Word from the ether sphere is that Labour leaders John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn are in for a Christmas treat this year of the traditional Dickensian kind. Just as soon as they tuck their white haired heads into sleeping caps and lay down expecting to dream of erecting giant billboards with their faces on in every town square.
“It won’t be the dreams they expect. Ghostly Nick Clegg is planning to visit McDonnell and Corbyn this year on Christmas Eve,” LCD Views has been informed, during a seance to contact the pre-2015 Liberal Democrat parliamentary bloc, “and he’s bringing a warning from the future and the past for the present.”
The seance was conducted using a ouija board constructed with the dead wood of state paid university tuition, you know, before the neoliberal con-artists starting commodifying it to slow destruction, and letters cut out from the first university fee agreements issued after they were trebled.
”This talking board does not lie,” a political psychic on our payroll affirmed, “and that’s good. Dickens is the obvious frame for the message, as the Labour leadership’s support of Tory Brexit will lead to Dickensian conditions for the many, but not the few.”
But what will the ghost of Nick Clegg tell them?
”It’s not the ghost of Nick Clegg. He’s still alive thankfully,” our psychic corrects, “it will be a ghostly Nick Clegg. A different animal altogether. This one fully realises just how seriously it let ghoul scrooge Cameron manipulate it in order to destroy the Lib Dem’s as a parliamentary force and get the U.K. back to two party FPTP Westminster politics.”
Well, what will ghostly Nick Clegg tell McDonnell and Corbyn.
”It will point to what happened to real Nick Clegg after he sold out on key promises and principles to gain power. McDonnell and Corbyn are on the same tangent.”
How so?
”Before Nick Clegg said screw scraping tuition fees I’ve a seat at the big table now, let’s treble them. Before that he was viewed as one of the last honest brokers left in our politics, having picked up and run with the work of his forerunners, most especially Charles Kennedy.”
Who?
”Are you a member of Momentum? They’ve wiped him from memory too. Charles Kennedy led his entire party in opposition to Blair’s Iraq War.”
This is starting to sound like a party political broadcast…
”For which party? If Vince hands over to Gina Miller maybe…anyway. But no. We choose our targets from the news cycle. And McDonnell and Corbyn are doing the same thing as Clegg. Trashing the perception of themselves as honest brokers, bringing in a new kind of politics, in order to put perceived party interests before the country, with continual fence sitting Brexit fudgeberg making, even though they must know people are suffering from Brexit yesterday, today and everyone will suffer tomorrow. Comrade. What is it worth to make that omlette? How many eggs do they expect the Tories to break?”
And that will be ghostly Clegg’s warning? What happens when disillusionment kicks in?
”Just ask real Nick Clegg about what happens then. Turkeys may vote for Christmas, but afterwards only a miracle will get them to vote for it again.”