Blog entry

Farage Calls By-Election in Dangerous Attempt to Let Voters Decide

A politician has responded to political pressure by asking the electorate to judge him. Mateless and Bad Teeth enter the studio to explain why this simple thing is secretly very complicated.

With all the anticipation, we had pretty much worked out that there were only two ultimate endings to the announcement. Either the man would do the obvious thing and put himself back before the voters, or he would do the other obvious thing and not do that. Naturally, this left us shocked, stunned, rattled, disoriented, and in urgent need of a thirty-seven-minute conversation about what his obvious decision revealed about his soul.

Today, I will resign as a member of parliament and ask the people to judge me.

This was where Mateless leaned towards the microphone with the solemnity of a woman announcing the fall of Rome.

“But what does judgment even mean,” she asked, “when the voters are involved?”

Bad Teeth nodded gravely. His teeth, once a national infrastructure concern, now gleamed with the force of a minor airport. He had the manner of a man who had paid privately for orthodontics and intended the country to hear about it through tone alone.

“It’s a very Trumpian move,” he said, because everything was a very Trumpian move if you lacked the patience to describe it properly. “He is refusing to be judged by us, which is sinister, and choosing instead to be judged by the electorate, which is, in its own way, a chilling escalation.”

Mateless inhaled sharply. This was one of her strongest broadcasting techniques. When she did not have evidence, she had breath.

“And what I found so revealing,” she said, “was that he said the people of the constituency should decide. I mean, since when has politics been about asking voters things? There is something almost aggressive about it.”

Bad Teeth agreed. He always agreed at first, before disagreeing in a way that agreed more elaborately.

“Yes, and of course he’ll frame this as democracy,” he said, pronouncing the word as if it had been found under a fridge. “But isn’t democracy exactly the sort of thing a populist would use if he were trying to win an election?”

There was a pause. Both of them understood the seriousness of what had just been uncovered. A politician had responded to political pressure by calling a vote. The implications were almost too large to process.

Mateless continued. “Some people will say, ‘Well, he’s putting himself before his constituents.’ But I think that misses the deeper point, which is that he’s putting himself before his constituents.”

Bad Teeth smiled the terrible smile of a man whose incisors had once known hardship.

“Exactly. It looks like accountability, which is precisely why we must ask whether it is actually the opposite of accountability.”

“And let’s not forget,” Mateless added, “that he seemed angry at the media. Angry. At journalists. For asking questions.”

Bad Teeth gave a low whistle. “That is how democracy dies. Not with silence, but with a man at an airport saying he doesn’t like Sky News.”

By this point, the analysis had become so serious that neither of them could risk mentioning the simple version: he thought the press and Parliament were trying to damage him, so he had decided to ask voters whether they still wanted him. That explanation was far too plain. It lacked pathology. It lacked America. It lacked a way of saying “self-pity” six times while pretending to be worried about constitutional norms.

So Mateless did what Mateless did best. She turned a comprehensible event into a weather system of motive.

“Isn’t this really,” she said, “about weakness?”

Bad Teeth looked moved. Not by the argument, exactly, but by the opportunity.

“Yes,” he said. “It is an act of weakness disguised as strength, which is different from strength disguised as weakness, and very different from our own position, which is contempt disguised as concern.”

And there it was. The old magic. The vanished spell. The belief that if two people in a studio gave the same sneer enough vocabulary, the country would mistake it for truth.