Tuesday 12 May 2015

An ovation for Nigel

Like Ceres, the general election result had a few small, bright spots, chief among these being Nigel Farage going through with his promise to resign if not elected. So I was disappointed and unimpressed to see him reneging on his promise at the first possible opportunity (resigning on a Friday and coming back the next Monday may technically count as resigning, but only in the idiosyncratic sense that Bill Clinton 'did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinski').

This bright spot has shrunk but it hasn't disappeared altogether. When Farage resigned, I was in the Milton Keynes football stadium, helping with the count for the local* elections. At the stadium, they had big screens with the BBC news coverage of the breaking general election results.

Mostly, people got on with what they were doing and kept any thoughts about the results to themselves. But when the news came in that Farage had quit, most people stopped for a moment and spontaneous applause echoed round the huge room. It did my heart good to know that it wasn't just me, my friends,  the 'biased' audience in that TV debate and the other inhabitants of my personal filter bubble who were unimpressed by the Scapegoat-Finder General's 'I'm just a straight-talking bloke, not one of those two-faced politicians' sales pitch.

Now that he's  publicly blown his sales patter by squirming out of his most public promise, I'm hoping that even more people will be clapping the next time he takes a fall.

So what are you going to promise us next, Weasel Boy? Do tell.



*As I'd been poll clerking from 7am to 10pm the previous day, I was up for helping to count the locals for which started at 9.30am on Friday, but not the general election results, which were being totted up from shortly after the close of polling until what-bloody-time-do-you-call-this? in the morning.

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