Bees. Fridges. Secret tapes. That was the election that was.
Elections, so the common wisdom goes, are won by smart political positioning, uniting figures and a well-thought-through ground game.
Debate performances that change the dial, soaring speeches that speak to a country yearning for inspiration, the public coming together behind that single candidate who…
Well, yes, we may have to revisit that — for despite the fact that somebody will come out of today’s election a winner, it hasn’t been a campaign laden with highlights.
Perhaps this should come as no surprise — after all, it took three attempts for the Labour party to even agree to hold a ballot, a rare example of an
opposition voting to keep the government in power. He’s always been
unconventional, that Jezza.
The Tories didn’t have much of a crackerjack start, either. Reporting on Boris’ friendship with tech entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri was a boon for media lawyers but not for the party.
Tory front- and back-benchers queued up at TV studios to put their feet in their mouths, with an accuracy and force only matched by Labour’s prospective candidates, many of whom appear to have tweeted as many inflammatory things in their past as appeared in Boris Johnson’s Spectator columns. Score draw, really.
But after a low-key start, the campaign finally got going and delivered all the thrills and spills one has come to expect when politicians meet the public for extended periods of time.
Some Extinction Rebellion activists glued themselves to the (electric)
Liberal Democrat bus — an event which included a grown man in a full-size bee costume rebuking leader Jo Swinson and her PR adviser for being so “patronising.”
The enthusiastic Jo also spent one day being forced to deny she enjoyed shooting squirrels (she doesn’t) and then had her manifesto launch blown up by Prince Andrew, who stepped back from royal duties after doing his bit for the nation’s struggling mid-market casual dining sector. Not the best of luck.
Boris sang “the wheels on the bus go round and round,” but this time it didn’t have any contentious numbers on the side.
He drove a bulldozer through a wall. He delivered some milk. He helped out at a fish market. He temporarily relocated a journalist’s phone. He hid in a fridge while one of his advisers told a journalist to “f*** off”, though if you’d been living on Premier Inn coffee and Freddo bars for six weeks and found yourself in Guiseley at 5am, you’d probably be a bit cranky, too.
And he kept saying Britain will definitely be able to negotiate one of the most contentious and comprehensive trade deals ever contemplated by the end of 2020, despite the fact it’s taken us three-and-a-half years to even work out what we wanted in the first place. That Johnson, he’s a laugh-a-minute.
All the party leaders held babies. All the party leaders, inexplicably, went boxing. And all the party leaders took turns pouring pints; Johnson and Swinson performing a fine job, Corbyn producing a sort of foamy mess. Nigel Farage was reported to have poured a perfect pint but nobody could get a photo of it before it was halfway down his throat.
Despite all of that, there were revealing, genuinely memorable moments.
Andrew Neil’s evisceration of Jeremy Corbyn for refusing to apologise for
antisemitism was as indicative of the Labour leader’s true feelings as Johnson’s refusal to submit to a grilling was of his aversion to scrutiny.
The secret recording of Labour’s Jon Ashworth taking lumps out of his own leader spoke to the party’s now four-year dilemma; that if you’re still in the party, you are campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn to be PM.
And lest we forget the bold instruction to Labour canvassers to ingratiate themselves with working-class voters by using swear words, and the Tories changing their Twitter handle to “factcheckUK” in a move that even for today’s politics was a bit beyond the pale.
But more to the point, thousands of candidates knocked on doors, stuffed envelopes, and spoke to voters. It’s in the little interactions between those people who care about their community and their country that faith in our politics will be restored.
And there was one advantage to a winter election. As Tracey Crouch, the Tory candidate for Chatham, said: “At least nobody opened the door half-naked.”
Main image: Getty