Can you weaponise boredom? I would say you can have a fair crack at it. Last summer, Tom Watson accused the far-left of deliberately making local Labour party meetings so boring that it would drive away moderates. Regardless of such tactics, I find most meetings boring and unnecessary. In theory everyone should speak, but actually nearly everything that needs to be decided in a political meeting can be done in 10 minutes – the rest is just pretending some sort of democracy is going on.
Which may be why this election feels so deathly dull. We are going through the motions of choice: Theresa May will continue being prime minister; Jeremy Corbyn will continue to be pure, righteous and wrong. Brexit negotiations will go on and on, while the nature of the postwar social contract is torn up in front of us.
So why does it all feel so lifeless? Brexit is one of the most important things to happen in my lifetime and yet it is one of the most boring. Both these things are true. This election is, in fact, very important, as it will solidify Tory rule, but it is also devoid of much content. May will be “strong and stable” and Corbyn will have played his part in the revolution that didn’t come.
The idea of an actual Labour government continues to atrophy. For political nerds, seeing John McDonnell standing under Stalinist banners and alleged flags of the Assad regime matters. But for the public, Diane Abbott’s brain freeze on live radio while discussing the cost of recruiting more police officers probably matters more. That’s the 30 seconds of political news voters will register.
Phrases such as “strong and stable” and “Brexit means Brexit” also register: these slogans bore into us like low-pitched noise from Theresa’s anxious, fervent voice. This is pure Lynton Crosby strategy: no oratory, just repetition. Trump did something similar with his simple slogans, “America First, America First” and “Make America great again” – the rest was a lunatic word salad. May is not a natural. This is the point of her, and that is why accusing her of being robotic is daft. Robots, on the whole, function and, post-Brexit, all most people want is for things to function. Brexit will eventually be about the lowering of expectations instead of some fantasy of having our gateau and eating it for free. Most seem to have accepted that Brexit is going to take place. And whatever happens is going to take aeons. Some will like May’s rhetoric of being “bloody difficult” and Britain winning a war against the EU establishment, powered by its own sense of entitlement.
Labour’s non-position on all this has only helped the Tories, who recognise that when the world is complex, people want simplicity. Populism is simplistic, robotic even. These “other” people are the enemy. This land is our land. It is precisely the fantasy of keeping bad things out and the rigidity of borders and hierarchies that May personifies. It is stiff and it nods always towards the chaos that would ensue if it let go. The only thing that can oppose this robotic simplicity is charisma.
Instead of that there is Corbyn, whose main attribute is that he is “real”. Actually, he is just rigid in another way. He is someone who hasn’t changed his politics for 40 years, whose party structures impede change. He is someone who won’t acknowledge the antisemitism in his party, who champions a party that blocks progressive alliances instead of embracing them.
The sudden rush of those who supported Corbyn who are now asking for a progressive alliance is an admission that he has failed as leader. This experiment is dead on its feet. Their narcissistic supply is about to dry up. Corbyn may go on but Labour is not prepared for power, just as it was not even prepared for opposition. The Conservatives expect power in June, though a challenger to May could emerge sooner rather than later if Brexit becomes all pain and no gain.
Meanwhile, boredom sets in. It’s not quite the same as apathy. Most people just want this election to be done and are not enthused about voting. Boredom, then, works well as a strategy to maintain the status quo. Young people will feel uninvolved and neglected because that is the case, so they are unlikely to turn out in great number.
Those who want to see a functioning Labour party know they have to bide their time. A Lib Dem revival looks unlikely. The stage-managed avoidance of the public and the press will continue, while the first-past-the-post system stifles. The switch-off is tangible now. It’s not that no one cares, but that their caring feels impotent. They have already voted in a referendum: they either got the result they desired and now want someone to get on with it, or they are in complete despair. For many this manifests as disengagement, a sense of this vote not mattering much, a foregone conclusion. Teenage leftist dreams have given way to a sense of compromised adulthood, where voting for a middle manager is as good as it gets.
It used to be thought that boredom could be a radical weapon used to make the masses rise up or disrupt the narrative. But boredom is now working for the Conservatives, with the added value of a low-level threat that the EU is interfering.
This election is not accidentally dull; it is deliberately so. Saul Bellow wrote, in The Adventures of Augie March: “Boredom is the conviction you can’t change … the shriek of unused capacities.” That shriek is all around, if anyone can be bothered to listen.
