Love and Liberty

Having a hellish day, so this’ll be truncated, but here are three political moments of the day to catch up with. Though my health’s usually poor, the last week and a half have been much worse than usual, today far more horrible still. My comfort is that, while this is personally my most frustrating election ever, politically it’s looking fantastic, and that’s definitely the right way round! But if you’ve been tuned in to the BBC today, you might have noticed that neither are going well for Liam Fox, Chris Grayling or the world’s least competent political Leader, Lord Pearson:

• Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning just before 8.30 had John Humphrys ask grumpy Tory Liam Fox how they were going to deal with the Liberal Democrat surge in popularity. “Complete positivity,” said Dr Fox, then made four hysterical attacks on Lib Dem policies (all betraying the right-wing old Tory policies he’s much happier with than Mr Cameron’s touchy-feely vacuity) before finishing by saying “And we have to get Gordon Brown out.” He rounded up his array of undiluted bile with the hilarious claim that that was the Tories’ completely positive agenda. Now, obviously, Dr Fox has absolutely nothing left to go on – but was Mr Humphrys actually being paid? A five-year-old could have laughed at Dr Fox, poked him and told him that “Complete positivity” can’t consist of nothing but attacks on other parties and having nothing at all to say about your own.

• BBC2 this afternoon had a clash between the three potential Home Secretaries, hosted by former Murdoch hatchet man Andrew Neil and a proper BBC correspondent at his elbow who actually knew some facts, and – to their credit – they’d got the format down much better than yesterday’s first go, with the same question to all three at several points so viewers can actually compare them. Lib Dem Chris Huhne was excellent: clear, strong and very on top of his facts, with a particularly impressive closing speech highlighting crime fighting that works and the Freedom Bill to sweep away Labour’s authoritarian record. Alan Johnson was there to defend Labour’s authoritarian record (and, though it’s very easy to slip over a word, I do it all the time and it’s very unfair to mention it, I did laugh when he described ID Cards as a “Manifesto mess”) – but I almost felt sorry for Chris Grayling. The BBC having hounded him down and dragged him from his safe house, he looked almost as grey and queasy as I do, and I’ve not seen anyone look more petrified on a TV political panel since the one I totally fucked up when I was 22. Then the poor man opened his mouth…

• By far the least capable, though, and the one I’d love to write about properly if I had the energy, was UKIP Leader Lord Pearson on Radio 4’s Election Call at 1.40 this afternoon. Where to begin? Well, he clearly didn’t know. It’s worth listening to the whole thing – it’s only twenty minutes, and I don’t know whether to feel glad that the BNP’s middle-class mini-me are going down the toilet, sorry that they’ll clearly be incapable of leaching votes from the Tories, or just incredulous at a Leader who’s not remotely up to the job. What would you think of a Liberal Democrat candidate in an absolutely, unimaginably no-hope seat – despite the opinion polls, there surely must still be some seats that Labour or the Conservatives just might win – who’s only just taken over at the last minute, perhaps because a prior candidate fell ill, who went to a local question time in front of a couple of dozen people and, every time they were asked a question about the Lib Dems, replied “I don’t know – I’ve not read our Manifesto.” A little sympathy, perhaps, but it’d be difficult to have much confidence in a vote for someone so lazy and clueless. That was Lord Pearson, earlier. A long-time Conservative activist, then Member of the House of Lords, one of the two Westminster Houses of Parliament. Several times, he was asked for UKIP policy, only to reply (even on people with disabilities, an issue he sounded personally decent about and professed to be interested in),

  “I don’t know – I’m not a professional politician. I’m not sufficiently familiar with our Manifesto.”

  Newsflash: you’re in the House of Lords. You are a professional politician. Just not one that anyone would give a job to. You’re a Party Leader, and you’re supposed to be the one people can call to account on your own policies! He went on: he complained that there weren’t enough questions on Europe – the callers are wrong; he got testy and didn’t know his facts; and, despite saying that immigration was one of only three policy issues he was interested in, when a Briton called to say he worked in France and – with millions of others working in the EU – would lose his rights to residency and reciprocal benefits if UKIP jerked us out of the world’s largest trading area. No, said his Lordship, they’d still have that. The man on the line just laughed: did he seriously think every other country would give us freebies when we’d torn up the treaty that granted them and thrown all their citizens out of the UK? Pearson’s utterly incredible reply:

  “We won’t throw anyone out.”

  Was that a direct lie, or does the man who’s against “immigration” not even support UKIP’s only bang to drum, that there are “too many people here” from the EU? Or is he simply the most incompetent political Leader in the world?

Don’t take my word for it – catch them all on iPlayer.

And as it’s taken me a couple of hours even to write this much, I’m back off to my sickbed. I rang NHS Direct last night (five minutes of ID questioning, repeated three times over – very Labour) when, after a day of feeling like I might be on the road to recovery from the horrible extra stomach illness I’ve had since last week, I suddenly threw up again and was simply fed up with it. When they rang me back, two hours later, to go through all the same questions all over again, I felt reassured: it did sound like it was something that was slowly fading, and not too much to be worried about. They even told me to start eating properly again, and what (no chocolate, sadly). I ate (no chocolate, sadly). At 4am, I woke with a crippling pain in not so much my stomach as my entire torso, and managed to stagger to the bathroom for the most dramatic vomiting since the thing started. My twelve hours since then have essentially repeated the same pattern, of waking, crawling to the bathroom, sipping some water, crawling back, falling into a feverish sleep for half an hour to an hour, then restarting, with occasional breaks stretched out on the floor groaning as I tried to get up energy to do something really taxing, like clean the sink or find the painkillers. It’s not exactly been fun, but I have let occasional BBC news programmes wash over my sickbed.

My health means I’m not up to it – so I’m not asking for anyone to vote me this time. What’s their excuse?

So my level of engagement in this election remains, as I said above, frustrating. If you feel sorry for me and want to make me feel better, all I ask is one tiny little thing: just send a majority of Liberal Democrat MPs to Parliament and make Nick Clegg Prime Minister. There – that’s much less effort than sending a card, some grapes and a box of chocolates, isn’t it?

Labels: BBC, British Politics, Conservatives, Health, Liberal Democrats, Personal, The Today Programme, UKIP