Your Party is a circus – but so are all the others

My own personal highlight is a bit of a niche one, and you may have missed it altogether if you didn’t spend enough time on social media over the weekend. It was a screengrab posted by a journalist from the main hall, and included the large screen that towered over the attendees. “THIS IS YOUR PARTY”, it screamed, which, huh, fine, yes.

Most importantly, the screen also showed subtitles for whatever was going on, but something had clearly happened to their software, meaning that the words being shown to the whole venue were: “Dogs put down the Queens tail Antique real jump. Ridiculous. Join their laughter. The brothers are legal now.” Go on, try to say it out loud; maybe recite it dramatically like it’s poetry. It’s surprisingly hard to get to the end without choking with laughter. The brothers are legal now!

Eventually, online sleuths – well, indie legend Tracey Thorn – concluded that the screen was showing mangled lyrics from what must have been the song playing in the conference room, Glad To Be Gay, by the Tom Robinson Band. Clearly, everything had gone quite, quite wrong. This, in a crowded field, was my cherry on top, though I really did enjoy the entire comical mess – it brought levity to what have been quite hypnotically dour times in British politics.

Why did it also leave me feeling a bit forlorn, then? I never rooted for YP, an outfit formed of people who previously proved they were unfit to run even a school fete, and others who would have all LGBT people and feminists stay well away from any and all school events. It was obviously always going to fail. I was neither surprised nor particularly saddened.

Still, something tugged at me. Sure, I had fun watching them slip on one banana skin after another, but I also wondered why no-one could actually bother having robust ideas anymore. There was, once upon a time, a rich intellectual tradition in the Conservative Party, and it has now become so devoid of anything resembling a brain cell that Kemi Badenoch recently argued that the concept of welfare is somehow unchristian.

Somehow, the natural party of government is being cannibalised by Reform, Nigel Farage’s nth personal vehicle which stands for “whatever Nigel Farage thinks he needs to say to win”.

Suggested Reading

How Corbyn lost the room

Jaydee Seaforth

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is one that veers from crisis to crisis and only ever takes decisions when enough internal polls and focus groups show that maybe, just maybe, it’s the right way to go. Stripped of an ideological guiding light, they merely fumble in the dark, constantly hoping to live another day.

There probably was and is a space for the Liberal Democrats to rise above expectations, but their policy platform remains either bland or incomplete. What would Ed Davey’s Britain look like? It’s hard to tell. Henri IV of France promised a chicken in every pot; maybe, under a Lib Dem government, every home could come with its own inflatable slide.

The Green Party is having a terrific time right now, and Zack Polanski certainly seems to know what he’s doing, but his media appearances don’t half make it feel like someone in their HQ typed “left populism” on ChatGPT and gave him a series of bullet points. The leader is able to get attention, but would his policies actually survive contact with real life? You probably wouldn’t put your savings on it.

It may seem tired and trite to argue that politics simply was better in the olden days, but it certainly feels that, even a decade or so ago, actual ideas and visions were being debated. There was, on both sides of the aisle, intellectual heft to be found, if not always on the front benches, then certainly around the broader parliamentary parties.

We now have more of those than ever, and what has that given us? Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right and hey, here I am, stuck in the middle with you. Thank god the brothers are legal now. At least there’s that.