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unfathomable

Sunday 4th May 2008

I can't get my head round this...

You see, I'm not naturally that empathic a person on a day-to-day basis but I can be when I put my mind to it. I can usually figure out what's going on in people's heads, but I'm utterly flummoxed right now.

I can even (for example) understand why people voted for George W. Bush in 2000, and even (less so but still) in 2004... I think I know what they thought they were voting for - I think they were wrong on every level to a quite catastrophic degree, of course, but I can guess what they THOUGHT they were doing.

But I simply cannot - CANNOT - fathom what on EARTH can have been in the minds of the 1,168,738 of my fellow Londoners who just gave possibly the second most powerful individual job in British politics to Boris Bloody Johnson.

My sister Rachel and I were discussing last night how people these days seem to have lost all sense of consequence; the idea that Doing A Thing Makes Other Things Happen. People do something to achieve some ephemeral immediate effect without thinking about the other, long-term effects their actions will have. Like deciding that Ken Livingstone is a bit smug and creepy, and wouldn't it be fun to knock that grin off his face, and voting against him just to teach him a lesson, without considering that in so doing, they've just handed the fate of the most important city in Europe (sorry Paris, but it is) to a man who has thus far struggled to demonstrate his ability to find his arse with both hands.

Is that it? Was that what you were thinking, if any of you are reading this? Help me out here, because this really is, as the poets put it, Doing My F___ing Head In.

Jeremy Hardy had it right on The News Quiz; this is all actually Angus Sodding Deayton's fault.  If he'd managed to keep it in his trousers then Boris wouldn't have had the chance to become the all-round media darling and Lovable Toff he now presents himself as; he'd still be the clueless snobbish Bullingdon Club Hoo-Ray he actually is (as indeed is David Cameron, Call-Me-Dave my arse).

Oh sod it, the best we can hope for (and it's a bleak bloody hope but it's all I've got) is that he makes as big a pig's ear of this as he has everything else he's ever attempted, and thus kyboshes the Conservatives' chances at the next general election.

I've just completed my last shows before two weeks of self-imposed paternity leave; on the one hand, hooray, no gigs, on the other hand, uh-oh, no income. This baby better turn up soon before we run out of money.

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