WARNING: WILL NOT LEAVE YOU
Here’s a surprise: a book by ITV political editor Robert Peston about the World Tennis Federation. Only kidding! The slangy title is intended to present Peston as a millennial guy, thoroughly at home with Twitter and WhatsApp – and thus ideally qualified to explain last year’s political eruptions to more analogueminded readers.
‘I didn’t vote for Brexit,’ he writes, ‘and I would never have voted for Trump.’ No surprise, perhaps, but it’s unusual for a supposedly neutral political reporter to be quite so candid. I wonder what his employers at ITV News will make of that.
Peston thinks both Trump and Brexit are ‘poisonous’, but also sees them as necessary purgatives. Like the implausible rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the overnight success of Emmanuel Macron, they represent ‘long overdue’ revolts against the smug, liberal elite.
The bizarre thing, as he points out, is that these insurrections were led by members of the elite, even if they did pose as outsiders. Corbyn, a Westminster politician for almost 35 years, assumed the guise of a latter-day Cincinnatus, reluctantly summoned from his allotment to save the republic.
When voters wanted to stick two fingers up to the ruling class, they voted for a mega-tycoon in America and for ‘quintessential posh buffoon’ Boris Johnson in the EU referendum.
Peston describes The Donald and BoJo as ‘great bulging bags
When voters wanted to stick two fingers up to the ruling class, they voted for a tycoon and a ‘buffoon’
*ROLLING ON FLOOR, LAUGHING... BUT YOU KNEW THAT, OF COURSE!