One thing I have in common with my friend Prince Hamlet of Elsinore is a rather pessimistic view of elections. Hamlet felt he’d been cheated out of the Danish throne by his opportunistic and fratricidal uncle, Claudius who just “popped in”- we could spend a long time thinking how the phrase popped in has undergone what diachronic linguists call weakening, but won’t- whilst I associate elections with failure, having been on the winning side only three times in my adult life.
How did this begin? Well, it’s Thursday 3rd May 1979. I am gearing myself up, not very successfully, it turned out, for my O levels, over whose results it’s best to draw a discreet veil. But today is a big day in British history, the General Election which would bring in Margaret Thatcher, and, unknown to us, eighteen years of Conservative government. That is longer than I had been alive, and had I known that the future would be so blue for so long, I’d have felt bluer than the bluest of blues singers, though less likely to immortalise my misery in a memorable, achingly painful yet hauntingly melodious four bar blues. My excruciatingly embarrassing teenage diary shows blithe indifference to the horrors of Thatcherism that lay in wait; I was one of those lads that thought there was no more behind but such a day tomorrow as today, and to be boy eternal, preoccupied with football, David Bowie, Jean Michel Jarre; and, above all, Angela B- my apologies to her if she ever reads this. I spend the evening of the election alone- my parents having been taken for dinner by the family dentist in his impossibly glamorous Rolls Royce, in the company of his equally impossibly glamorous girlfriend Carol. I realise now that this splendid vehicle was bankrolled by the extortionate bills for drilling and capping which he presented to us with such flamboyant theatricality. And I see it now as political metaphor, our freeloading tooth doctor, in the town’s only Rolls, ferrying my leftie (dad) liberal (mum) parents off to cheer them up at a swanky Sheffield hotel, surrounded by Northern Tories, aware that tomorrow, in the words of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, belonged to them. They are out till the small hours, and I occupy myself not with Oxygene or The Spiders from Mars, but exclusively with the coverage of the general election, which goes exactly as miserably as expected, leading to a pussy bowed Margaret Thatcher taking the crowds’ cheers in the morning.
And thus began my fatal interest in politics, fatal because politics in my adult life has largely resembled a dark, windswept no man’s land, where ignorant armies clash by night, and where the occasional spark of light is simply a pretext for a sniper to pick off a comrade. The word election has usually carried with it a mental association with hopelessness ever since. My socialist dad didn’t know, though he might have feared, that he’d never see another Labour government, Thatcher’s reign eclipsing what was left of his mortal coil.
The elections of 1983 and 1987 passed in a blur, the inexorable onward march of Thatcherite free market radicalism registering on my student’s consciousness merely as further corroboration of an electoral system weighted against Freiheit and Freude.
By 1992 I was teaching in West Cornwall, and the welcome tears of Mrs T as she was hustled from office by the men in grey suits were a false dawn, as John Major confounded all expectations by pulling off – groan- another Tory victory. I began to wonder whether there would ever be a government of the left in my lifetime.
And then, in 1997, as the Millennium approached in all its mockery of militant politics, of came the Messiah, in the form of a slightly Bambi-ish young Edinburgh public schoolboy, Tony Blair. The rough places were not only made plain, but liberally strewn with palm leaves to celebrate the inevitability of his advent. On election night we stayed up all night. I recall looking at my one-year-old son, peacefully asleep, and thinking, a bit sententiously I admit, that bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. Of course, those words of Wordsworth describe his wildly naive enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and by the time he wrote them he knew perfectly well that this bliss was an illusion- before long the revolutionaries would discover the guillotine’s slickly killing efficiency and Robespierre would realise just how useful terror could be in controlling the people. Despite Blair being forever tarnished by Iraq and a messy handover of power to Gordon Brown, he was not, of course, Robespierre; and in May 1997, that blissful dawn, things could indeed only get better.
The years of Blair and Brown, years of decency and hope, were, however, merely the prelude to something worse- the dawn being always brighter before the dark as it were. And, inevitably, in 2010, the government changed colour for only the second time in my adult life. The choreographed Dave and Nick bromance was the falsest of dawns, the roses in the Downing Street rose garden fatally cankered, and the Goddess Austerity waiting in the wings, sharpening up her axe.
The last fourteen years have been the worst, politically, of my life, a floodlit tour of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights but drawn by Hogarth.
This campaign has been comical at times- Sunak standing forlornly in the pelting rain, like an unenlightened King Lear on the heath, biding the pelting of this pitiless storm, and then managing to forget that The Titanic isn’t the most auspicious of metaphors for a political party. But mostly it’s been incredibly dull, Sunak’s chief tactic being to bleat unmusical variations on the lexeme of tax/taxation/increased tax, and so on, as if his party hadn’t created a historically high tax burden, Starmer simply ensuring that he shoehorns the word change into every sentence he utters.
Nobody has come to knock at my door, though leaflets have been thrust though the letterbox. Those from UKIP and Reform triggered the security alarm- there’s a finely tuned Noxious Bullshit sensor- and I enjoyed tearing both of them into shreds. I'm told that there's a large audience on YouTube for people unpacking cardboard boxes- no, me neither- and wonder whether videos of political leaflets from the hard right being torn up could be the Next Big Thing. As I perfect my system, they will be recycled into visual metaphors for their parties and pumped back out again. I just haven’t yet decided on the most appropriate image, though I suspect it might be turd shaped.
Anyway, this General Election day isn’t bliss, and if it is a new dawn it’s a relatively unspectacular one, rosy fingered but not blinding.
But I’ll take it. And I’m planning to sit up all night, with strong coffee, and relish every moment. Because hope cometh but rarely…
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