him into the woodchipper. Remember Tony Blair was only 30 when he was first elected in 1983, the Year Of The Blue Flood, and nobody would have wagered a farthing on him becoming Labour's Leader eleven years later. There's one just like him biding their time on the backbenches right now, and what Blair got by serendipity, bribes and blood oaths after John Smith's death, the Next New One will get by playing no-quarter hardball. And we know now that some within Labour will stop at nothing to take down a leader they don't like, even if that means harming the whole party. You've been warned, Sir Keir.
© Chris Riddell, The Guardian, 2020
But despite all the Tories' abject failures, Starmer's dilemma over the next few years will be: can history repeat itself? Which it doesn't except when it does. And then first time's a tragedy, second time's a farce and third time's a charm. Just what happened to Labour in the olden days after the 1983 debacle: 1987 a tragedy, 1992 a farce up to and including the BBC's exit poll, 1997 a charm. Now Starmer definitely needs the electorate to be kinder to him than they were to Kinnock. If he doesn't make it on the first or second strike, he won't get a chance at a third strike and some younger slyer fox will thatcher him into the woodchipper. Remember Tony Blair was only 30 when he was first elected in 1983, the Year Of The Blue Flood, and nobody would have wagered a farthing on him becoming Labour's Leader eleven years later. There's one just like him biding their time on the backbenches right now, and what Blair got by serendipity, bribes and blood oaths after John Smith's death, the Next New One will get by playing no-quarter hardball. And we know now that some within Labour will stop at nothing to take down a leader they don't like, even if that means harming the whole party. You've been warned, Sir Keir.
If you and your New Labour Party sound any more like the Tories
They'll sue you for plagiarism
(Our Friends In The North: 1995)
But Starmer has more pressing issues on his hands, like dealing with polls that paint England a constant deep sea blue like the eyes of a scallop, and now Wales too. Which was far from the likeliest situation back in January when all Labour had to face was a waffling buffoon with 'What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander' as his Brexit strategy. You did forget that one, didn't you? Yet it did happen, no shit. Then Sir Keir can blame Comrade Jeremy for the drawn out leadership contest, and the rather convoluted wording of Labour's 2019 Rule Book (Chapter 4; Clause II, Section C.iv) that effectively means that anybody who wanted to stuff the electoral register had more than enough time to do so. Not that it helped Momentum in any way. And by the time the leadership contest at last ended, Covid-19 had reared its ugly head and brought an end to Britain As We Knew It. It proved to be quite a trap for Keir as he chose to go into 'constructive criticism' mode rather than fire full broadsides at the startling incompetence of the English Government. Obviously Labour don't want to be accused of politicking a national emergency, even when the Conservatives do it day in day out and get away with it. And now the trend of general election polls shows what 'rallying around the flag' actually means.
If the December election had something of a 1983ish or 1935ish flavour, current polls have definitely switched to something 1931ish when Labour's best hope is to achieve something vaguely 1964ish as 1945ish is quite clearly well beyond firing range. Clearly Starmer going all forensic on whoever pretends to be Prime Minister at any given PMQs is not enough. Sly Keir might well look like he will conclude his weekly quota of questions with 'The prosecution rest their case, Your Lordship', switching from civilly barkey to calculatedly bitey would be a welcome change. Especially when the SNP repeatedly indulge in futile attempts to Get Brexit Delayed. Which everybody with half a functional brain knows won't happen, because Boris has said it won't. And in this case as in many others, the only No vote that matters is Number 10's. It offers Labour a golden opportunity to reaffirm themselves as the 'real opposition' over the 'little shits', as the sorely missed Dennis Skinner called them. But then it looks like this opportunity will be sorely missed too.
This is like watching a lion raping a sheep, but in a bad way
(Ollie Reeder, The Thick Of It: The Rise Of The Nutters)
The weighted average of the six most recent polls sends the same message as the trends I mentioned earlier. The Conservatives would miss the 50%-of-the-popular-vote target by a Chinese bat's hair. But then they have made it a habit of missing targets recently, haven't they? What all these polls also have in common is a massive drop of the Liberal Democrat vote, which definitely has a karmatic dimension embedded. The key here is 'moderate' right-wingers switching back to the Nasty Party because, ye ken, Boris Got Brexit Done, so there's no point in opposing it anymore, and he is the best Defender Of The Realm. Then you also have the SNP bouncing back to a majority of the Scottish popular vote, stumbling only on a weird Tory resilience among the EU-subsidized fishing and farming communities who still haven't got the memo about how Boris's oven-ready Brexit will definitely fuck them to the hilt and beyond. Edward II also believed he was in for a treat, until.... So here is what the polls say and what selected prediction models make of it:
So the good people of England are ready to hand a part-time Prime Minister and full-time con-artist a larger majority than any of Margaret Thatcher's and almost as commanding as Tony Blair's. Which is actually not as amazingly daft as it seems. First being comfortably dumb is like an aeons-old trait of the English gene pool. Then Waffling Boris is definitely a master at triggering all the Pavlovian responses from after-drinks speeches double-dipped in English exceptionationalism. Which works beyond expectations even when he evokes the Dunkirk Spirit and all the oiks forget Dunkirk was actually one of many humiliating setbacks on Winston's watch. Then Bumbling Boris is not one to miss any warlike metaphor, even when it's totally devoid of any meaning for the 21st century. But the 20th century was so much better, wasn't it?
It may be the Mother Of All Parliaments but the Tories have their hands up her skirt
(Our Friends In The North: 1987)
The most amazing thing actually is that Labour can't gain more from the current situation, probably because they don't even really try. The current English Government are a swarm of waffling chancers who thrive on failure as long as they can play the blame game, and have conclusively proven themselves to be an ensemble cast of pimples on the arse of mediocrity, as inspiring as the house wine at a suburban Indian restaurant. But possibly Labour don't want to succeed a government for whom home is where the heartlessness is. I can sympathize with the feeling that they hate to have to step into the Tories' shoes but only after the Tories have shat in them. But Labour is also desperately misplaying the weak hand they have been dealt. For some unfathomable reason, Sly Keir thinks now is the time for kowtowing to English nationalism, which might bring back some of Their Voters In The North, or not. But will most certainly backfire with their voters in cosmopolitan London and the few, not the many, left in Scotland. Not surprisingly this is just what the most recent polls show, with Labour and Tories nose-to-nose in London and a steady leaking of pro-Indy Labour voters to the SNP in Scotland. So Sir Keir's only hope now seems to be public opinion at last seeing the light and coming back at the Tories with a vengeance. Might happen, or not....
This government is maimed but it can't be shamed, it will be fucked
(Cal Richards, The Thick Of It: Episode Sixteen)
© Chris Riddell, The Guardian, 2020
Every seat-sniffing little shitbag that's ever filed a byline is gonna be questioning you
Cause now it's in the fucking public interest, isn't it?
And they're gonna hit you with every shit they can find
You're gonna be spread out there in front of them like a trollop in the stocks
(Malcolm Tucker, The Thick Of It: Episode Two)
© Melchior Franck, Jim Connell, 1889
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