Remember the Ed Stone? Of course you do. It’s the reason we don’t have a Labour government at the moment. The Ed Stone was a harrowing, ill-judged, two-tonne PR stunt forged in the fires of superhuman hubris. It was so brazenly awful that it effectively ended the election in a heartbeat.
This week’s Farage-fronted Brexit booze cruise deserved to be this referendum’s Ed Stone. The whole thing was too dumb to live; a mangled last-ditch folly led by a guy dressed for all the world like the fifth-place runner-up in a Come to Work as a Pebble Mill Presenter competition. It should have been a line in the sand; the moment when this country’s rational majority realised it couldn’t possibly align itself with such an embarrassing bunch of twerps.
And then the remain campaign messed everything up by fielding its own embarrassing twerp, Bob Geldof. Bloody Bob Geldof and his stupid mates on their stupid boat with their stupid sound system and their stupid V-signs, dragging remain down to the moronic level of its stupid rival. Everything was so nicely lined up – the pro-EU camp was starting to look like the dignified side, the side that could rise above the fray by not getting drunk on a dinghy at 10.30 in the morning – and then bloody Bob Geldof cocked it all up for everyone by joining in.
To be honest, we should have seen this coming. Geldof has consistently been the least fun part of anything he has ever been involved in. Readers unfortunate enough to remember the Live 8 benefit concert will no doubt still cringe at the moment when Geldof delayed the long-awaited Pink Floyd reunion by mooching onstage and belting out a version of I Don’t Like Mondays that sounded as if it were being performed by a dog in a bin. Or any of his short-lived political films inserted into The Big Breakfast purely to deprive each episode of joy. Or the way he indirectly acted as inspiration for Razorlight. Make no mistake, the man is a full-blown liability.
Labour lost the general election because the Conservatives didn’t try to respond to the Ed Stone. They knew that public derision was enough. The worst thing they could do, they realised, was build their own retaliatory Ed Stone out of papier-mache, and bung it down in front of the original Ed Stone, and then bellow insults at Ed Miliband through a bullhorn. And yet that is exactly what Geldof did this week.
As a result, the defining image from Wednesday – the image that made the front page of this very paper the following morning – wasn’t Nigel Farage boarding the boat next to a “CAUTION: SLIPPERY” sign. No, it was Geldof and his band of tubby gonks leaning over the side of their boat, looking like a bunch of retired Russian football hooligans hamfistedly attempting to recreate the US Marine Corps War Memorial statue. Geldof has ruined the referendum. The campaign to have him indefinitely landlocked starts here.
