Quite An Experience

The Conservative Party's greatest asset after the Prime Minister has been doing his bit for Daveybloke with a speech in which he mentioned judgement, boldness and leadership in virtually the same breath as Gordon Brown. The hilarity occasioned by that withering piece of sarcasm was doubtless exceeded only by the relish with which the audience heard the Ascended Incarnation of the Vicar of Downing Street proclaim that Daveybloke's slogan, "time for a change", was "the most vacuous in politics". In terms of confirming Daveybloke's Blairite credentials, "time for a change" is certainly vacuous enough; and probably dishonest enough too, since one of Daveybloke's major public-relations problems lies in the obvious fact that he does not intend to change anything, except perhaps by increasing the pace and ferocity of New Labour's fight for the privileges of the rich and corporate. But to hear the vacuity of the Vicar's own most successful imitator condemned by the Vicar himself - by the purveyor of endless verbless claptrap about joined-up government, paradigm shifts and progressive universalism; by the rhetorical grotesque who stood shoulder to shoulder with a nuclear chimpanzee; by the magniloquent psychopath who burbled about kaleidoscopes being shaken; by the pretty straight guy who declared that he would leave soundbites at home to make room for the hand of history on his shoulder; by the drivelling authoritarian who decreed that New Labour was the political wing of the British people; by the Dear Leader who gibbered about a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years - well, we can only hope that those who were privileged to be present had a proper appreciation of the scene, and that there were enough men with airtight tinfoil suits and reinforced buckets to carry away all the vomit.