I am the world’s worst seeker of votes. I get really annoyed with the only people I have a chance of influencing: floating voters. I can’t stand them.
Tories I can vaguely tolerate. Every society has a helping of greedy self-interested snobbish money grabbers, just as even in the most beautiful parks, dog turds lurk. Tories are a fact of life like shingles and scurvy. I have more problems with Liberal Democrats because they are vacuous toads, fervently saying nothing with painfully serious faces. But like muck that falls off your shoe, they have their place.
Floating voters don’t even achieve being mundane. They are airheads, devoid even of a wholesome prejudice. They lack realism and even self-respect, something I noted last weekend when one of their number told me, straight out: “I suppose you’d call me a floater”.
Ladies and gentlemen of a sensitive disposition should turn away from the upcoming paragraph. In it, I intend to define a “floater”.
To me, it is one of those objects that refuse to be flushed away – indicative, I am informed, of a lack of fibre in the diet. They tend to occur when there is a queue outside the only lavatory in the house, or just when you are leaving someone’s home after spending the weekend with them and everyone’s in the car waiting for you. That is a floater, in my book. Floating voters are the human manifestation of the phenomenon.
How can you possibly get to voting age and not know whether you favour working people, the obnoxious rich or dithering geography teachers?
And yet that whole embarrassing charade of leaders’ debates was invented purely to accommodate these mindless mankies. It was an irrelevance to the rest of us. It’s not like we were going to be swung by the debate. To be honest, it would be a tragedy if it were so. Voters have lived in and observed society for a minimum of a couple of decades. After all this, how on earth can they be swayed by three men rabbiting on the telly for a couple of hours?
It’s like supporting a football team. You don’t pause at the turnstile of an Everton-Liverpool derby to ponder whether you’re blue or red. You don’t hang around Ibrox deciding between a blue and a green scarf. You’re not a Gooner and a Lilywhite man. You’re one or the other, for god’s sake.
Women in pubs can be irritating floaters of the non-voting variety, but still displaying the same irksome traits. You know, the ones who stand there holding everything up as they contemplate the stock wide-eyed like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory. They’ve had more than 18 years to decide what they like to drink but when you ask: “What are you having?” they say: “Oh, I don’t know. What do you think?” The indecision is painful considering the seriousness and urgency of the issue.
Yet entire TV debates were staged for these dull uncommitted types. Personally, I can’t for the life of me see why it was done on television. Once we’d made the decision that personalities are more important than politics, why didn’t we go the whole hog and hire the stadium in Nuremburg? That’s surely the way to assess a potential leader. You have to give it to Adolf – if he’d been standing he would have impressed in the leaders’ debate, and his approach would have been much like the vile Nick Clegg. The pair share the policy statement of “We’re different – vote for me and see what happens”. Which should be a fair warning for Lib Dem fanciers: don’t buy before careful examination.
One thing I found a tad strange about those debates was that the leaders of each party all supported our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. So if democracy works, this means there is no opposition to the war. This stands in interesting contrast to the poll conducted by the BBC a month ago which showed 63 per cent wanting British troops withdrawn by Christmas, and last week’s poll which revealed 72 per cent think the war is unwinnable.
It was also rather bizarre to see all the big three gushing about how desperately concerned they were for “our boys”, the armed forces who are “over there” fighting for good against evil. If they are genuinely worried, why don’t they fetch them home to Aldershot? Job done. And it would also save us £2.6 billion a year.
But even this wasn’t as bad as seeing the lads queuing up to label every soldier in our army “a hero”. I can only assume they’ve never been in a boozer with a scrum of squaddies. These lads are thugs. That’s not pejorative – it’s a fact. It’s what we train them for. You don’t want an army of balanced, reasonable thoughtful men of moral courage. You want violent blokes who’ll take orders without question. Well, that’s not heroic, is it? It’s damned stupid.
The fact is that, if they weren’t thugs, they’d be crap soldiers.
Right. I’m back to excrement so I’ll finish there. This column’s becoming distasteful. It’s starting to float.
