Rod Liddle
Already a subscriber? Log in
But Boulton versus Campbell; it had a certain resonance, this contest, and raised one or two questions. Why, actually, was Campbell there at all, for a start? Why and through what mechanism, when we have just voted, was this smug dissembler suddenly deposited upon us, when we had thought he had bitten the dust half a decade back, having wrought havoc and brought the government into disrepute? Is he on a payroll? Who appointed him to march into Downing Street and then emerge to tell us those familiar porkie-pies? Is he doing it all for free, or on a short-term consultancy basis? Campbell, who ‘tweets’ on ‘Twitter’, accused Boulton of having longed for a Tory victory — a familiar Campbell tactic and one he has deployed in the past against others who have dared to question him, such as Andrew Gilligan and the patently neutral BBC political editor Nick Robinson.
Campbell has no grasp of the objectively derived question, of an inquiry motivated by a simple wish to discern the truth — a consequence, one supposes, of him never having been a journalist, but instead a serial propagandist with scant respect for the truth. But his attack upon Boulton also reflected similar bile which has been rolling around the internet for the past few weeks, stuff from the liberal metropolitan mentalists, busy little obsessives who are without not merely a life but also a sense of proportion, who can see a right-wing conspiracy in everything. You can watch clips of Boulton portrayed as a ‘Tory Boy’ on YouTube too, together with commentaries about how he is Rupert Murdoch’s emissary on earth, here among us solely to dupe us all into voting Conservative, which is what Rupert wants because he is incredibly rich and probably has a yacht and what’s more his friends are incredibly rich too, etc.
Does anyone, other than Alastair and the blogging libtard cretinati, believe this is really how things work? That journos such as Boulton are sort of not terribly desirable versions of the Stepford Wives, controlled by some malevolent force from afar, automaton agents of reaction? Grow up; such a world view was ludicrous even back in 1973. Remember — this election was tipped, months back, to be the internet election, where blogging and tweeting and poking and what-have-you would have some sort of decisive effect upon the outcome, and so the politicians had better engage with it. As one of the very few readable bloggers — Iain Dale — put it, in the event the internet was an irrelevance. It had no effect. Plenty of people use the internet, of course, because it is a useful tool; but only a pitiable and minuscule minority spend their lives appended to it, seething with rage and feverishly tapping away as the day shades into night and night shades into morning. They believe it is democracy in action, the internet — and so it is, if nobody takes any notice of it whatsoever. Here’s a mistake you might hope we will not make again, that the obsessives are representative of the population as a whole. I mean, they think that they should be, but they’re not.
But Campbell, in that hilarious spat, had a point too, in suggesting that Mr Boulton took himself a little too seriously. Because the other consequence of this fabulously confusing election is that the experts, the Westminster lobby boys and the serious-minded pundits, the amateur psephologists, the correspondents, the political presenters — well, they knew nothing either, in the end. They got the big story quite wrong. They were altogether too credulous, too avid for that apparent sudden spurt of newness exemplified by Nick Clegg in the first debate, unable to see the wood for the trees. It never occurred to me that Clegg would get more than 24 per cent of the vote — and in Westminster terms, I know nothing. But the electorate is always more intelligent than the experts take them for; they objected to the schtick of the two main parties and found Clegg, during those debates, refreshing by comparison — much as they might have found you refreshing by comparison, especially if you’d offered them a drink.
And one way to express that disillusion with the two main parties was to answer opinion polls on the nights in question with a cross beside the name of Nick Clegg. But they were never going to do that on election day — what do you take them for? And yet all of Westminster was gulled, taken for a ride. Trust nobody.
Also in Society
Also by Rod Liddle
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in