Britain votes

IN BRITAIN, there’s a time in late summer when media people talk about being in the “silly season”. That’s when there does not seem to be much real news to report and so pages and screens are filled with trivia.

This year, it came early, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak unexpectedly called a general election. The Conservatives were expected to lose heavily, but might have done even worse if the voting had taken place in the autumn. Better salvage what can be saved and leave Labour to deal with whatever unpleasantness is on its way in the coming months.

Despite all the money spent on advertising and the airtime given over to campaign reporting, there were few signs of the British public’s emotions being stirred by the election.

Political debates prompted boredom rather than interest. For enthusiasm, you needed to go to the Glastonbury Festival. Even football was a bit of a let-down, with the Scottish and English teams turning in disappointing performances in their European games.

The decisive element in determining the outcome is general disgust with the Conservatives. Economic woes, deteriorating services, unethical practices and, for some sectors of the population, exaggerated immigration fears, have produced a general sentiment that they must go.

This chiefly benefits the Labour Party, as the other major contender in the election, but if much of the electorate is voting to kick the Tories out rather than being impressed with what Labour has to offer, that’s a poor foundation on which to form a government. Keir Starmer may assume he has a mandate that he does not really possess.

The print media went into overdrive as polling day approached.

The Guardian talked up Labour but also encouraged tactical voting in seats where the Liberals or other non-right parties were the leading contenders against Conservative candidates.

The right-wing media made much of claims about the tax burden that Labour would supposedly impose upon the long-suffering electorate. Much of its coverage was desperate stuff.

On Wednesday (Jul 3), the day before the vote, The Daily Mail led with a story that Sunak and Boris Johnson had united to prevent “Starmergeddon”. Desperate indeed. Can the Mail really think that the collaboration of two discredited political leaders, one of whom is a proven liar who resigned in disgrace, is a good news story that will rally wavering Tory voters?

And who truly believes that Starmer’s election will result in a cataclysmic world- (or at least, Britain-) ending disaster?

Come the closing of polling booths, there’s continuous television coverage of the results. The rituals are familiar.

The first thing is an announcement of the results of an exit poll, which would normally point to the likely final outcome of the election.

Then there’s the talking heads filling in time with comments on the exit poll and the election campaign before the first actual result emerges from the counts. They include a psephologist. Psephologists are those whose lifework is the study of how people vote in elections. A general election is their big moment in the public eye. One can imagine their excitement at being called upon for a moment of glory and how that ebbs as they are re-interred in their statistics for four more years.

The commentariat eagerly anticipates the initial declarations.

“We’re expecting an early declaration from the Northern constituency of Little Skint. This used to be typical Labour territory, but voted blue at the last election. It will be high on Labour’s list of expected gains.”

The earlier results mostly come from smaller urban constituencies and tend to be weighted towards Labour.

Then the more rural and small-town, traditionally Conservative, seats are declared. “We’ve a result coming in from the Cotswold seat of Bumble on Snooze, where the Liberal Democrats are looking to overturn a hefty Tory majority.”

Viewers watch as a hefty Tory and other candidates of various proportions line up for the declaration of the result, looking for signs of a smile, a grimace or an expression of relief as they wait.

One point of interest is always the candidates on the periphery of the contest: those considered to be from the political extremes, those standing for election as a protest or those who just revel in poking fun at politics and politicians in general.

Between 1963 and his death in 1999, Screaming Lord Sutch set a record by standing for election 39 times, latterly on the platform of his Official Monster Raving Loony Party (OMRLP). He always lost his deposit.

It says something about the calibre of the contestants in some constituencies that the OMRLP candidate could seem like the most sensible of the lot.

The sun rises on the morning after the election, and the television news shows the victors’ celebrations and the losers’ misery.

The all-night viewer turns away from the screen and sees that everything looks just as it did the day before: no joyous throngs hailing a new age of hope, no Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse heralding the ruination of the country.

Expectations are low, but if even these are disappointed, who knows what will lie in store for the country in another four years?

The writer, a Singapore-based Briton, is currently in the UK on a visit