You can say just about anything during this election and sound brilliantly informed

1 May 2010

Hugo Rifkind gives a Shared Opinion

This is an election for bullshitters. It’s brilliant. Time was, as a young idiot working in newspapers, you might be afraid of opening your mouth and making loud and lofty predictions about the shape of the next government. Now it’s fine. You might not know much, but nobody else does either. You can talk and talk and talk, and it’s very hard for anybody to say, with any sort of confidence, that you are entirely wrong.

You see, this industry is dominated, some would say unfairly, by people who actually know stuff. They might have an intimate knowledge of the swings of the elections of 1923, 1974 and 1974 again. Or they might understand polling. Present them with eight shopkeepers from Penrith who’ve gone off tax credits and they can extrapolate to tell you how a schoolteacher might vote in Bognor Regis. The thing is, all this is predicated on the understanding that there are vast numbers of people who wouldn’t think of voting for a Liberal Democrat because they didn’t know what one was. Now, all that has changed. Or it might have done. Who knows?

It’s grandiose, and frankly quite offensive, but I keep thinking of 9/11. ‘The kaleidoscope has been shaken,’ said Tony Blair, back when he was still pretending he didn’t necessarily want to invade Iraq. ‘The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.’ Unfamiliarity is a great leveller. This is a Ground Zero for political opinion. Or, at least, it might be. The fact that nobody knows for certain is the whole point.

Now, there are various ways in which one can exploit this situation. Socially at least, I enjoy the irresponsible approach. Normally I’m quite reluctant to give an opinion when friends ask me about politics, in case they turn on the telly half an hour later and somebody like Nick Robinson is on, irrefutably making it plain I’ve been nonsensically winging it. But these days you don’t need to worry about that, because he’s as much in the dark as anybody else. So you can say anything, and sound brilliantly informed.

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