British Politics Has Never Moved so Fast

In the last few weeks, essentially since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, politics in the UK has never moved so fast…. That fast in fact that by the time I’ve typed this article, it will likely be out of date.

The filming of political satirical shows, such as Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You are generally recorded the day before broadcast, and that normally doesn’t present a problem. I have always thought however, that the producers of those shows must have a right headache when there are political movements afoot over the period between recording and airing.

Well, I’m certainly feeling the pain of those producers now. I’ve sat and considered writing about a political going-on that has piqued my interest, only for news to break affecting it just as I’m in full flow of typing my thoughts.

Of course, I could go back through the already written – and now woefully out of date opinion – and amend it to fit, but somehow that just doesn’t feel right.

Unlike many of the political wranglings over the years that I have written about, and there have been a lot – Brexit itself, elections, scandals, MP’s misbehaving, “The Speaker“, phone hacking, you name it, I’ve written about it for someone, somewhere – this one seems very very different.

Ordinarily with political wrangling, there is a consensus view within the Westminster bubble of what the end game of each protagonist is. Currently, nobody has a bloody clue about what the end-game of what Boris is planning is! Similarly, what on earth is Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn playing at? What’s his game?

The Liberal Democrats are doing well in the polls because they have their firm anti-brexit stance, but no-one seriously believes that Jo Swinson is going to become Prime Minister and that the Lib Dem’s will return many more MP’s than they actually have today. Those that have defected in recent weeks and months to the Lib Dem’s will wholesale be slung out by their electorate, bringing the Lib Dem’s immediately back down to the pre-bubble number of MP’s and then even they could seriously struggle to gain re-election on a no-brexit manifesto.

As of this day, at this hour, right at this moment, apart from an outing on the BBC’s Question Time last night by Richard Tice, where are the Brexit Party? Apart from Nigel Farage’s LBC radio show, he has been out of the media spotlight extremely noticeably in recent weeks.  Then again, it’s all moved so fast that I might have missed tit-bits of coverage here and there with the cacophony of noise coming out of College Green.

My thoughts on this are that the Brexit Party are allowing the Westminster lot to slaughter each other until there’s very little left, and then ride in at the last moment as the saviours and give the impression of picking up the pieces of a politics that has been in civil war for three and a half years. It’s a brave strategy if I’m right, but it will certainly cement Farage’s place in the history books, that’s for sure.

The other problem too, is juggling the responsibilities of daily life, they’ve moved so fast too in recent times and trying to fit in a quick twenty-minutes of quiet time to hammer away at the keyboard and get those thoughts down in the form of something close to making sense.

For those that read my thoughts regularly, making sense is something that takes quite a bit of effort, and if you were to read my initial article drafts, well, making sense would just go completely and utterly out of the window.

When I’m putting together a thought on a particular subject, I tend to try to get down at least a thousand words, allowing me to make that opinion at least in depth and with considered background, research and analysis.

So, I’m considering writing soon about the current state of parliamentary affairs… but with it being moved so fast, I’m hoping there will shortly be a window where the politicians are all held up in traffic, or en-masse questioned by the Sergeant at Arms. The likelihood of that happening in this febrile climate is, well, nil.

I said earlier in this article that I normally like to write about a thousand words…. this article is seven hundred words long, and the breaking news strap has just appeared again on the news channels, so I guess I’d better leave it there and open a new document!