Watching Politicians Dance

British Labour should have known back in 2006 that they’d never win an election under Gordon Brown.

It was then that the greying Jock geek, having hired consultants to colour up his image, took to mauve ties and talk of music. He volunteered to New Woman that the music of the Arctic Monkeys “really wakes you up in the mornings.”
If Blair had been prompted to produce that piece of bullshit, he’d then have genned up on the Sheffield lads’ oeuvre. But when, a week after the New Woman interview, Brown was pressed to tell more, he couldn’t name a single Arctic Monkeys’ song. What he’d meant, he bumblingly tried to explain, was that an Arctic Monkeys’ song on the radio in the morning would wake you up. And indeed, so it would. If the radio was on. And depending on the volume.
Labour should have given Brown the bum’s rush right there and then. But they didn’t, and are now reaping the result of being led by a man widely regarded as nerdier than his Tory opponent. Historic stuff.
Of course, David Cameron, too, is among nature’s nerds. These things are relative.
I gather that Cameron has claimed The Jam’s ‘Eton Rifles’ is his favourite song. Always felt an affinity with the track, he says, because at the time of its release in 1979, he was a 12-year-old Eton boarder and a member of the junior cadet corps – an actual Eton Rifle!
“It meant a lot, some of those early Jam albums we listened to. I don’t see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs.”
Except, of course, that what they were protesting against was pricks like himself.
“It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps,” Weller said in the New Statesman. He’d written it after seeing footage of Right to Work marchers being jeered by public-school prats as they passed through Eton. It gave The Jam their first hit. Now he’s singing it again, to make plain that a Tory anthem it ain’t.
Pete Doherty has the right take on these chancers: “I can’t tell between death and glory/New Labour and Tory.”
And neither can the British electorate. New Labour has run its race. The Tories are non-starters. Something wicked or wonderful is this way coming soon.