George Costanza, the stocky, balding and painfully insecure anti-hero from the Nineties sitcom, Seinfeld, contended that the lifecycle was backwards.
Instead, he thought, people should die first, then move into an old-age home, get kicked out for being too healthy, collect a pension, pick up a gold watch on their first day of work, retire when young and healthy, enjoy a responsibility-free childhood before finishing off as an orgasm. Curiously, this is how I’ve been experiencing British elections.
Over the last few months, I’ve watched each of the last eight BBC general election night broadcasts, from 1992 to 2019. To be clear — and here’s my last shred of dignity, so enjoy it — I have done this for pleasure, not for the purpose of content creation. As evidence, I did it in the wrong order, starting with the Boris Johnson victory and ending with John Major’s.
The reversal of the ageing process is the most striking consequence. David Dimbleby grows less cantankerous. Ken Clarke sounds the same but by the end is (almost) svelte. Hilariously, the Conservative Party grows more Europhile with every election, going from ‘Get Brexit Done’ to insisting that we must keep our options open on a single currency. The only aspect that remains unchanged by this switcheroo is that Labour starts and ends being hopelessly unelectable.
There are some standout moments, of course. Michael Portillo in 1997, a clip viewed so often that I half expect him to hold on at least once. Less remembered is Portillo’s rather gracious concession speech after losing his Enfield Southgate seat to Stephen Twigg, somewhat in contrast to David Mellor in Putney. Meanwhile, my favourite line to take comes from Jack Straw in 2001, who suggested that Labour’s second landslide, secured on a much-reduced turnout, was not evidence of apathy but a contented electorate.
Inevitably, the exit poll looms large, but it’s sometimes hard to tell why, given that it always seems to be about right and at times unerringly accurate. That is, until I finally reached 1992, an experience akin to meeting your partner’s mother for the first time and finally understanding why they are who they are.
I have some stray observations: the 2010 boat party that came close to jumping the shark, the giddiness of 2017 and the sheer glumness on practically all sides of 2019, reflecting a nation first enthralled and then exhausted by Brexit, finally prepared to offer unconditional surrender to the victors.
I think the principal challenge for election night broadcasts is the audience. Like FA Cup final day, the presenters must cater both to the casual fan and the obsessive, which necessitates explaining the concept of a parliamentary majority to those who have already calculated what a swing of three per cent in Houghton and Sunderland South means for Nuneaton.
Digesting these set-piece events years later and in reverse order, there is an exaggerated sense both of how important each election felt at the time and how the crisis of tomorrow appears to come from nowhere. Brexit, the Great Recession and Iraq.
We are, as the astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
Buying food and wine abroad is a joy
Why is food shopping on holiday total joy while trying to find anything in date at the tiny Tesco’s near Haggerston station such a trudge? OK, I’ve answered my own question. But there is something even sweeter about a rural French supermarket.
The perfectly drinkable bottles of red wine for €3.50, the cheese counter the size of a 19th-century European Grand Duchy and the shame of the “British aisle” with HP sauce and baked beans. This, mes amis, is how they see us.
I much prefer the person I am when shopping abroad. I select all sorts of earthy vegetables, fancy balsamic and those tiny bottles of beer they only seem to sell on the continent (yes, mum, no glass by the pool.)
I figure I might move here until I remember the opinion that will get me extradited: I still think the croissants at Pret are better.
