If British politics has ever been more absurd than it is now, then it must have been before my time. Up and down the country, people are cracking jokes with the punchline: “And nobody even had to put lipstick on the pig.” Yet while the prime minister may have become a laughing stock worthy of the wilder reaches of, say, a Charlie Brooker script, still there’s absolutely no danger, none at all, that any of the other party leaders will usurp him in leading the country.
And that’s not just because, on balance, the nation prefers leaders who have experienced youthful periods of idiocy to leaders who hand out jobs to chaps who have donated wads of money to their party. It’s because the competition is ridiculously inadequate.
The problems with Labour’s new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have been well rehearsed. His fans don’t want to hear it, but he’s immensely attractive to a minority of enthusiasts and a figure of not-even-fun to a majority of astounded bystanders – in England anyway. And Scotland has now got its own ways of expressing its contempt for the Westminster mainstream. I wish it were otherwise. It’s not, though.
But Tim Farron? No one has even bothered to warn the electorate that yet another Liberal Democrat leadership is bound to end in tears. It’s all far too obvious for such declamations to be necessary. Farron, it is plain to see, is one of those people who gain the top job at a time when no one with any wisdom would want it. You can’t even call him a tethered goat, because that inspires too many thoughts of nature red in tooth and claw. Poor Farron is more of a decoy duck.
Yet still the Lib Dems persist in believing that Corbyn’s leadership offers them some gigantic opportunity. Farron says that Labour MPs have been texting him, suggesting that they’re thinking of defecting to his party. One can’t help feeling that maybe a few MPs did text, innocently unaware that their obvious jokes – “If it gets any worse, you’ll have to make room for me!” – might not seem like obvious jokes to a man daft enough to fervently believe that the Liberal Democrats have current political relevance.
Why can’t Farron see that Labour MPs who can’t stomach Corbyn are no more likely to be able to stomach him? Having spent the past five years making it clear to the electorate that the Lib Dems had moved far to the right since the leadership of the late Charles Kennedy, they’ve now dived to the left again, just as Labour has done the same. I’m afraid it would make far more sense for Farron’s Lib Dems to be texting the Labour party, delighted that it has suddenly dumped wars on terror and jettisoned the belief that you can stop climate change by making a very sad face.
Quite what would a Labour MP who had switched to the Lib Dems say to their constituents? “I really liked Tony Blair’s technocratic approach, and I really liked Nick Clegg’s technocratic approach too. I know everyone hates both of them now, but vote for me anyway.” It needs some work, doesn’t it?
The worst thing is that the political landscape looks so much like a backdrop from a Wile E Coyote cartoon that all you can sensibly do is poke fun at it. The Conservatives really are doing some serious damage, irreparable damage, to fundamental infrastructure such as the judicial system, the health service and the welfare state. Environmental matters have disappeared from the debate. Electoral reform (that doesn’t benefit the Conservatives alone) is at the moment an impossible dream. Governments have been telling us how many homes they’re going to build – in a minute, Mum – for decades now. On and on it goes. The need for left-leaning solutions grows greater by the hour.
And who do we have lined up against the posh white male elite? Jeremy and Tim, that’s who. Nice chaps who have had their brief flirtation with greatness thrust upon them.
Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that some Labour MPs really had been considering leaving Jeremy and joining Tim. How are they feeling now, Tim having told the world and her husband all about their perfidy the first chance he got? The callow boasts of Farron’s self-defeating claims about the Labour people that he, siren like, may draw to him, are so guilelessly excitable that they make my teeth itch.
It’s a bit like when Cameron promised Clegg a rose garden, but on the much more teensy-tiny scale that the Lib Dems have now consigned themselves to. Who will rid me of this troublesome neoliberal government? No one who’s put their hand up yet, of that I’m certain.
