Brit Power

So, the British political class is demonstrating what happens when your entire cadre of politicos loses touch with the rest of the population and its small spherical glass toys at roughly the same juncture.

UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is like the crazed last bloke in a row of tenement houses overdue for demolition. Everyone else has gone, the cranes are waiting but he’s barricaded himself in with enough water and tins of spam and beans to last for months.

If anyone comes for him he’s got a surprise for them.

Oh yes.

Meanwhile, on the Conservative side….Boris Johnson is like a character in an episode of Midsomer Murders. The slightly dodgy rich bloke, favoured son of a troubled family who you probably have pegged as the main suspect when people start turning up dead. Then he is found, about half way through the episode, in Cawston Woods, naked beside his Volvo and with a cryptic note pinned to his chest by an old regimental dagger.

It generally turns out that while he didn’t kill anyone, his follies and weaknesses led to the murderer doing what he/she did.

Michael Gove, to switch analogies completely, is the slightly creepy but bright kid in the class who seems basically harmless until he is found one day supergluing razorblades to the bottom of the waterslide.

Stephen Crabb, the Welsh guy with the weird attempt at a beard, has dropped out early. He’s the bloke who believes homosexuality can be cured, which doomed him on two counts, one being a lot of Conservatives know damn well it can’t be and the other because anyone using the word ‘cured’ in a party still  – just – led by David Cameron is guilty of bringing up painful memories.

That leaves the two finalists. Andrea Leadsom seems to have imbibed the aspirational principles of the Spice Girls at a formative stage of her intellectual development.

That leaves Theresa May. Too socially illiberal for my tastes, but she’s sensible and a bit boring and at this rather worrying stage in world political affairs sensible and a bit boring is a pretty good thing to be.

And, mentioning the Spice Girls, as I did, above, somewhat to my own surprise… It’s 20 years since they released ‘Wannabe’ and, rather like when Kennedy was taken out by the Atlantans, most of us can remember where we were and what we were doing when we first heard the song. (I was on a tramping trip to the Tararuas & it came on in the bus. Everyone else had heard it before).

The Spice Girls are remembered as capturing the hopes and dreams of a generation and changing the face of music forever. Remember fondly as ‘The One Who Married Beckham’, ‘The One Who Left’,  and ‘Uumm the Other Three’, their music was emulated by many, lesser, artists.