Frankie Boyle’s conference roundup: Labour’s haunted tennis ball and the Slytherin chancellor

[Denzil_DC]

Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle sketches the party conferences so far. Nobody is spared.

After the second world war, Melanesian islanders formed cargo cults near abandoned airfields. They thought that if they carried out the rituals they had observed the troops performing at the American air force bases, planes would land. So they would march up and down in improvised uniforms performing parade ground drills with wooden rifles, believing that if the rites were performed correctly the planes would return and bring them cargo. I only mention this as a useful point of comparison for the Liberal Democrat conference. An isolated tribe going through the formal motions of something they think will bring votes, failing to understand that their actions are meaningless and vestigial. In fact, it’s more like the tribe had recently been allowed to fly a plane and had smashed it right into a mountain and nobody was ever going to let them anywhere near a plane again until the world was over.

Labour’s conference featured quite an impressive run-up by Jeremy Corbyn, tackling TV interviewers like a soothing GP talking to a hypochondriac. There was remarkably little infighting at the conference, as happens when a party realises it needs to put divisions aside and show solidarity to become electable, or, indeed, when two separate halves of a party loathe each other so much that they have to go to different sets of meetings.

Corbyn took to the stage with his head like a haunted tennis ball, and the general air of a pigeon that had inherited a suit. His speech lasted 59 minutes, one minute for every Labour MP who would like to see him fed into a sausage machine. The new Labour leader insisted, “Leadership is about listening.” If leadership is about listening, the great political speeches would have been a little different. Churchill saying, “Can you tell me what you’d like to do on the beaches?” Or Martin Luther King, surrounded by civil right activists at the Lincoln Memorial: “Did everyone hear that? He said a dog came into his bedroom but it had the head of his dead mother … it sang the Camptown Races and then all his teeth fell out. That’s a great one. OK, hands up who’s got another dream?”

Many in the party think Corbyn won’t last the full term, especially if we have a couple of cold winters. Actually, I have high hopes for him and his deputy Tom Watson, who could be mistaken, in a low light, for a chest of drawers with a telly on top. Perhaps their contrasting styles will complement each other. Corbyn looks like he will be killed by a mole from the secret services, Watson by a roll from the motorway services. Corbyn even came to the rescue of a speaker at the conference when her wheelchair became stuck while on stage. If it had been the Tories, she would have been removed by Iain Duncan Smith side-kicking her into the orchestra pit.

The rest here: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/08/frankie-boyles-conference-roundup-haunted-tennis-ball-slytherin-chancellor-politics?CMP=share_btn_tw

[LeftishBrit]

1. k&r

'If it had been the Tories, she would have been removed by Iain Duncan Smith side-kicking her into the orchestra pit.' - says it all!