Britain Votes For Basic Competence

The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4310 of the Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

I am Andy Zolzman and this is a post-UK election snap bugle.

It is Friday the 5th of June.

Our election was yesterday.

The results came in from sort of the 10pm exit poll through to the final concession at 1 minute to 5 a.m.

And we already have a new Prime Minister.

Such is the quick way that we do shit around here

when on the very rare occasions we put our mind to doing things efficiently.

Joining me to discuss it is,

well, a veteran of many elections,

the man who really should have been, by rights, should have been Prime Minister for most of the last 25 25 to 30 years, Mark Steele.

Welcome, Mark.

Hello.

So let's start with the bald facts.

The Labour Party,

having lost the last four elections, I've slightly lost count because they've been kind of having a look, stormed to victory with 412 out of 650 seats.

and failed miserably with 33.7%

of the overall vote.

Explain that to our listeners, Mark.

Well, I think the first thing, and I think we have to be very measured about this, and we have to be very considered about it, and I think that's one of the things as we get older, we're able to do that,

is to just accept that probably the main issue before anything else is that on balance,

getting rid of a bunch of verminous, gluttonous, misanthropic, condescending, sneering, feudal, sociopathic, virulent, obsequious, nasty, narcissistic, pith,

wit, dingbat, bloody, corrupt, disgusting, despicable,

bastard, bloody parceling out PPA contracts to any finging asshole that they managed to have shagged in the last couple of weeks, telling everybody to stay up indoors for God's sake, or you'll be arrested while we go off pissing it up and bloody getting barrels of beer in to the back of our shitty little bloody offices and then pretending that it didn't happen and saying that we need an investigation when there's about 7,000 hours of CCT footage showing us bloody shagging each other over the table when we've bloody been telling everybody else to be eight foot apart from everybody else.

Appointing a prime minister who manages to bloody bankrupt the entirety of the country in about an hour and a half after one of the previous prime ministers that she replaced described anybody or

pointed anybody who suggested that the library shouldn't be shut down by saying there isn't a magic money tree, there isn't a magic money tree, and then finding a magic money tree and handing it all over to the world's investors so that they could fing fund the bankrupting of the entire nation because everybody told her this would happen, but nobody took any notice.

Fing disgusting, fing over-wealthy prime minister who's richer than the king, shit face, fing wankfest, has gone.

And on balance, I find that positive.

Right.

Yes.

I think that's a very good way of putting it.

But really.

I mean, it's it's I mean, looking at where it went wrong for the Conservatives, I guess it would be

if you could start with absolutely everything they've said and done for the last fourteen years.

That seems to be really the root of their of their issues at this election when they they got absolutely ob obliterated the is that the most seat they lost over two hundred and fifty seats.

Um and only once since 1945 has a party lost over a hundred seats in an election and this is uh i don't know if it's an all-time record my my the data i found online only went back to uh about a hundred years but it's by uh the most seats anyone has lost at an election and they've really earned that they've really earned they have gone out of their way as you said to do basically it's like they they won that election in twenty nineteen um with Boris Johnson as leader.

And it's almost like they set out to think, well, how can we achieve the most spectacular electoral defeat in British history?

And they have, over four and a half years since then, they have put the work in, Mark.

They have really...

They put the work in, and you don't get results.

You don't get world records with that.

Did Usain Bolt

run 100 metres in 9.58 seconds in Berlin?

by not dedicating himself morning, noon, and night?

Of course not.

And what that's what they and i think that rishi sunak is very much the you same bolt of modern elections

i think in fact if only that the if only the people counting the votes had been a little bit sharper he would have been had to concede at 9.58 seconds after 10.

9.58 seconds is quite a high percentage of liz truss's time as prime minister as well

it's funny though isn't it that there's not a sense of jubilation It's a sense of relief.

And I think that's what, I think, if there's one word, relief.

Yes.

I think.

That's what a lot of people have said.

Yeah.

And I think it's that.

It's not.

There was a jubilation in 97, that there was a whole new world beckoning.

And there's not that here.

Yeah.

Which is good, I think, and sensible, because what history teaches us is that having high expectations for anything is a recipe for pain and disappointment.

Well, you know,

I know this is risky these days, but that's very Jewish.

Yeah, well, we've been disappointed a lot.

I mean, 40 years.

40 years in the f ⁇ ing desert.

Jesus.

The manner wasn't even that tasty, to be fair.

But it's that, isn't it, that they've gone and they were so, you know, I think this.

This sort of suggests that, you know, I could have heard some people on the left say already, well, Keir Starmer

is going to disappoint people really quickly.

And I don't know if that's true because the bar is so low.

All he has to do is not be caught lying and being so venally, obviously corrupt that even if he's just useless, people are going, oh, isn't it nice to have someone who's just useless?

So it's basically like trying to beat a worm in a pole vault competition.

As long as you stay above ground, you should be fine.

Keir Starmer in his victory victory speech, which he gave in the turbine hall of Tate Modern, which seemed kind of appropriate given the general levels of confusion around.

Basically it's a building where people go to stare at things on walls in a state of absolute bafflement, wondering what on earth does it all mean?

So that seemed kind of appropriate.

But he said election fict election victories don't fall from the sky.

And, you know, and it that that is true.

And L Labour lost last time, albeit they lost with almost the same proportion of the vote and more actual votes than they won with this time.

But in terms of election victories not falling from the sky, I think it did help Labour that, you know, to extend that analogy, the Conservatives were basically sitting in the election victory hot air balloon, catapulting narwhals upwards through the canopy of that balloon.

So they were helped by that.

But still, you know, as you say,

expectation management has been extremely successful for Labour because no one expects a huge amount.

So basic competence will seem like

what Boris Johnson would have called sunlit uplands.

I mean, Labour was boosted, Mark, just before the election by the Sun newspaper, which has traditionally not been a Labour

supporting paper,

sort of half-heartedly endorsing it.

Albeit this was a day before the election when all the polls were saying that

the Conservatives had no chance.

It was basically like backing the USA in the space race, just as Neil Armstrong was clearing his throat and about to step on, basically to say, you snooze, you lose, Buzzwells.

I'm going to be first.

And

the sort of desperation in the Tories campaign was shown when Sunak, and one of the last things he did as Prime Minister, he went on the, I think it was the ITV This Morning programme and announced to the nation that he really likes sandwiches whilst being in his, yes, whilst being in a studio with a woman claiming to be Britain's most tattooed mum.

Oh, that's

the picture went round.

Oh, I wondered why.

I thought she was the candidate for Kidderminster.

I might have done better for the story.

But that did not.

Yeah, that's not the most dignified moment in prime ministerial history.

Ever.

Well, the thing is,

in a way, there's not really anything he could have done because I often think it's being like we've all been in them situations, if we're stand-ups, where it's just not working.

The audience has decided long ago they don't like you.

They've then gone past that and decided they're not even interested in whether to work out why they don't like you.

And they are all chatting and you're up there

and no one's paying any attention.

And occasionally someone turns around and goes, oh, shut up, mate, will you?

And there's nothing you can do.

You could come out with the funniest thing in the world.

Well, I told you, mate, we're we're talking here, right?

And there's nothing.

And I think Rishi Sunak was in that situation about a year ago.

So there wasn't really anything he could do.

And then everything that he does, people just go, what now?

Whereas I can imagine, you know, some of the Bama doing a sort of silly little stunt.

People liked him.

And so that looked like him being cool.

Whereas with him, it just looks like pathetic.

So I don't, I'm not trying to make excuses for him because he deserves it.

Yes.

Well,

yeah, the way I would

describe it, and I can't know if I've mentioned this on the bugle before, but he's like a golfer.

He's got a really tricky shot.

250 yards into the green, crosswind, down a slope.

There's a little water feature in front of the green.

There's trees in the way.

It's sort of raining a bit.

And like I said, tricky crosswind.

And he goes up to his ball, gets a sledgehammer out of his golf bag and smacks the ball over and over again into the turf shouting get in the hole and yeah it was a really difficult shot but i don't think he's played it as well as he could have done

um i think there was a crocodile coming up the fairway i think there was a sniper in one of the trees that would make golf a hell of a lot of better spectator sport that and being able oh peter alice oh he would have loved that oh dear dear dear there he goes he's on the floor oh dear that's him here come the paramedics i think the sniper's got him dear old fellow, dear old fellow.

Repeat action, handgun.

Oh, poor old soul.

Find it hard to get in from there,

from the operating theatre.

I'd like that.

And also introducing charge downs like getting rugby when you're taking a kick.

As soon as you start your backswing, your opponent's allowed to charge you.

Try and block them.

I mean, it would be great television.

Anyway, we digress.

The challenge for Labour, even with these low expectations, is whether they can hotwire the sleeping rhinoceros that is the British economy.

It's going to be a tough job.

There is essentially no money to do anything,

which fits pretty well with Labour's manifesto of not doing a great deal.

So I guess they've done the sums at least.

For the rest of this election snap bugle, we are going to take your questions.

Some of you have sent in questions via the wonders of social media, and Mark and I will now answer those questions.

This came from James and indeed others and the question mark is simply Nigel Farage what the hell

look I don't think he'll necessarily end up there but it does seem quite likely although I don't really believe in an afterlife but it does seem it does seem like a lively possibility.

How do you explain the political phenomenon that is that is Nigel Farage?

Well he has shocked people.

I mean there are a number of people in the Reform Party which is his party

and which is trying to sort of I suppose be like one of those European parties that has replaced the traditional right-wing parties like Le Penz or the ATF in Germany that sort of party the ones you've got in almost every other country now and

there was some surprise some of the candidates announced that they were shocked and that they were leaving the Reform Party for the Conservative Party because sort of footage came out of people in that party sort of making racist and homophobic comments and so on and I can really understand that because I think that when someone has

announced a Brexit campaign that they're running by unveiling a series of hoardings of lines of immigrants with breaking point run underneath it, and they've used their position as someone on the national election debate as leader of their party to say that the trouble with our health service is it's being overrun by immigrants who use it to come over here with AIDS.

I think it's really, really

shocking to find out that someone like that has got a racist side.

And

I really feel for those people who were taken aback.

It just goes to show you never know people, do you?

Yeah.

I mean, it was close in some ways because, you know, people have been flooding over here to...

to use our health service, but as staff rather than patients.

Yeah, exactly.

And yet, and then they want to live here.

They want bloody handouts.

What we should do is they should come over here and then as soon as they finish work, go back to Syria or wherever it is they come from and then come back the next morning.

But no, they don't want to do that because they don't want to integrate.

That's the trouble with them.

That's the trouble.

They come over here.

It's like, you know, I'm a builder, right?

And the thing is, what your Polish builder does is they'll say, yeah, we're going to come round on a Wednesday.

And then what they do is they come around on a Wednesday.

I mean, how are we supposed to keep up with that?

No, I mean, we'll do about it, is it?

It's just that it's not making it fair for us.

You know what I mean?

Coming over.

And you know what?

What Labour's going to do?

All them Romanians, they all come from big illy countries, they're going to be able to bring a mountain each.

That's what's going to happen next.

You'll be walking down Streatham High Road.

There'll be a bloody great Balkan mountain you have to get over to get to the post office.

That's next.

Well, I mean, I personally would welcome more mountains in this country.

I think it's

one of our weak points, really.

Certainly down here in the southeast.

We're the ones with all the money.

All the ones in the dinghies.

You look around at all the who's got all the money.

Poor Richie Sunak, there's nothing he can do about it.

He ain't got no money.

It's a five-year-old clambering out of a dinghy at Folkestone.

Having just bought a a Premier League football club.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, Aston Villa, he's bought.

He's the chair now, ain't he?

I mean,

how can a normal football club compete with a club that's owned by a five-year-old who's been trafficked?

Well, this explains why they got 14% of the votes.

And Nigel Farage, at his eighth attempt, has been elected as an MP, which might, I don't know if he's going to enjoy that.

I mean, any sense of form of responsibility doesn't always seem to sit comfortably with him.

Well, I guess that's the one thing we've got.

Those of us who are not of the reform persuasion,

one of the things we've got that can give us hope is that

he's probably already bored of being an MP,

having been one now for about half a day.

He probably will just give up.

Someone, another comic could put something on social media that says the clacton which is where he's been elected that the marvellous thing about living in clacton now is that you won't see nigel farad for another five years

but

but uh

i guess that's in our favor but we haven't got someone who's quite as as efficiently dedicatedly dangerous as Marine Le Pen or Molini in Italy.

We haven't, if we did have, I suspect that that

they would be able to use this to

possibly replace the conservative.

I don't know.

That's a big task.

It's not impossible.

Is it the start of a new movement?

They got 14% of the vote.

And we had a very low turnout because nothing is stronger in this country than the deep, deep forces of apathy.

So the 8.5% of voters all in 4 million votes.

But is that the start of a new movement or is it absolutely everyone in the country who would ever consider voting for

Reform UK and Farage.

I don't know.

I mean, it depends how many of the people who still voted Conservative would

support reform if they thought that they were the right-wing party.

I don't know.

I guess quite a few of them would.

I mean, there's still the Conservative membership.

I mean, I had a couple of people going up saying, sort of conservative people, saying old-type conservative people.

Oh, well, at least the remaining MPs are the ones that are much more likely to be sensible and measured and moderate and aren't going to go off on one of these sort of sharabang, nonsensical journeys of the likes of Svella Brotherman.

But

that doesn't help them because

the Conservative membership is overwhelmingly the sort of people who...

they elect the last time they elected a leader it was Liz Truss who lost I mean well you're a statistician Andy what was her defeat in Norfolk?

Possibly the biggest ever, one of the biggest ever sort of losses from 25,000 majority?

Yes.

And yeah, I mean, she really had to, again, had to put the legwork in

to be, you know, to lose that seat, you pretty much had to ruin the country.

And she did that, to be fair.

So, yeah, I mean, it was truly, truly extraordinary.

Now, but they, that was so, she was so hopeless that she lost one of the safest Tory seats in Britain ever.

And she managed to lose that.

But she was elected to be leader by

the 95-year-old dingbats who are the members of the Conservative Party.

And they don't regret that.

They just think, well, that's because she wasn't supported and wasn't backed up in her plan to fill the...

Sea with electric fires to stop immigrants coming over by electrocuting all.

They didn't get backed by the Bank of England because they're all woke.

We were stopped by the woke arty.

People such as Gary Lineker and women and men and the Church of England and atheists, those people.

If it wasn't for those.

So Reform got four seats, which basically one million votes per seat.

And Labour on 9.6 million votes got 412 I think currently with a couple still to come that's about one every 23,000 votes

so if we have any mathematicians listening who could possibly explain that to curious children could you write your answers down on a postcard and then shred it because it will be wrong

let's move on to a question from Morgan

Rishi Sunak seems to have done something called conceding.

Could you please give a brief primer on this for us confused Americans that are unfamiliar with this procedure?

Yes, well, he did.

I mean, that's, he did.

I mean, I think it just showed a kind of classic British negativity that, you know, as soon as they'd actually lost the election, he said,

we've lost the election.

I mean, it's that, you know, that kind of accepting that you've lost when you've lost is the kind of defeatist attitude that has left this nation floundering.

Well, I mean, Churchill didn't do that, did he?

No.

Yeah, Donald Trump, you know, all his...

Well, as Richard Sunak should have done, he should have.

There's so many things he could have done that would have changed his legacy.

He could have come out to concede

in the pouring rain,

or if it wasn't raining, by getting Liz Truss to stand behind him with a watering can over his head.

And that would have been, I would have changed his legacy.

But no.

Or he could have said, it wouldn't have been painful if he'd come out and said, the election was fiddled.

Everybody knows it.

Everybody knows it.

It was literally millions, billions, billions of votes, trillions of votes were found in a ditch somewhere.

Someone told me.

Everybody knows it.

And then called upon the people of Guildford to storm parliament.

Yep.

Well, I mean,

yeah.

But we don't have that in our, you know, we've given up as a nation.

That's, yeah.

Trump, you know, all those bankruptcies, he didn't accept that he was beaten.

He just got out there and kept going bankrupt in different ways.

You know, he was more determined.

Exactly.

He put in a bit of effort.

Yeah.

Where's Sunak's never

no evidence that he's been with a sex worker or that he paid her off?

It's yeah, it's it's feeble.

This is why we never win the World Cup, yeah, exactly.

Because we concede elections when we lose them.

Um, whereas in the 60s, no one conceded elections when we won the World Cup.

There you go, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly, I like Douglas Hume, he's still there, he's still there, he still thinks he's prime minister, he's 163

in Portugal.

In Portugal, when the revolution happened,

there was that sort of moment when a dictator hands over to another dictator and sort of hopes that they would be able to carry on.

And I think, if I remember right, there was a guy called Catano

who was then overthrown by the revolution in Portugal.

And the people around him

decided that they wouldn't tell him and they kept him in his office for some time for weeks and weeks weeks and wouldn't tell him that he'd been deposed as president and every day they would go in and ask him what they should do today and he would give them all these orders and they'd say certainly mr president and then they they'd go out and just go we're gonna have to tell him at some point that he's been deposed

and it went on I think he might have even died thinking he was still the leader I don't know Well, I think they could have done that with Boris Johnson because really he wanted to think that he was prime minister, but he didn't actually want to be prime minister because being Prime Minister is a fucking difficult job.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah,

if only they just indulged him with that fantasy, then exactly.

Then, every morning,

Prime Minister, what should we do?

Frogs.

I believe there are too many frogs and they need to be bigger and they need to be less.

And Wiltshire, could we put it in Sussex?

Yes, we'll do that.

It's Prime Minister.

And then

he just shouted that every day.

Yeah, we'd have all been happy.

We've got to rename the Zebra and every day, something like that.

Toby asks,

when will the Richmond and North Allerton bye-bye election take place?

So this is Rishi Sunak's seat.

Obviously he's stepping down as Tory leader.

Not immediately.

He's going to

hang on for a little while, I think, whilst they bag and label everything and do the autopsy.

But he said he'll stay on for months or even years as local MP.

But he didn't didn't specify whether those years were Earth years.

And a year on Mercury is only 88 days long.

So, you know, that might be what he's thinking of.

Or cat years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Don't you think they've already booked it?

They've been online and they've got a flight booked, haven't they?

Him and Mrs.

Sunak.

Yeah.

I think he might have a, I mean, they are wealthy beyond wealthy.

I think they could easily afford a body double to just sit in parliament.

No, he's not going to say a lot, is he?

You know, most MPs don't say a lot in Parliament.

Just sit there nodding and he'll be off in California somewhere.

Yeah.

Mighty Zinn asks, what are all the political satirists and comedians going to do now that the Conservative gravy train has gone off the rails?

Well, I don't know about you, Mark, but after 14 years of the same government, I am really, really looking forward to trying to write some jokes about a different

government.

Even if there's a government I agree with more, I'm just, you know,

just the difference, the freshness of it is something that I'm quite excited about.

Yes.

I do enjoy this sort of thing, this line of argument that people make.

And they go, for two reasons.

First of all, it assumes that we would rather enjoy the luxury of being able to carry on writing similar jokes about the same people rather than have the country not run by a bunch of evil sociopaths.

Secondly,

it would possibly be a point

if

we could be confident that the new government was going to do everything really well

and make everything lovely.

But I think there's a chance that won't happen.

Right.

There will be stuff

to fill the bugle with.

I mean, obviously, you know, this is

a satirical show.

You know, we we we don't we we don't want Keir Starmer to have a 100% success record in everything he does.

I think you'll be all right.

Yeah,

yeah.

And also the Tories will carry on providing us with entertainment because they're going to have a leadership election where they're going to decide that the problem that they had was that they weren't bat shitty enough

and

they will leave no stone unturned to find the bat shittiest person they can get.

And that batshit person will then stand for election by the Conservative members who are not allowed to be members unless they're batshit.

Also, you know, what will we do with a different government?

More puns, probably.

So I think I'll be all right.

And also, it would be nice to do something a bit more constructive than merely shouting into a void of despair.

So I look forward to that.

Do you think they'll take notice, this government?

I think he'll go, the first thing,

we we have got a minister of a minister of jokes and they're going to listen to all the jokes being made about us and they're going to all have to go to a meeting and they'll say well what do you think we should do yeah and uh then we'll have to go into a room with yvette cooper and say what we think policy should be on about the fire brigade well it could work

We did have a complaint about the news quiz last year from a Conservative MP who complained that the news quiz was

did more stuff about the government than the opposition.

But to be fair, you know, the way to rectify that was not by changing the show, but by his party being eviscerated at the next election.

So he's very much achieved his goal.

For people who are outside the country, it seems like a very strange business, all this.

But the Conservatives have gone down from,

what was it you said, for 360

to 121 did they end up with yes i think so but isn't it there's a strange sense that

if it's slightly disappointing it wasn't even worse for them well two figures that i mean a two-figure score would have been really

extraordinary or even like yeah i did you have that i had a sort of bit of a daydream that what if they go down to like 11 mps

but it is the i mean the lowest they've had in 1997 they had 165, and that was viewed as a kind of generational cataclysm for them.

So it's quite a lot worse than that, and their vote share then was still over 30% rather than below 24%.

So, yeah, it is, but if you add the Tories and the Labour vote, that only comes to about 56%, which is comfortably the lowest ever combined vote.

Anyway,

Alex asks, can you rate the major parties' performances and match them to a related performance by a sports team of your choice?

That's a very good question.

I think then that is very much in the bugles hitting zone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Politics and sport.

Well, Labour sort of

at a spectacular win, but in quite an unimpressive way.

To me, maybe Greece winning the 2004 European Championships, playing the most utterly joyless misery football.

You could see it as that just kind of goes.

Yeah, that's very good.

I mean, I was going to say

on similar lines, if Southgates England

gets a miserable penalty shootout win against Switzerland after an awful 0-0 draw in which not a single shot takes place and then wins the semi-final and final with a 10-man defence in which the

number of people watching the final, even in England, is seven.

And it's so miserable and boring.

And England wins, and people still call for Southgates to resign.

That's Labour.

Yep.

The Conservatives, what instantly came to mind for me for the Conservative performance as a cricket fan was

England playing a test match in New Zealand in the 1983-84

winter season.

And in the second test,

New Zealand made 307, and England were bowled out for 82 and 93 to lose by an innings and over 100 runs.

And I remember the, I would have been about nine years old, but I remember hearing on the radio the tone of disgust as the reports came through on the radio really didn't just wasn't just dealing with cricket, it was dealing with a nation that was dying from the inside.

That's what it felt like.

It felt like, you know, it was a, it was beyond sport.

This was a deep-seated psychological, collective, traumatic failure.

So

I'd see that.

Or perhaps Wendy Wobbler, who is a famous horse that ran the Grand National in 1934 and fell at every single fence, just got up, carried on going around,

ended up an absolute.

I mean, it didn't actually happen.

But, you know, had it happened, then I think that would have been this conservative campaign.

Basically, just 30 fences going down at every single one.

And finally, the Tarp Paulin of Mercy comes out just yards from the finish line yeah or a game of monopoly in which one player

go tries to sell off

just takes the water works and the electric company and tries to sell it to their next door neighbours

who aren't even playing yep and then takes all the money and is told to come back and then

does a dump on the board.

I mean, I think that is basically what has happened with this government,

the way that they've dealt with public utilities.

Reform?

What have they done?

They've sort of

that, oh, they're the, aren't they a bit leads in the 1970s?

They just kick and bring people down, hack people down.

The referees try to tell them that

they're not allowed to do that, and then they claim that they're being victimised.

Yep.

That could work.

Or

it was,

what's the name?

Chippy Chainsaw, who was a tennis player player in the 1970s who went on court with a chainsaw.

And he never actually won any matches, but he really caused a big rumpus.

Violation for sawing the net in half.

He had a very tempestuous match with Ilyan Astasi one year, I believe,

out on court, too.

The Green Party were like a team that manages to just stay up, like Bradford City that year.

Everybody likes them in the end.

Yep.

Well they got

I think 6.8% of the vote, nearly 2 million votes again, four seats, which is great for the Green Party but

wildly up underrepresented if you are a fan of objective mathematics but such as the wonders of our

electoral system.

This come this question was from Claire.

It says how does Andy feel about the change in the constituency he grew up in?

Well that was Tunbridge Wells.

And when I was growing up in Tunbridge Wells Mark in the 1980s, you were considered a bit of a lefty if you only voted Conservative once at an election.

It had been Conservative since I think around about 18,000 BC when the first evidence of human life in the area was found.

They found the remnants of what appears to be a woe-covered rosette from around about 18,000 BC.

And they managed to lose the Conservatives.

They lost Tunbridge Wells by a fairly significant market, about 8,000 votes the Liberal Democrats were ahead.

And that just makes me question everything about my entire life.

As someone who grew up on the mean streets of Tunbridge Wells, well, mean,

sorry, private streets of Tunbridge Wells.

It's very hard to, I feel that all the certainties of my existence have been stripped away from me by the fact that Tunbridge Wells did not vote Conservative.

I mean, what the f has happened to this world?

I suppose

that's the opposite side of the coin of Blythe, which for people who don't know Blythe, it's about 12 miles north of Newcastle.

It was a shipbuilding and mining town.

It was the very essence of the Labour movement.

And at the last election, it went conservative.

And I suppose

this is the good Lord restoring

balance.

Yes.

Is that what it is?

Yes, I guess so.

I guess so.

Because Tunbridge Wells is to the Conservatives what Blythe was to Labour, I guess.

Electoral karma.

Electoral karma, yeah.

Yeah.

That's what won it.

It's Buddha, what won it, isn't it?

But truly, there are no certainties in life anymore.

If the Tunis can lose Tunbridge Wells, then anything is possible in both a positive and negative way for our species.

That's quite exciting, isn't it?

Yeah.

Claire also asked, how many wickets will Jimi Anderson take in the first test?

So the first test of the summer next week, England plays West Indies.

Jimi Anderson is retiring after that test.

First played for England in 2003.

I mean, I hope he takes 13 wickets in the match because that would take him to 1,000 in all internationals, 700 in tests so far,

plus a load in one day as and a few in T20s, I think.

I mean,

we're losing some of the greatest sports people of modern British times at the moment.

Mark, Andy Murray is bowing out of tennis at a very emotional and I know you've you've followed his career with great

enthusiasm.

Yes, I've tried to adopt him several times, but

I don't know.

There's all sorts of officialdom that's just beyond me.

Yeah.

Yeah,

but I don't know how we're going to, I don't know, you know, what are we going to do without without these.

Basically, I think Jimmy Anderson and Andy Murray have pretty much been holding this country together for almost 20 years.

Both of them going almost simultaneously.

Well, Ronnie O'Sullivan's keeping going.

Yep.

He's one of the

sort of growing crowd of sporting political activists.

Yes, yeah.

But he didn't endorse Labour this time.

No, in fact, not only did he not endorse Labour, but Faisa Shaheen, who was sacked by the Labour Party as the candidate, even though

she produced one of the best results, one of the sixth best result for Labour at the last election, she was sacked by Labour this time as a candidate, stood then as an independent against Labour.

And

as a result of there being two Labour candidates in effect, the official one and the unofficial one, they both got 12,000 votes.

And Ian Duncan Smith won the seat with 18,000 votes.

For anyone abroad, this system must seem so ponkhous, but

that's how it works.

It must seem like something you read about that took place in 1237 until the barons went, such

tomfoolery with mathematics cannot be permitted.

And

it was put right, but no, we're still waiting for it to be put right.

So, but Roniel Sullivan backfires a sheem, which is a very gutsy thing for him to do, really, as a sort of superstar sportsman.

And Lineker, and you know, all sorts of people, Gary Neville, and

Murray and his mum.

Andy, can I just start on Jimmy Anderson?

Jimmy made his Test debut under the Blair government.

Yes.

And there are no Test cricketers in the England team who survived Brown.

The next longest-serving cricketer is Bairstow, who is now dropped, who is a Cameron one.

So we only have a handful of Cameron-era international Test cricketers left.

That's how long it has been since we have had a Labour government.

That puts everything in a kind of perspective that I can understand.

When did Dirt Root start?

He made his debut in late 2012 in the fourth test in India.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that.

In fact, being a rocket scientist, you'd probably know other things of considerably more importance and use.

But that's, yeah, so 2020.

So he was a Cameron.

He was a Cameron.

Finally, this comes from Filsky.

In the pantheon of photos of losing ministers standing dejectedly on a stage at a provincial leisure centre next to someone dressed in a ridiculous outfit.

Where do you rank Jacob Reese Mogg Stood next to baked bean balaclava man.

Where does that sit on your Portillo index?

So in 1997, Michael Portillo, a cabinet minister, lost his seat in the...

I mean, that was really the sort of the most memorable moment of that particular Tory catastrophe.

But Jacob Reese Mogg,

and if you don't know about him, we have talked about him quite a bit on the show over the years,

lost his seat and was standing next to a man with a baked bean balaclava on.

And that's the great thing with british politics and we had you know rishi sunak standing with count bin face in his uh in his constituency or bin face i think he's the italian i forget um and uh

um

i mean that's you know it is it does you know bring a bit of humility to the you know the arrogance of politics

do you think he got cross Bruce Morgan

this impertinence is simply bringing the entire democratic process into disrepute one does not wear a balaclava in such somber occasions.

It is impudent.

And

India said it all in lattice.

Vassilus, vicillus, balaclavia, baked benias.

As anyone would know, but no doubt, no doubt you were an attendant of Harrow rather than one of the superior schoolers, and therefore not concomitant with that which is democratic within our own constitution.

They don't have this in any other country, do they?

No, I think they've all grown up.

Do you think that Hitler would ever have risen to power

if in the 19 if in the 1928 election and

the uh and the I, as returning officer for Munich West,

Hitler A Nazi Party nineteen thousand four hundred and sixty-two

Herr Peddlebin.

Oh, God.

How can anyone take Hitler seriously when he stood next to a man with a pedalbin on his head?

Well, on that note, I think we should leave this election.

We will cover the aftermath in future bugles, the next of which will be in about 10 days' time.

Thanks enormously to you Buglers for your questions.

Thanks to Mark Steele

as always Mark anything to plug?

Oh not really.

Well Mark Steele's in town is on BBC Sounds these days and so there's a sort of longer version of the show where I go around the town all the time and then I'm all rude about it but I don't mean to be and there's

so that's out there's a new series of that the first two have been out and they're going out by the time you hear this maybe the third one will have been out and your podcast which oh and podcast what the F is Going On, yeah.

Yeah, which you're on.

Which I've on this.

Yes.

And there's an election special this week where we're talking about the election.

Yes.

And people abroad must be absolutely fascinated.

They must be going, please, please tell us more about

the absurdities and the iniquities of the British electoral system.

Well, there you go, Bugles.

Don't forget to buy your ticket to my tour show, which begins in November.

Details at andyzoltsman.co.uk to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to help keep the show free, flourishing and independent and to get access to the global exclusive monthly Ask Andy show.

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Until next time, goodbye.

Hi Buglers, it's producer Chris here.

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