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This week: do the French really think Birmingham was boring? And a map of the continuing impact of Vikings. But first, that infernal election.

I don’t think this was my position at the time, but these days I feel strongly that the best bit of The West Wing is the last season and a half. The “God bless America!” schmalz of the early years, which has aged like so much fine milk, is long forgotten; and someone behind the scenes has finally, thankfully, noticed that Josh Lyman is a dick. Best of all, the election storyline that takes up most of those final episodes is brilliant: funny, exciting, unpredictable, and delivering, ultimately, the slightly unlikely result you were probably hoping for all along. It’s what all elections should be. 

There’s something else that storyline gets right: that no matter how much you think you enjoy them, every election seems to go on far, far too long.¹ At the start of the final season, the campaign with all its movement is fun, for the characters as well as audience. By the last few episodes before election day itself, though, everyone is tired and cranky and just wants the thing to be done. Five weeks since Rishi Sunak stood in the rain without an umbrella and claimed to have a plan even as he dripped, the entire Westminster bubble has reached the “Matt Santos yelling about World War 3 on a bus” stage of the campaign.

Anyway: I, too, long for this newsletter to primarily be about things that have nothing to do with British politics again, but rest assured that we are on the home straight now. In the meantime here’s the penultimate, probably, edition of the Tory gaffe list. Something that isn’t about the election follows.

The election

• The biggest campaign story of the week continued to be the depressingly low-rent betting scandal, after it emerged that Tony Lee and his wife Laura Saunders, respectively the party’s director of campaigning and a parliamentary candidate for Bristol North West, were also being investigated by the Gambling Commission over allegations of bets on the election date in the run up to its being announced.

• It then emerged that Nic Mason, the party’s chief data officer, had placed “multiple bets”, too. 

• More Tories are rumoured to be implicated, although I’m not actually sold that the news that Scottish Secretary Alistair Jack had placed several bets on different dates, thus suggesting he didn’t have a clue, really counts.

• Michael Gove, accurately but unhelpfully, compared all this to partygate. He’s not wrong – there’s the same “one rule for you” vibe and the same “Really? You decided to blow it all up over this?” quality to both stories. But it perhaps did not help the Prime Minister for him to say it out loud. (Gove is standing down, giving his intervention a certain YOLO quality.)

• Sunak eventually withdrew support from Saunders and Craig Williams, the MP whose bet first broke the story. (They’ll remain, at this stage, on the ballot.) But it was nice of him to wait an implausibly long time, thus ensuring the story dominated the news agenda for as long as possible first.

• In the middle of all this, the party tweeted and then deleted a post featuring a roulette wheel, accompanied by the caption, “If you bet on Labour, you can never win”. 

• It did not delete the Facebook video ads designed to look like emergency alerts, even though they contain what look like outright lies.

• Or this frankly mental post which just includes the word “tax” literally hundreds of times.

• In other news, during last Thursday’s Question Time debate, Sunak suggested that anyone refusing to do national service could have their “access to finance” restricted. This seemed, given the financial hole the country is in, the scale of his assets, and the way he skipped out on D-Day halfway through, brave.

• Chris Skidmore, the former energy minister and forgotten least bad author of Britannia Unchained – not a high bar: the others were Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab – said he would be voting Labour, for environmental policy reasons.

• James Sunderland, a former MP and current aide to foreign secretary James Cleverly, was revealed to have called the government’s Rwanda policy “crap”. (“The policy is crap, okay? It’s crap, but it’s not about the policy”.)

• Rishi Sunak himself meanwhile was photographed shaking hands with Tom Wilson, his potential Labour replacement as MP for Richmond. Questions were asked why the Prime Minister seemed to be spending so much time campaigning for a seat with a notional majority of 23,000, which even the more pessimistic polls show him holding. 

• His leaflets major on the fact he’s a “local champion” focused on “safeguarding the friarage’s future” – and not, as half the internet said, “Farage’s”.

• Rishi’s decision to stay local might be partly because candidates in many seats are now telling him to stay away. “He is better off out of it, I don’t want to be tainted by him,” one told the Mail on Sunday. Ouch.

• The Tories are also, Saturday’s Times reported, worrying about money. “Labour’s fundraising has outpaced the Tories by seven to one in the first two weeks of the campaign,” apparently. “Sir Keir Starmer’s party took £6.1 million while the Conservatives raised £889,872, less than the Liberal Democrats on £898,307 and barely more than Reform on £882,000.” Again: ouch.

• Tactical voting posters have begun to appear, in which someone claims to be “Labour – But voting tactically for Liberal Democrats to defeat the Tories”. I cynically imagined this to be a LibDem ploy, but it turns out to be the work of the pressure group Compass.

• In some seats, Tories have resorted to campaigning on the Kitchener-esque slogan, “Keir Starmer needs YOU to vote Reform”.

• An analysis of constituency polls by the Labour writer James Austin found that they back up the more absurd MRP projections, which show the Tories winning well below 100 seats, putting the party on course for its worst ever result by a substantial margin. (The current record is 1906, when it won just 156 seats.)

• More in Common’s Luke Tryl explained that the idea the Tory campaign had achieved nothing was wrong: it’s achieved the feat of persuading undecideds not to return to the Tory fold. 

• It also turned out that at least some Tory voters are actually quite keen on this whole “Tory wipeout” and “Labour supermajority” thing the Tory party is campaigning against.

• The right-wing media continued to respond to all this in its usual sane and rational manner. My old bete-noire Daniel Hannan, who once claimed the only necessary parliamentary regulator was the “electorate”, wrote in the Telegraph that “there is simply no rational case for the sort of Labour landslide we are probably about to see”. The electorate, it seems, disagrees.

• In the Times, Camilla Long wrote an article under the headline “The great Sunak shaming: please stop this human sacrifice”. In it, she criticised a young voter for having the gall to even ask what the government had offered his generation.

• Tim Montgomerie suggested it was time the majority started listening to those with different views. Whatever the case for intellectual generosity, I do not remember this being such a concern when the Tories were in the ascendent.

• Back in Downing Street, the Prime Minister seemed under the impression that, in a row between all but universally adored national treasure David Tennant and business secretary Kemi Badenoch, the latter was the one to back. (What next, asks my mate Jim? “ Punch David Attenborough in the cock? Call Michael Palin a simp? Shit in Paddington’s hat?”)

• And finally Mike Batt, the Wombles songwriter and former Tory donor who wrote the theme for the Tories’ 2001 election campaign, Heartlands, is spending the campaign promoting a new Wombles single rather than the Conservative party. This was, noted Karim Palant, a bad sign.

On the upside, Bob Geldof has endorsed Andrew Mitchell as MP for Sutton Coldfield. So who’s to say whether things are going well for the Tories or not? 

Not the election

The other day, the screenwriter Ollie Masters tweeted a lovely review of my book:

This is fantastic. Reminded me of Bill Bryson at his best. Full of such pure, infectious curiosity about the world with a heavy dose of humour. If you haven’t already, make sure to pick up a copy

(He’s right! Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, Bert’s Books.)

Anyway, I was delighted by this – delighted enough that I’d asked Ollie not to waste it on a private message after he’d DMed it to me, which is why he’d tweeted it in the first place. Partly this was because it’s just a lovely thing to read; partly it’s because pre-nimby Bill Bryson is a bit of a hero of mine, and his books have exactly the vibe I aspire to. But also, it’s because it reminded me of a thing that’s not about the election even slightly, which I’m going to write about instead.

In his 1990 book on the English language Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson noted that the French used the phrase “être de Birmingham” to mean, roughly, “to be bored out of your mind”. I’d always found it amusing, if a bit distressing, that the city’s reputation extended that far, and went on to use the fact in a 2016 CityMetric article about how everyone ignores the place. When I went to write it up though I couldn’t locate a second source. Since then, more than one French friend has said they’ve never even heard the phrase. When Sathnam Sangera tweeted his discovery of the same line a few months back, a lot of people told him the same thing. 

And so, I assumed, Bryson was either wrong, or winding us up. Occam’s razor was that there’s no such phrase.

Well – it turns out that there actually is. The phrase is archaic, and didn’t mean quite what Bryson implied. But it does seem to have been real.