I can make you hate (27 page)

Still, if broadcasting the storyline was
fairly
crazy, complaining to Ofcom about the lack of realism in
EastEnders
doesn’t seem much saner – almost on a par with threatening to sue the manufacturers of Monster Munch because their crisps don’t taste of monsters.

Nonetheless, the BBC appears to have backed down and the storyline, in a weird reflection of itself, will be laid to rest prematurely. The mad God of Walford originally wanted the zany saga to reach a festive climax next Christmas Day, typically. But now the whole thing will apparently be rewritten to accommodate a viewer-friendly ‘happy ending’.

Yes: that’s a cot-death-baby-swap storyline
with a happy ending
.

Now there’s a script meeting I’d like to sit in on.

Nick Clegg – currently Britain’s 7,358th most popular public figure, sandwiched between Maxine Carr and the Go Compare
tenor – has written an article for the
Sun
in which he bravely stands shoulder-to-shoulder with a shamefully overlooked, uniquely burdened segment of our population.

And he’s obviously given the matter plenty of thought.

‘Now more than ever, politicians have to be clear who they are standing up for,’ he writes. ‘Be in no doubt, I am clear about who that is.’

Who? Ethnic minorities? The poor? The disabled? The original lineup of Gerry and the Pacemakers? Beekeepers? Milkmen? Necrophiles? Yeomen?

No. They can all piss off. Because Cleggsy Bear has someone else in mind. But despite claiming to be ‘clear about who that is’, it’s a group he defines in the vaguest, most frustrating terms possible – almost as if he doesn’t really know what the hell he’s going on about.

He’s on the side of ‘Alarm Clock Britain’, apparently. Yeah. You know: Alarm Clock Britain. Stop staring blankly at me. Alarm Clock Britain! It’s everywhere!

‘There are millions of people in Alarm Clock Britain,’ Clegg writes. ‘People, like
Sun
readers, who have to get up every morning and work hard to get on in life.’

Basically, Alarm Clock Britain consists of people who use alarm clocks. That counts me out, because I wake each morning to the sound of my own despairing screams. Which I guess makes me part of Scream Wake Britain – a demographic Clegg has chosen to ignore. There are millions of people in Scream Wake Britain, and approximately half of them voted for him.

Still, it’s undeniable that millions of Britons use alarm clocks, so it’s nice to know someone at the heart of government is prepared to speak up on their behalf. We are yet to discover Clegg’s stance on Toothbrush Britain (Britons who use toothbrushes), or Bum Wipe Britain (Britons who use toilet paper), or Newtonian Physics Britain (Britons subjected to the law of gravity), but I think it’s fair to assume he’s on their side too.

Which is not to say Alarm Clock Britain is an amorphous group with no boundaries whatsoever. Students, for instance, are notorious for waking up late, so they’re definitely excluded, which is just as well since the average student trusts Clegg about as much as I’d trust a hammock made of gas.

Anyway, Clegg goes on to pepper the phrase Alarm Clock Britain throughout the rest of the article as often as he can, as though it’s some kind of transformative mantra, in the apparent belief that the more he repeats it, the more we’ll identify with it. He even managed to slip it into TV interviews, telling BBC News that he could understand why ‘the people of what I like to call Alarm Clock Britain’ are pissed off about bankers’ bonuses (not that he promised to actually do anything about it – one of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough).

The trouble is that no one apart from Clegg himself is talking about Alarm Clock Britain (unless, like me, they’re mocking him in print), so his attempt to seed this spectacularly meaningless catchphrase into the national conversation merely comes across as desperate.

It reminds me of a heartbreaking
Peanuts
comic strip in which Charlie Brown, in a rare moment of unguarded candour, tells Lucy he wishes he had a better nickname.

‘I’ve always wanted to be called Flash,’ he says. ‘I hate the name Charlie. I’d like to be real athletic so that everybody would call me Flash. I’d like to be so good at everything that all around school I’d be known as Flash.’

Lucy stares at him for a bit before laughing out loud, incredulously cackling the name ‘
FLASH
?!?’ a few times, before running off to share this hilarious news with the rest of the gang. Charlie Brown is left standing in the frame on his own, looking as suicidal as it’s possible for a circle with dots for eyes to look.

Still, it’s not as if Clegg’s been the only one trying to attach a preposterous name to a group of potential voters. Unstoppable
political dynamo Ed Miliband recently tried appealing to ‘The Squeezed Middle’, which sounds like a frighteningly nonspecific sandwich filling, but is, in fact, precisely the same group as Alarm Clock Britain – middle-income households too rich to rely on benefits, too poor to shrug off VAT rises. As if this group didn’t have enough to contend with, they now have to face the ignominy of their parliamentary representatives failing to rustle up a media-friendly pigeonhole term that defines them.

Maybe Cameron could enter the fray, and start calling them ‘The Nameless Ones’ or just ‘Thingy People’. Or ‘Thingy Things’. ‘Things with Feet’. ‘Feety Folk’.

Yes! Only when our leaders outline their desire to walk a mile in the shoes of Feety Folk Britain will we appreciate how much they truly value us.

Poor old Ed Miliband. Those aren’t my words. Those are the words your mind thinks whenever you see him on television. And then you feel bad for thinking that, which makes you feel vaguely sorry for him again, and that in turns feeds back into the initial pity you experienced, and the whole thing becomes a sort of infinite commiseration loop that drowns out whatever he’s actually saying and doing.

I keep reading that if he really wants to build support for Labour, Miliband doesn’t actually have to do anything: just sit back, let the coalition slowly appal and repel the population, and voilà: future votes will be his, by osmosis. This low-risk strategy seemed to be working. And then, bafflingly, over the past few weeks he’s decided to break the spell by granting interviews and popping up for photo opportunities.

First he was interviewed by Piers Morgan for
GQ
magazine. Incredibly, he managed to withstand the urge to vomit long 
enough to describe himself as ‘a bit square’, and mutter something about wanting to share a desert island with Teri Hatcher, Rachel Weisz and Scarlett Johansson. I can’t work out whether that’s a reality show I’d like to see or not.

Then he went to Afghanistan, shadowed by ITN’s Tom Bradby, who was compiling a profile piece. Unfortunately, Ed looks incredibly silly in a helmet and flak jacket. Like a toucan in a fez, it just doesn’t go. Rather than making Ed look like a thrusting leader, the end result was several minutes of footage which, with the sound off, looked like a report about a small boy who’d won a competition to go and see a war.

You can understand why his press advisers keep shoving him in front of the microphones and cameras. They want the voting public to get to know him. The trouble is they’re getting to know him as ‘that drippy guy’. It’s not his fault. He’s burdened with an inherently drippy demeanour. Image shouldn’t matter, but it’s impossible to blot out.

Rather than making Ed more accessible, his PR team should be doing the opposite. He’s never going to come across as ‘one of us’, so why not actively go in the other direction? Make him unknowably distant.

Here’s an idea: get Ed to seal himself inside a featureless metal cube and insist on conducting all political business from within it. And vow never to be seen in public outside the box. No nerdy face for us to judge, no wet mannerisms to chortle at. Nothing to get a glib critical foothold on. Just cold, blank steel. Ditch the name Ed Miliband and insist on being referred to as ‘
CUBE DX
-9’ instead.

CUBE DX
-9 wouldn’t speak, either. It would communicate exclusively via typewritten messages, each about the length of a fortune cookie prediction, which would come whirring out of a tiny slot on its front. Crucially, these would be brief, gnomic proclamations about sensitive issues that would a) be open to interpretation and b) provoke intense debate. And once
any debate had started,
CUBE
DX
-9 would refuse to be drawn into it.
CUBE DX
-9 never clarifies its position. It simply issues a contentious statement, maintains an enigmatic silence, and trundles away, leaving argument in its wake. Did I mention
CUBE
DX
-9 has wheels? Well it does. It also has an ear-splitting siren that goes off whenever someone tries to touch it.

Admit it. You think it’s a stupid idea. But think again. Picture the first Prime Minister’s Questions in which David Cameron finds himself going up against
CUBE DX
-9. For one thing, he’d look pretty desperate arguing with a box. Also, the agonising delay between responses from
CUBE DX
-9 would remove the element of pantomime jousting and turn the whole thing into a tense psychological thriller. Sometimes
CUBE DX
-9 would fall silent for a full forty-five minutes, emitting a low hum or possibly the odd bit of smoke. Will it issue another statement? Is it broken? What’s it going to say next? Every time you saw it, the surrounding aura of mystery would be irresistible.

Furthermore, since the public would never get to see what’s inside
CUBE DX
-9, there would also be intense debate over whether Ed Miliband was actually in there or not. Naturally,
CUBE DX
-9 would simply ignore any inquiries on this subject, or shrug them off by issuing a statement such as ‘
CUBE DX
-9
CONTENTS NOT YOUR CONCERN
’, then firing a laser bolt over the interviewer’s head as a warning not to proceed with that line of questioning.

I’d vote for the sod. And in the aftermath of
CUBE DX
-9’s inevitable election to the highest office in the land, political leaders worldwide would be clamouring for an inscrutable impersonal shell of their own. Before long there’d be a Chilean mayor who rolls around inside a gigantic onyx egg, and a German chancellor who consists of nothing but a runic symbol flickering on a monitor accompanied by a vaguely menacing drone.

And we’ll all feel much better about our elected masters. Yes we will. Stop lying. We will.

Tory chairman Baroness Warsi recently complained that
Islamophobic
chatter had become acceptable at dinner parties. I hate to break it to you, Baroness, but if they’re saying anti-Islamic stuff while you’re sitting at the table, imagine the kind of thing they come out with when you nip off to the loo.

A few weeks later, David Cameron delivered a speech on
multiculturalism
, and Warsi’s notional dinner-mates doubtless nodded in agreement, even though the very word ‘multiculturalism’ has so many definitions it almost requires translation. It’s not black and white. Which is ironic.

As a result it was possible to draw almost any conclusion from Cameron’s speech, from ‘segregation is unhelpful’ to ‘send ’em back’. Cameron is many things – including an android, probably – but a racist he is not.

So he was doubtless dismayed that his speech went down well with the BNP’s Nick Griffin, who interpreted it as a ‘huge leap for our ideas into the political mainstream’. When I read that, my sense of hope took a huge leap into a shit-filled dustbin.

The speech was also welcomed by Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League – and Stephen Lennon of the English Defence League. Who are both the same person, Robinson being Lennon’s pseudonym. Mr Robinson–Lennon claims he’s opposed only to extremist Muslims, not moderate ones, although how he hopes to tell them apart when he seems unsure of his own name is anyone’s guess.

But then certain elements of the EDL seem confused by names in general. Several of them have been heard chanting ‘Allah, Allah, who the fuck is Allah?’ If they don’t know who the fuck he is, perhaps they ought to read that book they want to ban.

Robinson–Lennon recently appeared on
Newsnight
, up against Paxman. Not a classic battle of wits, but nonetheless the EDL’s
man came out on top: while middle-class viewers may have chortled at Robinson-Lennon’s relative inarticulacy, others may have seen a member of the establishment sneering at a
working-class
white guy. Admittedly, Paxman sneers at everybody; he can’t catch sight of his own reflection in the back of a spoon without asking who the fuck he thinks he is. But it reinforces the view that the white working classes are marginalised and looked down on by the media.

Not the entire media, mind. Some tabloids do little else but speak up for the white working classes – the
Daily Star
in particular. Which would be great, if the
Daily Star
didn’t patronise its readers by repeatedly publishing lies.

Sometimes they’re daft lies. Take the lie about the company behind
Grand Theft Auto
planning a game called
Grand Theft Rothbury,
inspired by the Raoul Moat saga. ‘We made no attempt to check the accuracy of the story before publication … We apologise for publishing a mock-up of the game cover, our own comments on the matter and soliciting critical comments from a grieving family member,’ read part of the paper’s subsequent grovelling apology.