Peter Rhodes on elections, champagne and handing over a poisoned chalice
I suppose, six days after the announcement in the rain, I really ought to wind myself up and say something dazzlingly insightful about the General Election. But it's a tedious outlook, isn't it?
No matter how the activists try to dress it up, this is an uninspiring contest between two very similar, vanilla-flavoured social-democratic parties fighting for a bland patch of centre ground with policies and spending limits so similar that you couldn't slip a playing card between them.
The most truthful thing anyone ever wrote about such contests was the poem On A General Election, a ditty by Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953). Although he doesn't name any party, Belloc is clearly reflecting on the defeat of a Conservative government and the election of a party which claims – unconvincingly – to be radical and different:
The accursed power which stands on Privilege
(And goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge)
