I’m with Brenda from Bristol — I’ve had a bellyful of elections!
BRENDA from Bristol spoke for Britain. Ambushed on her doorstep by a BBC reporter seeking reaction to Theresa May’s decision to call a General Election, Brenda shrieked in disbelief: ‘You’re joking! Not ANOTHER ONE?
‘oh, for God’s sake, I can’t, honestly, I can’t stand this. There’s too much politics going on at the moment. why does she need to do it?’
This exasperated west Country matron summed up my sentiments exactly. And I suspect most of yours, too, whichever way you voted in the Brexit referendum.
when Radio 2 interrupted the Ken Bruce Show with the news from Downing Street, I almost choked on my mid-morning coffee. Those of you listening on car radios could be forgiven for swerving off the road. After the relative respite of the Easter weekend, it was back to politics with a vengeance. Don’t these people ever take a day off? Apparently not. Mother Theresa is reported to have decided to go to the country during a walking holiday in wales, when she was supposed to be breathing fresh air and clearing her head, away from the pressures of office.
But while we were working our way through hot cross buns and chocolate eggs, her always-on political brain was whirring away, calculating her chances of winning a landslide victory.
Couldn’t she have made her mind up last week? At least that way the election could have been held to coincide with the local elections on May 4.
Perhaps she was worried that if she fired the starting gun too soon, the Boys in the Bubble would start trucking in lorryloads of asphalt over the holiday weekend.
College Green, opposite Parliament, is already starting to resemble westminster’s answer to Britain’s biggest illegal travellers’ camp at Dale Farm in Essex.
Yesterday it was teeming with gipsies, tramps and thieves from the political class, queueing up to have their three minutes with Sky’s Adam Boulton, resident ringmaster on these occasions, who has been known to sleep in his suit rather than miss a moment’s ‘Breaking News’.
How long before the broadcasters start setting up mobile homes and burning a few tyres to keep warm? As it is they’ll be there for at least the next seven weeks — and probably much longer.
It took ten years to evict the stragglers from Dale Farm. The politicians and TV pundits will have to be dragged screaming and kicking from College Green long after we’ve left the EU.
The election won’t be held until June 8, so before then we’ll be forced to endure one of the longest official campaigns on record. The country has already been in election mode for the past twoand-a-half years.
The 2015 General Election effectively began in January and was followed by a year-long EU referendum campaign.
we thought the decision to Leave was settled once and for all in June 2016. we thought wrong.
Ever since, the national discourse has been dominated by assorted refuseniks, Remoaners, malcontents, members of the House of Lords and Supreme Court judges doing their damnedest to derail Brexit.
well, now they’ve got the second referendum they wanted — dressed up as a General Election. But why the hell should we need seven weeks to sort it out?
Some of us are old enough to remember the days when General Election campaigns lasted three weeks, tops.
The responsibility/blame for our second vote in two years lies squarely at the door of all those who refused to accept the democratic will of the people.
I can understand entirely why Mrs May has gone back on her earlier determination not to call an election until the end of the fixed term in 2020.
The Tiny Tim Farrons, Anna Soubrys, Nicky Morgans, Cleggs, Mandelsons, et al, have tried to frustrate Brexit at every turn.
The unelected House of Lords is determined to wreck the whole process. Normal parliamentary business has become increasingly impossible.
Now their bluff has been called. It’s time to lance the boil before they can sabotage our formal negotiations with the EU.
what was needed was a short, sharp shock — not a protracted seven-week campaign, with all the opportunity for mischief and mayhem that presents. Theresa clearly wants her own mandate, encompassing not just Brexit, but a much broader agenda.
Fair play to her. Unlike gutless Gordon Brown, who bottled calling an election which he could have won comfortably, May has cast caution to the wind.
Having spent the EU referendum campaign hiding behind the sofa, she has embraced Brexit with the zeal of the convert and, to her credit, has decided to put her political career on the line in pursuit of that goal.
It would be churlish not to congratulate her on her courage. But it still has the potential to blow up in her face.
oK, some might say Mrs May’s not taking much of a gamble, given that she’s got a 21-point lead in the polls and Labour appears to be in a death spiral.
The pollsters and the ‘experts’ predict that she’ll romp home with a three-figure majority. But the pollsters and ‘experts’ have been spectacularly wrong before. If we’ve learned one thing, it’s not to trust opinion polls.
Another thing those of us a little longer in the tooth have learned is that voters don’t like unnecessary elections and are capable of punishing those who call them.
The first General Election I covered was in 1974, when Grocer Heath went to the country early on the question of who runs Britain — the Government or the unions? He didn’t get the answer he was looking for.
Seven weeks is a long time to have the politicians in our faces 24/7. Voter fatigue can easily set in.
This may seem a straightforward choice between a popular Prime Minister determined to implement the will of the people and an opposition led by a hapless, IRA-loving, Hezbollah-worshipping North London Trot, wedded to sky-high taxes and suffocating state control.
But the headline figures don’t always tell the full story.
THIS isn’t a straight yes/ no election, like the referendum. The Tories may be miles ahead, but it will be fought on the old constituency boundaries, which give Labour an inbuilt advantage.
Since the implosion of Ukip, which did Labour so much damage in the North, there’s no guarantee that former Faragista voters will automatically switch to the Conservatives. Come election time, old tribal Labour loyalties may kick back in.
The Lib Dems might be a rabble led by a spotty schoolboy, but no less a figure than Tory strategist Lynton Crosby warned recently that they pose a serious threat in Remain areas, such as South-west London and the South west of England.
There’s ample time for what Harold Macmillan called ‘events, dear boy’ to crash the party.
what if Donald Trump’s foreign adventures escalate into fullblown engagement in Syria or North Korea?
Britain would be bound to support America, which would bring the Stop The war gang back onto the streets and provide Corbyn with a perfect pulpit. who knows how that could play out?
It would take only one baby dying on a hospital trolley to push the NHS to the top of the agenda. Tory ‘cuts’ would be blamed — and then what?
Look, I hope that Theresa May romps home, even though I’ve never been a fan, because I want a tungsten-tipped Brexit. Not that I’m convinced that, when push comes to shove, she’ll deliver everything we thought we were getting when we voted Leave. But she’s the only show in town right now.
with any luck a few treacherous Tories such as Soubry will lose their seats into the bargain, and wee Burney’s Toytown Tartanistas will get a nasty surprise, too.
what I’m dreading is seven weeks of wall-to-wall politicking, endless opinion polls, Question Time specials and TV debates.
The truth is May should have triggered Article 50 the day she moved into No10. Although she’s ostensibly being bold now, she’s spent far too long dithering.
The 17.4 million who voted Leave last June didn’t think they’d have to go through another General Election a year later before their decision could be implemented.
May’s biggest obstacle is voter cynicism and disgust at the self-serving antics of the entire political class.
No wonder Brenda from Bristol reacted as she did yesterday. ‘You’re joking! Not ANoTHER oNE? oh, for God’s sake, I can’t, honestly, I can’t stand this.’
Me neither, Brenda.