05/05/2012
It is easy to be
wise after the event, as is Brendan O'Neill, editor of
Spiked. But we can still give O'Neill his moment of glory, letting him say exactly what we have said so many times, as he acquaints us with "further proof" that the political class inhabits a different moral universe to normal human beings.
For that proof, he says, you need look no further than the analyses of the elections, with the
chatterati proclaiming "a good night for Labour". Yet, says O'Neill, Labour got roughly 39 percent of the vote on an estimated turnout of 32 percent.
We've done this
sort of sum before, noting of a recent by-election that the winner got her seat in parliament with 15.7 percent of the electorate. But in this case, Miliband is preening himself over getting around 12 percent of the eligible electorate to vote for his party, and the political commentariat is allowing him to get away with it.
If you put it another way, O'Neill asserts, 88 percent of us â the heaving mass of society â did not vote Labour. "If that's a good night for Labour", he muses, "I'd hate to see a bad one".
Thus does he conclude: "Yesterdayâs elections were the most boring in living memory. But they revealed something very interesting: Britain is morphing into an oligarchy, with a gaping chasm emerging between the spin-doctored politicians and Twitterati who 'do politics' and the man and woman in the street who do not".
The strange thing about this is that the
Failygraph is publishing O'Neill. But his is a token comment, and one which will be completely ignored by the paper's own political
claque. Even as we write, Charlie Moore is
blathering about the need "to revive the Conservative and Liberal Democrats Coalition".
It is people like Moore who give stupidity a bad name. His meanderings transcend myopia, and lift tunnel vision into a new dimension. His is nothing short of a wilful refusal to recognise that the Cameron
projet is part is falling apart.
In particular, what Moore is missing â as many will miss over the forthcoming days â is the enormity of Cameron's failure over the elected mayors' referendums. The idea was very much his. He spoke for it and invested considerable political capital in it. And nine out of ten areas have told The Great Leader to go take a running jump.
One of the more important failures here is Cameron's complete misreading of the public mood. No one with any feeling for the grass roots could possibly suppose that the answer to public antipathy towards the political classes is to add a new layer of professional politician.
No one with any political acumen could be so blind as to make that mistake â yet this is precisely the mistake Cameron has made, an entirely unforced error betraying a colossal lack of judgement.
And therein lies that proof that, when it comes to the basic trade of politics, Cameron really isn't very good at it. The man at the helm of our political machine doesn't know what he is doing. But then, the idea that the posturing, fatuous fool that is Ed Miliband is any better, that he can provide a credible alternative, is one of those political ideas whose time will never come.
Only in the politico-media bubble could such an idea gain any credence whatsoever. Outside it, as O'Neill points out, 88 percent of the voting population did not vote for it. But one must also remember that 91 percent of people didn't vote Tory either.
If politics right now was a dog, we'd be paying the vet to put it out of its misery.
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