Apparently the next general election is going to be decided by Mrs Christine Volestrangler, who lives in Edgbaston. Having been told yesterday about her crucial role in the affairs of our nation, Mrs Volestrangler, 63, said she felt “honoured, but a little bit stressy” and vowed to make a judicious and careful decision at the ballot box.
A former customer services manager for a high-street department store, Mrs Volestrangler lists her hobbies as watching musicals, tending her garden and dogging. “I have always enjoyed going out, meeting people and having casual sex in public,” she explained.
Mrs Volestrangler was nominated by the political analysis firm More in Common, which informed the Conservative Party last week that the election would be decided by the votes of suburban women just over the age of 60. By the first in a string of remarkable coincidences, this is the second time Mrs Volestrangler has been charged with deciding the fate of our country, because in 1997 she was in her mid-thirties and living in Redditch. “Yes, it’s true, I was what the pollsters then called Worcester woman, so I got to make Tony Blair prime minister,” she said.
Incredibly, you might think, her husband, Michael Volestrangler — who is ten years older than his wife and a self-employed businessman hailing from Wickford — was given the job of deciding the outcome of the 1992 election, having been identified as Essex man, a vital component of electoral support for the Conservative Party. Some commentators have worried that the governance of our country is too important a job to be left to such a minuscule coterie of people as the Volestranglers, but others argue that the arrangement “makes for strong and stable government, unlike what they have in Italy, ha-ha-ha”.
The “suburban women over 60” stuff is, of course, another of those fictional stereotypes dreamt up by pollster wonks who in truth haven’t the slightest clue what people are thinking beyond their Westminster bubble, but try to pretend they have so they can make money from political parties and the national newspapers. And so we have been introduced to the aforementioned, rather proper Worcester woman; the aspirational Mondeo man and Basildon man; the perpetually put-upon just-copers; the reactionary toothless trogs on their mobility scooters in the red wall; and the tranche of middle-class voters thinking of voting for Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats next time round, known to the psephologists as the “stupid bastards”.
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All of these constructions are, paradoxically, both too general and too specific. The specifics are required to make them saleable commodities, thus enabling the BBC News teams to scurry off in the hope of finding some of these fictitious people to vox-pop for the lunchtime bulletins.
As you may have gathered, I have grave doubts about this business. There are few generalisations one can make about voting patterns. Even class tribalism — which has done a remarkable, if gradual, about-turn, with the more affluent now voting Labour and the poorer voting Conservative — might be subject to a certain recalibration in 2024.
What has tended to be true, however, is that our general elections are decided not by the middle or working classes, but by the disquieted votes of our lower-middle classes. They were once derided as Poujadists, shopkeepers and cryptofascists, but they are also the people who keep our country afloat by working hard and saving money. The synonym for almost all of those fictional creations of the pollsters is a blank “lower-middle” — and this has been true since about 1955. It has, I admit, been challenged as a decisive factor over the past 30 years by the huge growth in our public sector, whose workers can be relied upon to vote for anyone other than the Conservatives, not least for reasons of self-preservation.
Where does this leave us? In a battleground between those who are paid for by a skint state and those who create the wealth — mediated by the way each of these cabals rates the two main parties in terms of competence or otherwise. But even this broad analysis falls down for the by-election in Rochdale this week. A lot of voters want to talk about public investment and the cost of living, but it is likely to be decided by people who think the most important thing is to wipe Israel off the map.
The deliberations of the electorate, then, tend to be too volatile and too locally specific to call. As Mrs Volestrangler was apt to remark on those fragrant evenings when she set off in her Volvo to a nicely closeted lay-by, you never really know what you’re going to get.
UK defence crisis
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● President Biden isn’t the only resident of the White House who is completely barking, it would seem. His dog, Commander, also seems to be “crazier than a shit-house rat”, as the Americans sometimes put it.
This creature, a German shepherd, has savaged White House personnel no fewer than 24 times inside one year, leaving some in need of hospital treatment. Staff have been issued with doggy treats and pepper sprays — carrot and stick, you see — as a means of reasoning with Commander when he goes doolally and tries to rip their arms off.
Perhaps it is the stress and pressure occasioned by being the principal carer for a senile old man who safeguards the free world but can’t recall his own name and needs constant reminding to breathe.
Covid stops us all divorcing … sort of
There’s been a large decrease in the number of British people getting divorced — a development greeted with dismay in the more liberal of our newspapers, which believe everybody should get divorced all the time, perhaps even if they are not married.
The main reason there are fewer divorces, though, is that there have been fewer marriages. There was a gradual decline — partly, one suspects, a result of successive governments fighting valiantly to render the institution meaningless — until 2020, when Covid caused a drop of 60 per cent.
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Now is just about the time that people who would have got married in 2020 would be contacting their lawyers: the shagging’s dried up, she’s run off with her yoga instructor, he’s decided he’s only attracted to pandas and so on. But they didn’t get married then; and the precipitate fall in divorces now is partly evidence of this.
A rip-snorting red-top exclusive
A British newspaper has just published a previously unseen and quite shocking photograph from the early Seventies of Mick Jagger leaning over and doing something suspicious. It was headlined, “Does long-lost snap by Stones’ ‘fixer’ show Mick snorting cocaine?”
If this is true, then that’s it for me and the Rolling Stones. It had never entered my mind that those young men availed themselves of illicit substances.
Make sure you buy the same paper this week for its exclusive photograph of a bear emerging from a copse, hastily pulling up its trousers and looking embarrassed.
