You’ve read Lord of the Fuckwits, right? You know the story; a bunch of boys are stranded on an abandoned island who quickly descend into conflict until the ginger-haired bully character Meanie McSweeney comes up with a sinister plan to cut off his own head and put it on a spike.
No, hold on, that’s not right. How would that even work? All I know is that Lord of the Fuckwits is at it again, and it seems sort of par for the course in contemporary politics.
I am insanely busy just now and I write this mainly to get it off my chest, but it is incredibly significant nevertheless. Because what has been happening in Britain this week looks like the sort fo thing that has been happening in the US – but without the gusto. That’s what I was thinking last night anyway.
I was staring bemused at Maga-world. We’re now more or less at the point where we have a confirmed, authenticated photograph of Donald Trump raping a baby panda and there are still a lot of people who ‘just can’t believe it’ and another bunch claiming ‘there’s no such thing as a panda – this is fake news’.
It’s not a panda though, it’s Epstein’s ‘girls’. And why it is difficult for anyone to believe that Donald ‘grab them by the pussy’ Trump might be friends with Epstein for a very particular reason is not something that makes obvious sense to me. And yet we’re long past the point where that is surprising. What is surprising is that the more people hate Trump, the more they seem to hate the Democrats too.
That brings us to these shores where I was also pondering the question last night which is best summed up concisely as What The Actual Fuck? I probably don’t need to tell you this and you certainly don’t need to be an experienced political strategist to intuit it but it is a fairly solid rule that if you don’t want someone to think about it, don’t say it out loud.
You’re at a party and you walk into a room and someone is already there and shouts ‘I wasn’t going through anyone’s underwear drawer’. There is no better way to get someone to go from not thinking it to thinking it.
When one politician fails, it makes us lose confidence in the others as well
I had left some wriggle room for the possibility that it was Sturgeon’s team who leaked the Salmond probe to the Daily Record and that they’d gone out of their way to ensure ‘plausible deniability’ so she didn’t know. Then she said she thought it might have been Alex who leaked it himself and I instantly knew that she had done it herself or had direct knowledge of it.
How? The same way I wasn’t totally sure my then-seven-year-old son had eaten the donut that should have been there until he offered the possibility that ‘maybe it was the cat’. This makes it unfathomably difficult to understand how Team Starmer woke up one day and thought ‘you know, if we tell everyone that 50 MPs are ready to resign to get rid of Keir, perhaps if we say it really loud they’ll all stop’.
Thing is, in politics circles it was broadly assumed that Starmer was safe until after the English local and Welsh and Scottish elections next year. Not now they don’t. And it gets dafter, because they named a culprit and he was already booked to do the media round the next day and this is literally as ham-fisted as it could be.
No, wait, they’re not finished. Everyone knows it was McSweeney who gave that briefing and while he is followed around by a group of sycophants who constantly tell anyone who is listening that he is a genius, plenty other people hate him. He’d handed them his head on a plate. He should be fired on the spot.
But if he goes, Starmer is done. So Starmer has asked who was behind the briefing and it wasn’t anyone. No-one who works for Starmer briefed this story. Which begs the question of who exactly is briefing on behalf of Starmer and persuading the Guardian that it is a Starmer briefing? ‘No-one’ is what Starmer seems to think he can get away with. Go figure that one out.
None of this matters. I told you a year ago that Starmer was toast. We’re only negotiating over timing, and while no-one thought he’d make it to next Christmas, his own people have contracted that possibility by a year. So none of this matters. Except what happens next.
Because what happens next is the rule in politics – when one lot fuck up, the other lot benefit. It is the Trump point again – if Epstein revelations screw Trump, the Democrats should gain. That isn’t really happening (in terms of approval ratings at least). If Starmer livestreams his political suicide, the Tories ought to be dancing in the streets. But no-one likes them more than they did.
There used to be a zero-sum game in politics but now it is a zero-multiplication game. It’s no longer things having to add up to zero, it’s things all being multiplied by zero. Which is zero. When one politician fails, it makes us lose confidence in the others as well. That is a direct challenge to democracy.
Those concerned demonstrate such a lack of seriousness and a lack of capability that they make it all feel irrelevant because none of it feels credible because none of them feel credible
So where now? Well perhaps we can expand this wider still. I’ve been explaining that it is strange that among those not benefiting from Labour’s implosion is the SNP. They seem to be getting multiplied by zero too in the new voter stakes. So what if we take ideas and do the same?
It gives me no pleasure to reflect on the giant fall-out between Salvo and its lawyers. I know many people in Salvo and they’re good people, but they all went mad. They honestly thought a judicial body in the UN would break Britain up for them, even against the will of its population. How did they come to believe this? Because they thought about it a lot and became certain.
They hit reality this week as their lawyers explained basic concepts to them, exasperated that anyone could actually believe what they were being asked to believe. This was always going to fall apart, but I don’t think this has cast any positive light on the alternatives.
For example, Believe in Scotland’s convoluted road map has so many unsubstantiated bullet points and such a complex set of mad-cap conditions that it is painful to read. It couldn’t have been a more transparent stunt to scoop up your money for the promises of hope than if they’d sent it addressed from a Nigerian prince.
Which leaves us glancing over to Swinney World and saying ‘right, so is you getting an outright majority now our only chance?’. It isn’t making it look any more convincing to me. The opposite in fact.
We seem to have got into a position where ideas and parties and candidates and leaders and politics and policy are all now in an irreversible downward spiral into complete irrelevance to most people. None of this is irrelevant of course, it’s all very important indeed.
But those concerned demonstrate such a lack of seriousness and a lack of capability that they make it all feel irrelevant because none of it feels credible because none of them feel credible. Managing the machine offers no options, swapping the machine fewer, opting out of the machine altogether not much more plausible than the noise the machine is making.
It is a room of mirrors inhabited by an idiot. No matter where you look all you see is idiocy, reflected in everything. I’m not sure how this ends. But it’s the fact that I know already it’s going to take another dozen Epstein emails, another desperate attempt by Starmer to pretend that ‘sometimes random strangers just start briefing on your behalf and there is nothing anyone can do about it’, and yet another failure of Believe in Scotland to demonstrate it has a clue and of Swinney to gain an outright majority before the next thing happens.
Then we’ll be at the bottom, where nothing is true or real any more. From there? Either someone will come and rescue us or it will be heads on spikes all round.