The Need for Post-Election Chill

This month it has been almost inevitable that all thoughts/anecdotes/columns turned on the recent upheavals in Westminster. While falling short of the totemic where-were-you significance of JFK’s death and September 11, the last few weeks have come like a series of David Haye combinations and we the electorate are politically punch-drunk and foolishly climbing back in for more rough treatment.

Whichever London speakeasy or Chicken Cottage I find myself in, I can’t seem to get away from it. Election fever has spiked into coalition epilepsy. It’s a television age and the last month has been a real-time montage of compelling set-pieces and we can’t get enough. We’ve been furnished with the Lear-esque tragedy of Brown’s exit, furtive briefcase-wielding lackeys stealing out of back doors and reporting back to their respective Dons and Cameron coaxing the carrier of his unborn child into his vanquished enemy’s palace like some marble-faced Macedonian king.

And then of course there was the gay Hollywood rom-com wedding of Cameron and Clegg in a walled garden in Westminster. The effect was completed by the coiffured dog sat at the feet of the front row of guests. And my, how that gross menagerie laughed when reminded of the difficulties the bride and groom had faced during their early courting; the silliness and spats that nearly ended this fabulous union! How Cleggers delighted them when he asked if Dave had really been rude about him! How nervously they smiled when he pretended to storm off! How they wondered what in fuck was going on when Cameron leant over his lectern beseeching him in falsetto to come back.

Say what you want about Brown, but when we are facing the most horrific public finance cuts in modern memory and a descent into a black hole of interminable strikes and violent street protests, I would rather be told to strap in by a granite-faced Presbyterian joy-vacuum than Bert and Ernie.

On the stroke of midnight somewhere in 2011, when Spain, Ireland and Portugal follow Greece’s demise and the Euro self-eviscerates; when Aberdeen is 843 miles closer to the moon due to the sheer weight of weeping Frenchmen clinging onto the white cliffs of Dover; when Grimsby and Stockton-upon-Tees have raped and pillaged as far south as Milton Keynes and Boris Johnson has lashed scythes to his bike-wheels to keep the mobs of braying peasants outside City Hall at bay, I do not want to have the news broken by a Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister wearing matching pajamas.

Image by Steve Weaver courtesy of Flickr