Bugle 292 – A career defining election

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Hello buglers and welcome to Bugle issue 292.

I am Andy Zoltzman reporting live and exclusively for the bugle from the post-electoral mayhem of London, where the British electorate has chewed up its ballot papers, spat them out, and made them into a giant paper-mache middle finger aimed directly at the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats.

And joining me from his political refuge in America, where he's hunkering down for the bleak years ahead, is the man whose departure from Britain has sparked what is now said to be 10 years of Tory rule.

It's the 21st century's Margaret Thatcher himself, John Oliver.

Hello, Andy, hello buglers, Andy, what the f just happened over there?

What the f did you just do?

I don't I have never ever been happier not to be there.

And I could not be except I still feel too close.

I could be an astronaut in space looking down and thinking, oh shit, that looks bleak.

I mean obviously it's a majestic globe, but that little bit over there looks fing bleak.

Yeah it's

it's

it's been an interesting night

for British politics, certainly.

This is Bugle 292.

Coincidentally, that's the number of party leaders who have resigned in the last three hours, as we record.

Also, the 292, the expected number of decades it'll take the Liberal Democrats to recover from their five-year Faustian pact with government.

And also, 292, the percentage of the British population who will never believe an opinion poll again.

And I think, John, this is the one thing that has truly, truly emerged from this election: is that whatever else we lose in Britain, and you know, we may not truly know what we are as a nation anymore in a rapidly changing world, we may be unsure of what we are politically, ethically, spiritually, but we always know we are the best nation in the world at lying to opinion pollsters.

There's absolutely nothing we will not do to tell an opinion pollster that we're going to vote in a way that we have absolutely no intention of of doing.

And this is for the weekend, Friday, the 8th of May 2015.

A very interesting anniversary, this one.

It's zero years exactly since the day that British politics went stark raving bonkers.

Quick section: There have been a commemorative audio pull-out of the most used phrases of last night's election nights.

One, I'm not prepared to speculate.

Two, it's too early to comment.

Three, these things have to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Four,

yes, it is starting to appear that way.

Five, shit, shit, holy shit, and six, f, seriously,

that section in the pin.

So, top story this week, UK election news.

Seriously, what the f just happened?

What the

what the f?

I mean,

what

what the f,

but it, because you went, it's, what the f, Andy, what the f?

If you live anywhere on earth that is not the United Kingdom, then frankly, congratulations in a significant, lasting way, because I'm guessing that the UK is a pretty depressing place to wake up this morning, unless, of course, you're an arsehole.

But then arseholes always wake up happy, Andy.

After all, they are arseholes.

I would sincerely hope that many,

unexpectedly many people in Britain woke up this morning with an emotional hangover thinking, oh no,

what did I do yesterday?

Only to look at a stubby pencil on their pillow and scream, oh shit, please say I'm more conservative.

Oh please, please say, not again, not again, Lord.

After a five-week campaign of shallow, cynical fear-mongering, the UK managed...

pretty effectively to exhibit many of the worst facets of the human condition.

It really was a tasting menu of twattery on all sides.

And the election was by all, literally all polls, expected to result in a hung parliament.

And hung in the truest sense in that democracy was supposed to attach a noose around its neck and attempt to kick the chair out from underneath its twitching feet.

But either the polls were all wrong or there was a last-minute swing to the Tories.

Essentially, the polls suggested that basically people had said to pollsters they would not punch themselves in the balls, they would absolutely not do that.

Then they went into the polling booth and two minutes later came out icing their genitals that's in in a nutshell what has happened because the end result is that the conservatives have won the election and David Cameron is once more head boy of the country head head boy is back yeah yeah now I found it pretty depressing to watch from thousands of miles away Andy how did it look at point blank range uh well yeah i mean it was uh he's talking now he's talking now he's on tv he's oh f you

He's talking now.

And it's almost worse with the sound down.

You see happy face

moving.

I hate it when his face moves.

So I'm guessing you're not happy with the results there.

Well, obviously, he's a safe pair of hands to guide the country off the cliff.

That's right.

They want to finish the job of finishing the country.

That's all they've asked for.

And all they've got.

As you say, it is their lunchtime after the morning, after the the night before, which in turn followed the day, the previous morning, five weeks of almost exclusively infantile campaigning, and five years of government that has put Britain back on track or sent Britain careering towards long-term disaster, or both, depending on your view of Britain tracks and disasters.

And you talked about that swing in the ballot box, and I think this was the key factor.

I think it will come to be known as the Milliband swing.

And I reckon that was worth a good five or six percent, maybe even fifty or sixty percent, caused by people in polling stations getting their pencils of democratic destiny in their hand, looking at their ballot papers, thinking about the kind of future they want for the country, for their children, the kind of role they want Britain to have in the world, the kind of ethics they want to have at the heart of our society.

And then picturing Ed Miliband walking out of the door of 10 Downing Streets or sitting down at a G8 summit and thinking to themselves,

No, definitely, definitely no.

And I think that has been the single crucial factor.

David Cameron had asked in a build-up to the election, he said this, when you're in the polling booth, ask yourself on the things that matter in life, who do you really trust?

Suggesting that the answer was him, which it clearly isn't.

I mean, when I'm thinking about the things that truly matter in life, I can't do that in a polling booth, John, because I cannot vote for Wisdom Cricketers Almanac, and my mother wasn't standing.

But it certainly was not David Cameron.

But I think what happened is it was David Cameron, not necessarily in a positive way, but in a negative way, that it was less not not him than it was definitely not Ed Miliband.

And he's resigned just about an hour before we started recording.

Officially resigned, about five days after he basically resigned, when he unfailed an eight-foot-high stone with six Labour pledges on it.

It was like a f ⁇ ing gravestone with a preemptive epitaph of his inevitably broken dreams.

And resignation's flight.

Nick Clegg has resigned.

Nigel Farage has resigned.

I'm hearing rumours that the Queen might have just got a bit carried away with it all and the excitement of the occasion.

But it's hard to see what Miliband was thinking when he did.

I don't know if

you might not all have seen it, Buglers who haven't been following this election closely here in England.

It was an eight-foot-high concrete slab, basically, with six incredibly nebulously worded, pointless promises on it, signed by Ed Miliband, carved into the stone in handwriting that looked like he'd missed a couple of years of crucial education, with a gap at the bottom as if they'd got six policies down and thought, oh, what the f ⁇ , No one's going to read this far.

Let's leave some space for the inevitable graffiti telling us to go f ourselves.

And it's hard to think what he was thinking, John, as if Miliban was thinking there, and he'd had a bit of a bump in the polls and he was doing alright, he was neck and neck.

As if he thought to himself, maybe I was just getting bored of the novelty of appearing even vaguely electable and decided to get back to Ed Miliband basics to do something that would make people look at him, then think about Downing Street, and once again say, no, definitely, definitely no.

And the way he stood in front of this Ed Stone, you were expecting him to say, Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the sad parting of my credibility and of the Labour Party as an election-winning force snatched away from us after a long and painful illness.

As we record now, David Cameron has just left his audience with the Queen.

And I would think that even she would see him walk in the door, give a deep sigh, and mutter, Oh, f, it's you again for another five years.

I honestly don't know if I can fing do this.

Charles, you're up.

I'm out.

I can't look at his face.

It's just off-puttingly round.

Many analysts are saying this is a fundamental shift in the landscape of the UK.

And I guess specifically that that landscape is going to shift from rolling green hills to a mountain of festering shit.

There seems to be a sense that the UK as we know it may not be much longer for this earth.

The United Kingdom may have to put the united part of its name in inverted commas because if the election results are any guides, the UK is about to carve itself up like a self-harming turkey.

I think basically the UK is probably finished, isn't it, Andy?

Because as you say, the Labour Party was beaten more heavily than expected and the Liberal Democrats are currently like the northern white rhinoceros, Andy.

They're not technically extinct yet, but they probably need to be taken into captivity and bred very carefully over several decades if generations in the future are to see them in the wild again.

Absolutely.

The SNP was not so much a curveball in this election.

Well, it was a curveball that basically swung in viciously to smack the batter firmly in the nutsack before turning out not to be a ball, but a hand grenade.

And it has, as you say, thrown everything

into a state of almost total electoral chaos.

So we have the situation where the SNP have won, I think, 56 out of 59 seats in Scotland.

Labour have won, the Conservatives have won.

David Cameron proudly said, we we held on in Scotland.

Well, well fing done.

Tories, you fing love that country so much.

You've kept

the one seat that Scotland deigned to give you.

I suppose it's like if you meet a man wearing nothing but a pair of underpants, and then you meet him again five years later, and he's still wearing the same underpants, you could either think he's got to be disappointed with that, or you could think, yeah, it could have been worse.

Particularly if he's in a fashion contest that afternoon against someone he really doesn't like who five years ago was wearing a decent quality lounge suit with a shirt and tie and is now wearing nothing but a pair of underpants.

It's um

Cameron is, I mean,

I find him hard to warm to as a

neutral.

I'm not really neutral, but

he made this glorious slip of the tongue that really kind of left us in no doubt as to what this election was all about.

He said just a few days before the vote, he said, this is a career-defining, sorry, country-defining election.

And John, for me, that is the most Freudian slip a career politician like Cameron can make.

It couldn't have been any more of a Freudian slip if he'd just put on a pair of tight-fitting underpants with a picture of his mother on.

Boom, I'm not sure there's enough Freudian slip jokes.

Oh, okay, let's go with the second Freudian slip joke.

It couldn't have been any more of a Freudian slip if he'd asked a 20th century British painter renowned for his fleshy nudes to play cricket and field next to the wicket keeper.

For our American listeners, slip is the position next to the wicketkeeper, and Freud was a painter who painted big nudes.

Thanks very much.

That joke really kept me going through the dark night.

Apparently, Cameron has referred to this as his sweetest victory.

And is there any more alarming canary in the coal mine as his face being happy, Andy?

When he's happy, something absolutely unspeakable has just happened.

And in the speech that he has just wrapped up, he said, this is a country with unrivalled skills and creativeness.

And yeah, as you say, Andy, seemingly lying to bolsters.

What happened?

What the f just happened, Andy?

What does say something slightly alarming about our democracy?

That the Conservatives have been returned with a small majority, but they are a party that people are too embarrassed to admit that they're planning to vote for in a completely anonymous poll.

They're too even in total anonymity.

They cannot bring themselves to say to another living, breathing human being, I'm going to say extraordinary.

And it's a really, really bizarre situation that Cameron, previously the partially elected prime minister has surfed back into Downing Street on a tidal ripple of moderate public acceptance as the least irritating option available with an underwhelming democratic mandate he got 36% of the vote that's basically exactly the same as last time on a fairly piss-poor 66% turnout so he's basically got around about a quarter of the possible votes he could gone could have got just over 50 percent of the seats um so basically he's just as popular stroke unpopular as he was in 2010, just a bit luckier with the system.

It is not exactly a ringing endorsement, more a just about audibly tinkling endorsement, which is considerably better than anyone expected.

And I think his real,

the key thing he did in this campaign, the absolutely crucial match-winning gambit he did, was having Ed Miliband as the Labour leader, who I'm not, I'm sure I've said it on this podcast before, not so much an iron fist in a velvet glove as a shit fist in a toilet paper glove.

So what was it that really made people vote in this way?

Well, a lot of people said it's,

you know, it's been a great, great election for the British scaremongering industry.

It shows we're still right at the top of the global game when it comes to that go Team GB.

But I'm not sure it's so much that the British public voted against the fear, particularly the spectacularly mongered fear of the Scottish National Party essentially charging south covered in woad, burning York to the ground and asking for William Wallace's testicles back.

I must stop reading British newspapers.

But I think it was more rather the threat of Scotland shattering the the Union and destroying the entire planet, as we've been told they definitely wanted to do.

It was more the threat, John, if there was a really indecisive result, of having to have another election just months away.

I think it was the thought of another four weeks of bleats and counter bleats that made people think, I've just got to vote in whatever way makes that not happen.

That is my only duty to this country, vote to stop any more elections happening.

And one thing I would like to say to

Mr.

Cameron is:

I don't know if you've followed this election closely, John, but at every available opportunity, he has rolled his sleeves up for no discernible reason.

And I'm not going to tell Cameron how to do his job, but please, if I may, issue one message from the Bugle to the new government.

It's roll your fing sleeves down.

I know it's probably been run through a focus group that said that rolling your sleeves up makes you look business-like.

Bullshit!

It might

maybe be been told by the pollsters that if if you roll your sleeves up, eight people in Northampton are slightly less likely to vote Labour, but it makes you look like at any moment you're expecting to be called away to a farm to deliver a foal or slay and eat a lobster in front of your old mates from school.

Either or probably but almost certainly the latter.

And also John, more importantly, if at any point in your career as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom you find yourself having to roll your sleeves up, you are doing your job wrong.

You are definitely basically the only situation in which that would happen is if you're having to clear up after a botched hit on someone.

That should not happen.

You should have people to do that for you.

Gents, you've managed a f every 50 seconds today.

Well, if this didn't set a record, Chris, then, you know, we were probably both clinically dead.

I'm sure if you don't swear now,

when do you swear?

What are you waiting for?

Um, f.

Cameron showed that his barefaced balls remained as barefaced and ballsy as ever before, claiming that the result was a positive response to a positive campaign rather than a kind of a neutral response to a negative campaign.

And he said his party can now offer, quotes, real hope to people in our country.

John, the lead is still hot on the ballot papers, the corpses of his rivals are still warm on their career slabs, and already the morning off the election, offering hope to the people of our country.

It is a humiliating political U-turn, John.

Absolutely humiliating.

There was a huge amount of tactical voting, it seems, because of our curious electoral system that basically renders most votes

not so much an expression of democratic opinion as practice at accurately writing an X in a small box, which is a very useful life skill to have.

And there's been quite a lot of vote swapping, people going online and swapping votes with people in other constituencies.

You say if they vote, you know, a party that can't win in their constituency, they find someone who's in a similar situation, they swap each other's votes.

So their vote kind of counts.

And I did this, John.

I couldn't decide

between the parties.

They all seem to be in favour of good stuff and against bad stuff.

And I couldn't be asked with a small print.

But I'm hugely opposed to Islamic State.

So I went online and found a guy in Mosul.

So he is going to vote against Islamic State in the next election, in which he can try and vote them out.

But he's a massive, massive fan of Nick Clegg.

So

I voted Liberal Democrat for him.

Huge fan.

For Labour, John,

it's a total and utter catastrophe.

Ed Miliband appeared to be a frankly baffling choice at the time.

Now, baffling is looking at an extremely generous way of putting it.

But it was quite a remarkably high tariff feat of political gymnastics, John, for Labour, in which they managed to basically do worse than they did under Gordon Brown in terms of seats and only very slightly better in terms of vote share.

And this was worse than when they went to the polls with one of the least popular prime ministers of all time, probably in any country, in the the aftermath of a catastrophic economic downturn following 13 years of increasingly unpopular government.

To have matched that, or even worse it,

you have to admire the effort and application that has gone into making themselves as unelectable as humanly possible.

Tristram Hunt, a Labour MP, said these remarkable words.

Ed Miliband has exceeded expectations.

Which I guess could feasibly be true if your expectations were that he would dress up in a pantomime linen outfit and book the Queen and family a one-way ticket to Siberia, which appeared to be what some of the newspapers seemed to think.

For me, Miliband was as about as convincing as a political leader as Dracula would be as a vegan.

It just

didn't ring true.

In fact, scientists, I'm just reading today,

scientists from a high-tech lab have claimed that they've done some research and found that if Labour had elected a vat of cabbage soup instead of Miliband, they would have only got three fewer seats and would, in fact, have received 140,000 more votes nationally.

That is a lie, but the point does basically stand.

I guess the only positives for Labour is that other parties did very badly as well.

As you've mentioned, the Liberal Democrats.

But basically, Nick Clegg has turned out to be pretty much like Leica, the Cosmodog.

The day that he joined the Coalition, that was very much like Leica sitting in the cockpit thinking, well, this is my one chance, but realistically, it's not going to end well.

And long term, there probably aren't going to be many dogs in space.

Other parties have, there was a very disappointing result in Bermondsey for the Republican Socialist Party.

Only 20 votes.

Both George W.

Bush and Joseph Stalin reported to be very disappointed with the result.

And UKIP,

the great UKIP revolution, did not come to pass in terms of seats.

They only won one seat.

Nigel Farage, their leader, also resigned, having

not won his seat.

But they did score about 12% of the vote.

For one seat, John, the Greens, I think, are heading for about 4%.

Is that right, Chris?

You've got the latest results.

So between them, 16% of the vote.

Two fing seats.

What?

I don't like UKIP.

I fundamentally disagree with them on

everything,

partly because, you know,

I like the idea of immigration and I cannot trace my bloodline back to before the Romans came, so I'm not really a true Brit.

But it is, I mean, that's about three million, three and a half million votes, which is the equivalent of half of London or three quarters of Scotland or Greater Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff, and Tunbridge Wells combined.

But they might be disappointed.

I think part of the reason they didn't do as well as maybe they hoped was because basically over the last four weeks if the day ended in the syllable day, you could be pretty sure that UKIP had just had to suspend someone for saying something absolutely fing dreadful.

And recently

a guy in the Hampshire North East constituency, a candidate there, who said that he was up against an Asian Tory candidate called Jay Wardener, and that UKIP was filmed on a hidden camera saying that if this guy became Britain's first Asian Prime Minister, he would personally put a bullet between his eyes.

It's very hard to spin that in a positive way

politically.

And Joe Warden has said he was shocked that someone with Mr.

Blaise's views could be selected as a UKIP candidate.

Shocked.

How can you possibly be shocked by that after what UKIP has done over a recent month?

That's why I'm being shocked when your toast pops out of the toaster.

Oh no, the funny machine by the breadboard made a scary noise.

Help.

Help, help, help.

Just some more results coming in now.

The Conservatives says the last few results.

Conservatives have held Tunbridge World.

That's the first result from a 2020 election.

That Buglers is all from this week's election special bugle.

I think we both need to go and have a bit of a lie down and think about what we've done or not done.

It's just terrible.

It's terrible.

It's just terrible.

Which is very bad.

But the recovery, John.

The recovery.

We've had...

I mean, no one's noticed it, apart from people who are already rich rich enough not to have noticed there was anything they needed to recover from but it's still it's the recovery the newspaper all those newspapers with all their foreign billionaire tycoon owners they can't all possibly be wrong can they

oh god it's bad yeah um i mean it's just really bad

yeah i our newspapers have really really disgraced themselves in this election they've i think the concept of journalistic objectivity is now that that can now be put in the british museum with all the other shit we stole from overseas.

It's hard to limbo under a bar that low, as well.

We've managed it.

They're increasingly surprisingly flexible.

Anyway, buglers,

happy election,

if that's your bag.

I mean, we all love democracy.

Oh, dear.

Oh, dear.

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

Until the bright new dawn next week, when it turns out that the whole thing was a forgery, all faked in a studio in Texas, and you can see the flags moving in the background.

Until then, goodbye.

Do keep your emails coming into info at thebuglepodcast.com.

Don't forget to look at our SoundCloud page, soundcloud.com/slash the hyphen bugle.

Until next time, goodbye.

Farewell.

See you in Berlin.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please, come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.