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.