It’s striking how very swiftly we’ve accepted an event so mightily strange as the Makerfield by-election. After a couple of days of marvelling at the spectacle – a politician aiming to get back into Parliament for the express purpose of unseating his party leader – the media started treating the farrago like a totally normal event, and switched from boggling at the weirdness of it all to doing all the usual by-election stuff. Getting aerated about random polls, digging up the candidates’ salty old tweets, hanging about in pubs chatting to locals, etc. The novelty of the thing has evaporated.
Pulling a sad face and stating how beneficently ardent you are is, in fact, incredibly irritating in a politician
Indeed, Andy Burnham’s public campaign launch last week felt very much like business as usual. Sad-eyed Andy did his customary thing, getting totes emoshe about the north, while trying to get away from it. ‘I love this place, I love the people of this place,’ he said of this Wigan suburb, ‘but what I have inside is a burning sense of injustice that the proud communities of this place face a Westminster system that puts them at the bottom of the list’. Andy cares, you see, and like many politicians he likes to let you know how passionate he is inside, how very much he loves the special people of this very ordinary place. They’re more loveable than the very similar people in places like Essex and Kent because they’re slightly further away from London, and it’s a fact that you get more adorable and authentic with every mile of distance from Westminster.
