Ring the Bells that Still can Ring. Forget your Perfect Offering. There is a Crack in Everything. That’s how the Light Gets in. Look on the bright side. It’s nearly over. Finally. For the last four weeks the broadcasters have been testing the axiom that insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result to destruction.
We’ve had every possible variation on the debate theme. A head to head with Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak. That was a disaster. Then there have been a few seven-way debates. Less said the better. Party leaders interviewed individually by presenter and audiences. Spare us. We even had a debate with the half-witted Chris Philp. Channel 4 will never do that again. There has been the odd moment. Sky’s Beth Rigby was combative, the audience on Question Time did their best and the Sun’s Harry Cole drew some insight. But anyone who has actually made the mistake of sitting through the whole lot will feel as if they have been force-fed benzodiazepine. By and large we have learned nothing we didn’t already know. Rishi may have been even snippier than we had imagined – keep an eye on the Tetchometer – and Keir has got better as the weeks go by. Apparently you can teach an old dog new tricks. But as for intelligent debate, forget it. The same non-answers, the same half-truths, the same evasions. No one much the wiser about what a new government would look like on 5 July. Hell, we aren’t even allowed to talk about the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicting that we’re in for austerity and tax rises whoever gets in. Since when did the country become so miserable? It’s even become impossible to enjoy the football. Unless you’re Austrian. Or Slovenian. No wonder so many people are flocking to Reform events. Not only are they the only rallies to which members of the public are invited, but Nigel Farage is the only politician who appears to be enjoying himself. Everyone else is comatose or terminally depressed. Where is the joy? The BBC spin room in Nottingham may have been buzzing in the hours before the last debate – a rematch head to head with Starmer and Sunak – but the rest of the country was bathed in apathy. We’ve seen enough already. The last 75-minute debate no more than the final passing out parade. Literally in some cases. Oh to be one of them. Who wouldn’t love to be unconscious through the next week and take their chances on polling day? At least that way we could avoid some of the unedifying shite coming our way. Gambling, honeytraps … what next? Sex and drug orgies? What is it with our wannabe politicians? The apathy starts at the top. Conservative central office is a dead zone these days. There’s no one to be seen. Almost every cabinet minister has disappeared to watch repeats of Pointless. Their best chance of retaining their seats is to dissociate from Rish!. Away from the stench of failure, Lord Big Dave has only surfaced to make things worse. That way his own term in No 10 doesn’t look quite such a disaster. All that’s left are a few dysfunctional bots firing out weird cries for help on X. But the show must go on in the House of the Dead. A performance that is both cruel and futile. And if anyone could inject some meaning into the meaninglessness it is the BBC’s super-sub Mishal Husain, who was replacing an injured Sophie Raworth. We started with gambling. No surprises there. Sad face. Rish! reiterated that he had been so angry that he had been forced to do nothing about it. Keir really didn’t need to say anything much after that. The main interest in the room was the shouting coming from outside it. Or maybe it was just someone begging to be let out. So soon. You couldn’t blame them. It was all pretty much downhill from there. In other words what we heard was the well-rehearsed soundbites we had heard countless times before over the past few weeks. Only this time on steroids. Sunak had clearly decided he was in the last chance saloon and had decided to come out fighting. Time and again, he talked over Starmer and Husain. It was like listening to an over-entitled teenager playing at being an adult in the Oxford Union. There is no one he won’t patronise. The Tetchometer rapidly tipped into the red as Keir got the first round of applause for pointing out that if Sunak bothered to listen to people in the audience he wouldn’t be so out of touch. Not that Starmer got it all his own way. He frequently looked startled, confused even. As if it had never occurred to him that Rish! might not play by the agreed rules. It was only towards the end that he regained his composure. The promises and flashes of temper came in quick succession. On small boats, Sunak kept insisting his plan was working and that he would be sending thousands of migrants to Rwanda in a matter of weeks. “We must never surrender our borders,” he said over and over again. Like a poundshop Churchill. Surrender was an interesting choice of words from a man who was acting as if Starmer was already prime minister. There again he hasn’t got a record to defend. No one was any the wiser when we got on to the economy and Husain observed we would be better off listening to the IFS. If only. Rish! got increasingly snitty as he always does when things don’t go entirely his own way. His one human moment being when he talked about his excitement at getting the keys to his Santa Monica penthouse. We can all relate to that. Both men got roughly equal amounts of applause. No surprise there. The audience was equally divided between Tories, Labour and undecided. It was a score draw as these things always are. No one won, no one lost. So it had been largely a waste of time. The best question was: “Are you two really the best choice we’ve got?” Sadly the answer is yes. Because in an election of despair neither man could offer any hope. We are being led by the hopeless.