I haven’t quite got the hang of it. I spent part of last week picking up dog turds in Nunthorpe — a pleasant suburb of Middlesbrough — and reported the fact proudly to my agent. “Did anybody see you picking up the dog turds?” No, I replied, it was pouring down. “Well what’s the f point of that? Did you even take a selfie?” No, I admitted. I always come out on selfies looking like a lugubrious half-cut gangster, so never take them. I look the same when other people take photos of me, but I have no control over that.
My agent sighed long and hard. “You’ve just wasted a day. You should have got the Gazette down, or the local BBC news.” He paused for a while. “Unless you were picking up the dog turds simply out of a private, genuine, civic spirit?” he asked hopefully. Christ, no, I replied. I don’t think I have a civic spirit. “No. I’m sure. You also have the political nous of a small, damp, cardboard box,” he concluded.
He’s probably right. I am standing as the Social Democratic Party candidate in Middlesbrough South & East Cleveland and, while these are early days, truth be told, it has been a bit of a stuttering start. I am far more comfortable snarking from the sidelines than actually, y’know, being properly involved.
The whole thing has affected my behaviour. I have started smiling with enormous benevolence at everyone I meet on the street, which sometimes occasions them to step into the road and gather their children about them in a protective huddle. I overtip in pubs and restaurants. When I buy a pound of lamb mince in the butcher’s I depart the shop saying stupid, grandstanding toss like, “I think it’s important to shop locally, you know.” And I do. It’s just that when you say it, you sound very much like — how can I put it? — an arsehole. So much of politics is odiously performative and synthetic.
My track record is good, mind. I have stood in precisely one election previously and won that by a landslide. It was in this very constituency, in February 1974, when my comprehensive school held a mock election to coincide with the fraught general election which was, as it happened, won by nobody.
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I stood as the Communist Party candidate — a 13-year-old Marxist — and my enormous majority was, I think, the consequence of a teacher who was hated by everyone in the school, warning the kids never to vote for the evil of communism, invoking gulags and show trials. How I could do with his help now. Mr Tomlinson, where are you?
Why stand? I dare say hubris is in there somewhere — or, as my wife put it, I have an inflated sense of my own worth. Sure. Also, the light is noticeably growing dimmer these days, and I feel I ought to do something productive and useful before decades of getting congenially rat-arsed finally take their toll. There is the suspicion that, in the scheme of things, merely jabbering is not enough.
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But there’s also this. Our political system has become deracinated and sclerotic. We go to the polls in six weeks given a choice between two parties with whom the majority of the voters are wholly disaffected. There is an utter, consuming weariness with the Conservatives, who are no longer conservative, and no great enthusiasm for a Labour Party which itself no longer represents the people it was created to represent.
The inequality between rich and poor, and between north and south, worries and depresses me, much as does the apparent determination of the left to traduce our history and instead to sign up to any and every idiotic shibboleth of that corrosive and divisive creed, identity politics. I see the West annihilating itself, in a kind of chaotic de-enlightenment.
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My lot, meanwhile, stand for a social market economy and redistribution, but also for what is sometimes derisively called faith, flag and family. You can trace our credo back to Aristotle, Burke and Catholic social teaching, but I prefer to locate it in one part Ernest Bevin, one part DCI Gene Hunt from Life on Mars.
The point, though, is that our first-past-the-post system has come, in effect, to disenfranchise vast swathes of the electorate — Ukip in the past, the Greens, Reform and the SDP in the present. I have the feeling that people would like to vote for change, but will instead opt for the least worst option between Labour and Tory, each of which party has trimmed its sails to accommodate the tiny percentage of the electorate who actually decide who must govern.
I fully expect to be returned as the MP for Middlesbrough South & East Cleveland, or at least I do in a weird fantasy world occasioned by alcoholic stimulants. And if I’m not, then at least Nunthorpe will be dog-turd free for six weeks.
That shrinking feeling
Those of you who take antidepressants ought to take note. Legal actions have been launched in the US by people who discovered that after having taken selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), their libidos vanished into nothingness … and sometimes their actual genitalia too. Yes, their bits shrank. It is a terribly cruel world. First you feel yourself lifted from the slough of despond by SSRIs and, full of positivity, decide that you should perhaps give the wife a treat. Then you look down and see all you have to work with is a button mushroom.
A Euros boost? Rishi’s off target
It’s worrying that the future governance of this country may be in the hands of Gareth Southgate. Rishi Sunak seems to have decided that this election might be a reverse ferret of 1970, which was unexpectedly won by Edward Heath.
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Then, Labour were — as now — way ahead in the polls, but four days before the vote England lost their World Cup quarter-final against West Germany. The feelgood factor evaporated and the Tories, like smirking Gerd Müller et al, came from behind to win.
This time Sunak will be banking on old horse face and his underachieving side to boost national morale in the Euros. But he is not so deluded as to think England will win the tournament. The election will take place just before the quarter-finals: surely Southgate can get us to the last eight at least?
Hmm. Don’t bet on it, Rishi.
Saint Binyamin goes marching in
Pope Francis has approved the canonisation of Carlo Acutis, a devout London-born Catholic who is attributed with having performed two miracles and who died of leukaemia at the age of 15. A worthy nominee, no doubt, but counter to my suggestion, which I submitted to the Vatican, that Binyamin Netanyahu would be the most suitable candidate, given his unflinching dedication to peace in the Middle East.
I myself have also harboured hopes of becoming St Rod of Middlesbrough, for my unstinting efforts to bring accord where there is disagreement and joy where there is gloom. However, it felt improper to advance my own name — so I am in your hands, dear readers.
Farage reveals election plans
