Politics has been tedious for most of 2023 and for a long time I couldn’t quite figure out why. Well, obviously I could, in some ways. Rishi Sunak is an uninspiring and uncharismatic prime minister who doesn’t seem to have a plan. The parliamentary Conservative Party is acting like a serpent that is longing to devour its own tail.
Keir Starmer is doing what he must but, as a result, isn’t doing much at all. His MPs are trying their best to ensure they are neither seen nor heard, lest they do or say the wrong thing at any point. The press keeps getting incensed about a topic, then forgetting all about it a day later, ad nauseam.
You know all this and so do I. We’ve both had to live through this year together, after all. Still, something else kept annoying me, making me want to roll my eyes and read about virtually anything else. It only hit me a few weeks ago, via the medium of a silly metaphor, because you can’t always pick the shape of your epiphanies.
Living through 2023 felt like watching the last hour of a movie when you’ve already figured out what the plot twist will be at the end. You’re sitting there, in the cinema or on your sofa, and the film keeps throwing red herrings at you. Was the victim not the person they said they were? Is the killer that shifty bloke who keeps popping up at odd moments? Is the detective really trying to solve the case, or is there something else on their mind?
Plot lines keep appearing and petering out but none of them matter, because the movie was badly written or produced, or you’re just very good at sussing out endings. You’re sitting there and you know that it definitely wasn’t the colonel, and that the weapon wasn’t the candlestick, and that the scene of the crime certainly wasn’t the library. The movie is going through the motions and it’s exasperating, because you know where and when it’s going to end anyway.
This is what this year has felt like. We know there is going to be a general election in 2024, or at the very beginning of the year after. We know that the Labour Party will win that election. It may be a crushing majority or an uncomfortably thin one, but they will win. We know that the Conservative Party will lose, and Rishi Sunak will stand down as leader. We know that the clock is running down and the government has neither the time nor the stomach to do most of the things it said it would do.
We know who the killer is and still, we must sit there and watch as the police officer puts the clues together. It makes you want to pull your hair out.
It is also why my one wish for 2024 is for the election to happen sooner rather than later. It seems unlikely that it will, as Sunak has shown time and time again that he would rather dither and kick the can further down the road than actually do anything. In fairness to him, it is not wholly unreasonable to want to wait just a bit longer, in the vain hope that something – anything – will turn up. If I were him, I’d wait it out too.
Thankfully I am not Rishi Sunak, and so I can say: please put us out of our collective misery and end this parliament. No one is having fun. No 10 talks about everything, yet does little. Centrist Tories and right wing Tories are at each other’s throats, but cannot achieve anything either. An increasingly fidgety Labour Party is doing its best to keep walking the tightrope it has found itself on, but obviously not having a good time.
Political journalists are having to write and rewrite the same stories, again and again, about Rwanda and crime and prisons and underfunded councils and benefits and child poverty and schools crumbling to dust. They know that nothing they write about will actually get done. You read these stories and you know it, too.
It’s time for us to leave this Groundhog Day nightmare. What do I want to happen in 2024? I want an election.
