Ghosts of the Barely Civil Undead

If the media consensus is to be believed the UK currently finds itself in middle of an election campaign that has been greeted with public apathy. Presumably, voters are bored for the same reason that shooting fish in a barrel never caught on as a spectator sport: rather than sportingly let her opponents get a head start in the renewed race for number ten, Theresa May called the election when she already had a considerable poll lead.

Unfortunately, bored journalists looking to make a story out of nothing have two sources of potential headlines close at hand: Tony Blair & George Osborne.

Blair's so-called return to politics is, of course, nothing of the sort. He has been a constant feature of the political landscape for the last year: he campaigned against both the Brexit side of referendum & Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour with all the determination of a man who has been on the wrong side of public opinion before and will be damned if he doesn't place himself on the wrong side of it again. Blair is not so much back as ever with us like the poor, and that era of foreign wars of which he was a principal architect.

Osborne, on the other hand, has been licking his wounds since last July. He is a man with a very particular claim to fame, having lead a campaign that failed to secure a Remain vote in the referendum despite having all three governing parties (&, for that matter, the SNP) on his side. As if that failure was not feather enough in his cap he is then reputed to have attempted to have May removed from her post at the Home Office as punishment for her failure to support his campaign more full-throatedly, laying the ground for a splendid reversal of fortunes of the sort more usually found in Game of Thrones.

Last September, it was reported that Osborne was attempting to cast himself as "the Tory opposition to Hard Brexit" and "revealed" that he was "considering a return to front line politics". All very "Tony Blair", who has been threatening something similar in an attempt to hold the media spotlight.

Now, however, Osborne has availed himself of a pulpit somewhat different from the anonymity of the back benches, as he has become the editor of the London Evening Standard, a paper that was described at one point as "a mouthpiece of the Conservative Party" but which has now recovered some measure of independence by trashing May's campaign (by no means unfairly) for its reliance on sloganeering above policy detail.

So here we have two senior politicians - both, in some measure, great successes & stupefying failures - who have decided to bring the force of their debatable insight to bear upon the leaders of their respective parties. Blair is trying to work up some enthusiasm for tactical voting & a progressive alliance; Osborne is sniping at the woman who sacked him, arguably in the hope that he can speed the Wheel of Fortune's inevitable turn towards the moment when he can inherit the party to which he is currently showing disputable loyalty.

Yet neither of these men wishes to serve. They airily speak of returning to politics, but not the politics of constituency surgeries, just the politics of enjoying an unelected vantage point for commentary. They are perfect representatives of the political class that played duck & cover when the EU referendum backfired: the class of which Boris and Cameron are also such perfect examples. They know all about cars just as long as they are kicking someone else's tyres.

And when it comes to unelected vantage points for commentary, the line forms behind Sordel.

Boring Writer Declares Less Boring Writer "Boring" Shock

In the days before Sordel suffered the misfortune of subscribing to a newspaper, I admonished a friend for writing a vituperative series of blogs about columnists. "Set your gaze upon a target lofty enough for your critical muse," I encouraged him.

Yet it comes to this.

Richard Brooks, the "veteran arts reporter" of The Sunday Times, writes what is intended to be a bitchy gossip column by the name of Biteback. This week he turned his attention, inter alia, to Tony Blair, and this (in full) is what he had to say:

"Tony Blair has selected nine of his favourite books for a new literary magazine, We Love This Book. I'm gobsmacked he has actually read nine. Even so, three are religious tracts - no surprises there. At least he remembered to list the boring Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott. After all, it was the one he chose on Desert Island Discs 15 years ago."

Really, Richard? You are gobsmacked that Tony Blair has read nine books? You really are very susceptible to surprise; I would have thought that Tony Blair is exactly the sort of person who would have read nine books.

In any case, it's the sort of line that would be pretty thin if used of Wayne Rooney, but it would need some dressing up for him. Something like: "Wayne Rooney has selected nine of his favourite books for a new literary magazine: I'm surprised his colouring pencils held out that long." (It's not comedy gold, Ladies and Gentlemen, but at least there is a genre of Rooney stupidity jokes.)

With Blair, the jokes are all to do with how much of a liar he is, or how superficial. "Tony Blair has given us a list of his favourite books, which only leaves us to wonder which of them he didn't enjoy and which of them he hasn't read."

Such a missed opportunity.

I'm not convinced by the other jokes, either. I'm sure that many people find Blair boring, but it isn't exactly a satirical staple. Is the joke that Blair is boring and therefore likes boring books? Or is the joke that Walter Scott is boring? If the former, a better joke would be to say that he is too exciting by half. If the latter, well, Scott entertained a lot more people than Brooks ever will and his books are scarcely the dust standard of literary dullness.

Oh, and those "religious tracts"? A look at the Bookseller reassures us that there are no religious tracts in Blair's list. The books are Jesus Was A Jew, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and Martin Lings's biography of Muhammad. These are not exactly the books that one would choose if you were seeking to characterise Blair as a joyless Catholic.

Then again, perhaps Brooks was counting The Lord of the Rings as a religious tract. When it comes to titanic battles of Good and Evil, Blair may have been more Tolkienesque than was entirely to the interest of the rest of us.

After You, Cecil

Other than encouraging the media to discover the word psychodrama and turn it into the new vuvuzela, the catastrophe that befell David Miliband is most notable for bringing to further light a distressing new phenomenon in British Politics: Buggins's Turn.

It began with Mrs. Brown's Little Boy who (for those who cannot remember a time when he was anything other than an object of hissing and derision) was pictured as a sad-faced child looking on in a bereft manner while that nasty Tony boy from next door hogged the Nintendo and crowed about his High Score. "Let Gordy have a turn," encouraged the Great British Public from the doorway while greasing up a cake tin in preparation for High Tea.

Well, the position of Prime Minister is not like your fifteen minutes of fame ... not everyone gets a go.

David Miliband (latest example of the Pod People generation into which our current Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister were hatched in a damp basement some years ago) seems to have thought that letting the sour Scot have a few more moments steering Mario repeatedly off the high cliff and into the rapacious man-eating vegetation below was somehow "the decent thing to do". I suppose with his foot almost upon the stirrup of power, David felt that exquisite pleasure that can be derived from patient expectation.

Quite possibly David was an able Foreign Secretary, although that would be difficult to establish during an era when international detente is actually being conducted by the Ministry of Defence. Like the hare, however, he rather overestimated his supposed lead in this particular race and was to be found napping as his steady reptilian sibling crawled past him and across the Finishing Line.

So now Labour MPs are affronted. Clutching small pieces of coloured paper with numbers written on them and shaking their fists like shoppers at a cheese counter, they turn their fury upon the vuvuzela Ed Miliband.

(The word vuvuzela in my last sentence can (and will) be replaced by ruthless if you are a BBC Political Correspondent.)

Amusing though it was to see David pipped at, and to, the post, for sheer callousness Ed falls well short of the standards of Stalin and Hitler. Unless he actually hangs his brother from a meat hook (something that he might be well-advised to consider) I think that his victory only qualifies for the description "business as usual".

Still, the whole sorry mess has made work for lip-readers who assure us that the comment passed by bad-loser David to Harriet Harman was: "Why are you clapping? You voted for it."

Rarely has the word it been more readily replacable by the word me.