It's the end of the world (as we know it (again)) You sometimes have to worry about the mental fragility of the left. Not just Gordon of course, although God knows there’s enough to worry about there, but the whole damn mindset itself. Remember May 2008, when lefties were fighting a desperate last-ditch defence of Ken Livingstone? The Guardian decided that sanity was no longer required, and conjured up desperate doom-laden images of what the future had in store under a new Borisian overlord. The best of these was undoubtedly Arabella Weir’s pledge:
I will go on hunger strike and throw myself in front of the next horse at Ascot if he wins.
Luckily, of course, none of it happened (even the hunger strike – poor old Arabella was still complaining about being a bit fat two months later. You think eight weeks of solid hunger striking would have shifted some of the flab), and Zoe Williams even, and rather decently, recanted the most bilious of her attacks, and suggested that Boris was just mildly out of his depth. The world, at any rate, had failed to cease to turn in its orbit.
It’s not a delusion limited to Guardian journos either. John Rentoul, the Martin Bormann of the Blair bunker (and I mean that in the nicest possible way), wrote an even more bizarre ‘looking into the future’ piece about Boris’s victory in London, in which he stated that it was Boris’s policy of urban fox-hunting that allowed David Miliband (with, oddly, Chancellor Ruth Kelly at his side) to pull off a 2012 election win. Rentoul’s epic predictive powers are amply displayed later in that piece:
"President McCain called to offer his sympathy," said the private secretary in the front.
Quite.
Anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound. Rounding off the trio of lefty gobshite papers is the New Statesman. Unusually, this time the epic political and journalistic powers of James Macintyre are not at issue. Instead, that shonky crystal-ball gets dusted off once again, this time explaining why David Cameron is, like, the worst person in the world EVAH and, like, we’ll all be sorry when we’re dead. It starts with a, presumably unintentional, trick:
In a few months' time, we will face one of the biggest political choices in living memory. For the past few years, Britain has stumbled from crisis to crisis under the direction of one of the worst governments any of us can remember. Our economy is hamstrung by recession and public debt, many of our best-known retailers have been wiped off the high street, and the vacant eyes of the young men on street corners testify to the devastating impact of high unemployment.
Indeed. Not, in fact, a bad summary of where we are.
This is David Cameron's broken Britain in 2015. How did we come to this? To contemplate the state of the nation today is to gaze upon a picture of near-unrelieved misery.
Oh. Plus ca change eh? What terrible things have the Tories done to bring us to such a state? Well, among other things, the eeeevil Tories have made local councils subcontract their gritting services to private firms (the bastards), they rushed into a punitive and misguided package of spending cuts worth as much as £30bn (lets see how that one goes shall we?), and free admission to most museums and galleries disappeared (my God! Nooooo!). But the real clincher was Lord Hannan of Brighton's presence in the cabinet since July 2011. In my opinion, Daniel Hannan and the left in general should just book a room and get on with it. It might mean that Dan’s a bit busy for the next few months, but really, this much pent-up attraction is just dangerous. Incidentally, why Brighton? Wouldn’t Lord Bassam get upset?
The rest of the prophesy is just a bit… odd.
Britain remains the only EU member not to have signed the Budapest Treaty, last year's crucial document reforming Brussels institutions, and Cameron has already stated that he has no intention of submitting it to a referendum.
Why? No European Treaty will ever pass a referendum here – so why wouldn’t he put it to referendum? Internal logic fail…
The Murdoch newspapers and Sky News - whose strident tone is increasingly set by star presenters such as Rod Liddle and Jeremy Clarkson - openly tout the Prime Minister as a courageous and reforming historical figure.
Blimey, Hannan, Liddle and Clarkson all in the same piece. Are we sure Sunny Hundal didn’t write this?
OK, I’ll stop. Fish in a barrel and all that. But lets leave it with one more fabulous combination of ignorance and idiocy:
With the deep cuts in news services, radio and factual television, many of the jewels in the BBC's crown have already disappeared. The World Service might be better renamed the Skeleton Service; the Proms have been severely curtailed; and as for the mainstream channels, who could enjoy such a relentless diet of Horne and Corden?
- The World Service is not funded by the BBC;
- The BBC have been running the proms since 1927 when, I hazard, funding was rather tighter than it is now;
- What? Horne & Corden, ghastly as they are, are ‘star’ BBC performers. Don’t blame mythical future Tories for them.
Note to lefties – the world did not begin in 1997, springing fully formed from the forehead of Tony Blair. Nor will it end in 2010, with the fall of the one-eyed king of the Labour Gods. Perspective: it’s a good thing. Get some.