Before the typhoon strikes

Quietly churning away like my stomach at the sight of Amber Rudd tongue-punching Theresa May’s fartbox live on TV, the wheels of democracy have lurched us to the barren cliff edge of election day.

Diane Abbott has jumped off the cliff ahead of Labour Party schedule and is now wallowing in the strange purgatorial realm of ‘illness’ – one that reeks of a sick note from your mum that gets you out of being rugby tackled by the head boy in PE. Only the head boy is now a semi-sentient, permanently concussed farmhand and yet he retains a better grasp on politics than Abbott, which is almost a shame.

The haunted stuffed owl that currently shuffles through No. 10 like a somnambulist, waking in terror at every question fired off by a reporter, somehow still lives, although not in the traditional human sense. Whatever voodoo keeps May alive clearly didn’t work for Abbott. At least she went with a whimper rather than a bang; people are on edge this week and sudden movements make everyone queasy.

Dear Diane is gone now, along with a whole host of forgettable others, but the slaughter is far from over and Friday will be a day that sits uneasily with anyone who’s staked their career on the leaders of our times. There will be no walking wounded when the ballots are counted. This is truly an all or nothing battle to the death, and as Corbyn and May circle one another, switchblades tightly gripped between their teeth, rasping about the NHS, RBS and other three-letter acronyms, the public are sadly granted the power to determine their fate.

In my heart of hearts, or, better still, in my vodka-swollen guts, I know that Labour will lose and Corbyn will be cast, more favourably than expected, into the U-bend of history. Although he’ll soon be torn asunder by the jaws of defeat, it’s worth remembering that for once – in my lifetime at least – we were offered a real choice; the strong stability of the Terminators or the flower-down-the-barrel-of-the-smoking-gun brand of socialism. A fine choice for a nation so bitterly divided, but this isn’t Ed Miliband pulling his sopping wet face out of a recently flushed toilet to assure us he’s “tough enough”. For once Labour can actually enjoy defeat on the grounds that their leader won’t have to commit Seppuku out of sheer national humiliation.

The same cannot be said for May and her successor will have a hard time filling such dull but expensive shoes. Failure to secure anything but a handsome majority will see her chased out of town by a fleet of BMWs and kicked to death by fine Italian leather loafers. Old Tessa knows this is coming and is probably making plans with a private healthcare service having let Jeremy Hunt grin maniacally and suck up this year’s supply of blood donations through a straw.

Hunt is an odd character to have survived all of this, given that he has all the charisma of a dead rodent on the side of a road somewhere outside of Huddersfield. But alas and alack he’s alive whilst many NHS patients are not. Ye gadz man the bastard may even outlive the NHS itself.

Today is not a day for hope – it is, if anything, that strange balmy time before the typhoon strikes and fucks up your tent on a barren island somewhere off the coast of Korea. At least that’s what it feels like out here. The news appears to have forgotten that today signifies the greatest possible chance at redemption our nation is likely to experience in a century and as such reports of psychopaths in Tehran, sob-stories in Washington and Cold War gibberish dominate the headlines. But not for long.

Despite all this, Labour’s defeat has the potential to jam a crowbar into the eye-socket of British politics and blow open a whole new plethora of options. Barring calamity we’ll be able to say that not for a long time has such an authoritarian government won so narrowly over such a left-wing opposition. Given the squeamishness of Brits when it comes to socialism, a narrow defeat should send a signal to all left-field characters across the political spectrum that now is not the time to run back to the middle ground of the interventionist Blair years.

Now may be the best time to dig in heels and start practising what has been fairly perfunctory preaching in recent years. Sanders almost took the DNC nomination before the Democrats fisted America into accepting four years of Trumptastic nightmares – the kind that make good men drown themselves in puddles to escape all this hideousness – but there is clearly an appetite for something beyond the dire realities of today.

Tomorrow is a new day, as they say, but it’s already tomorrow and no amount of hard liquor will keep it from being so. The polls are open and we, the people, will need more than stiff drinks at the ready before they close. Labour’s defeat will not be a surprise to many, especially bookies, but in their failure there are vital lessons to be learned for whoever emerges from the phantom lair of Downing St. tomorrow.

Much in the way that Jimmy Savile will never direct a nativity play again, Theresa May will never fight another political campaign. She’s at least as guilty as Savile, undoubtedly, for the loss of lives that have been incurred through the barrage of Tory policies that she has helped to shape and mould with her taloned hands, but as much as she will go on to stain the party, the nation and humanity in general, she will never amount to the skidmark that Jimmy left on society. Sadly, Jimmy was likeable enough to get away with it all for decades. Old Tessa on the other hand has lost out in opinion polls to cold, crusted vomit revealed by the cold light of Sunday morning, Piers Morgan and herpes – all three of whom would have made a better candidate.

So it’s almost bizarre that in spite of this she will win, but only almost. After 2016 the electorate will accept anything – anything that doesn’t involve the defilement and besmirching of all they hold dear, which is now very little. While Corbyn offers hope in favour of the scorched-earth cynicism of last year, he’s done little to convince those who will never be affected by politics anyway and it is with a heavy heart that we must accept that they are the ones who will hold the keys to number 10 tomorrow.

People failed to spot the madness in Adolf Hitler and learned too late that democracy had been bent over the barrel and shafted by the barbed penis of history. Perhaps in the years that follow those voting Conservative today will have to face the same nightmarish realisation that they were as much a part of the problem as Boris, May, Cameron, Osborne and all the other crooks that led us to the precipice.

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