Election Mural

First appeared in Dazed and Confused

To aid my reporting of the general election, Dazed didn’t stump up the £500 a day political parties charge an elite pool of journalists to be ferried around on their ‘battle buses,’ and I’m pretty glad it didn’t. That’s a pretty expensive bus ride, and the smell of journalists’ farts could well be as putrid as some of their coverage. After the first leaders’ debate, one article in the Guardian compared Nick Clegg to Barack Obama with no sense of irony, and another in the Daily Mail compared him to Adolf Hitler. If this is the kind of journalism produced onboard what John McCain dubbed the Straight Talk Express for his presidential campaign, I’m more than happy to say that my coverage of the election owes more to the National Express than any battle bus.

In travelling around the country covering political events, I have concluded that people’s naiveté and apathy towards politics has been replaced by a deep and bitter cynicism towards politicians, and rightly so. When Nick Clegg’s bus rolled in to Eastbourne with his and Vince Cable’s faces pasted onto the side, it brought to mind James Rosenquist’s mural President Elect, where a politician, a bus, and a cake are rendered in the image of a billboard in slippery metallic paintwork. It’s an omen for our culture, where elections have been annexed into the public relations industry, as politicians want to have their cake and eat it. By using the techniques of mass marketing, success is determined by their ability to boil a message down into the simplest, most emotive terms possible, with the main offenders this time around being ‘change’, ‘a new politics’, ‘THE BIG SOCIETY!’, ‘change we can believe in’, ‘tax on jobs’, ‘death tax’, ‘real change’, ‘a fairer system for all’, and the people’s favourite, ‘Broken Britain’ [1].

In the TV debates, we were relieved of our duty to think for ourselves because an on-screen worm told us exactly what we ought to be thinking as it plotted other people’s reactions on a line graph. The most genuine moments of the campaign were ultimately the most tragic, as they highlighted the human cost of modern politics. Rob Marris, an honest, hard-working Labour MP whom I met in Wolverhampton, lost his seat to a sinister Tory who looks like Apu from The Simpsons and campaigned by handing balloons to teenagers who then got high on the helium. On the plus side, Esther Rantzen didn't surf in to parliament on a wave of public outrage/lunacy (delete as appropriate), and at least some of Westminster's corrupt scenery was finally removed from the political stage.

The need to be robotic in order to win an election was shown by the media’s reaction to Gordon Brown in the Mrs Duffy incident, where he was forced to apologise for making a perfectly valid statement when he thought his microphone was off, which only seemed awful to me because he didn’t have the nerve to call the woman a bigot to her face, which he was quite within his rights to do. I’m pleased to see that people are growing wise to the man running for prime minister who pastes his face onto a billboard as though he’s a bottle of Pepsi, and punish him by spray-painting Elvis sideburns, swastika tattoos, and the word cunt on his forehead. But ultimately, they have punished themselves by electing him, in a very roundabout way, to be their prime minister.

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1 Come election time, the Tories had gradually phased out ‘Broken Britain’ as their karaoke classic, and replaced it with similar, but equally vacuous piffle such as ‘The Big Society’. Still, nothing really beats Michael Howard’s ‘Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking?’ in 2005, which is so bad it really could be the name of a Saturday evening game show.