Choice Questions

Every now and then (and it can only get worse) one runs into a large, plain white poster with a question scrawled on it in those pseudo-pencil-line letters which make normal everyday print such a delight to the eyes. The question is usually a rhetorical one, like "How would you feel if a bloke on early release assaulted your daughter?" This rather fatuous Daily Mail query to Michael Howard's idea of the man in the street is followed by another question, which is common to all the posters and seems to be some kind of Zen riddle, wherein the key is not so much to find a definite answer as to meditate upon the mystery: "Are you thinking what we're thinking?"

Am I thinking what they're thinking? Well, gosh, I wonder.

Although no general election has yet been called, the campaign has well and truly opened. Strictly speaking, of course, it opened as soon as the results from the last general election were announced; the standard campaign in our ad-man's democracy now consists of four years of soundbites followed by three months of hydrophobia.

These signs, then, are the early symptoms of Conservative electoral zeal; the twitches and yaps which precede the foaming at the mouth and the fleeing from places with a high moisture content, like the Liberal Democrats. I suppose we can take a certain comfort in the obvious fact that a decade and a half of Conservative maladroitness has not yet come to an end. Red-eyed Tony and "New Labour, new danger" was bad enough, but the implication that the perpetrators of the new Mental Health Act and the recent Prevention of Terrorism Bill are a lot of bleeding heart liberals just dying to get hardened criminals back on the streets is almost as ludicrous as the claim of a different poster ("How much does it take to keep a hospital clean? Are you thinking what we're thinking?") that the NHS would be any safer under the Conservatives.

Even at three months' distance, you can see the way it's going. In keeping with tradition, neither of the two main parties will be content merely to claim the ability to run the country; we must prepare for weeks of Heath Robinson policy-making as each tries to out-radical the other. If the war criminal proposes to incarcerate "terror suspects" without charge, the vampire will want longer prison sentences for parking offenders. If the wild-eyed one wants asylum seekers sent back where they came from, the dead-eyed one will demand they be deported to the dark side of the moon. And if the slimy one is resolved to follow George W Bush unto the ever more foreseeable end of civilisation, the other slimy one is probably preparing even now to take George W Bush by his sweaty little paw and lead him there.