#everyone knows including her why are u playing the denial card

[actual-changeling]

fake relationship is one of my favourite tropes of all time so shout-out to x files for not only giving us an entire episode about it but peppering it into the plot since season 1.

people straight up do not believe them whenever they try to deny it and i am LIVING for it

[lhs3020b]

I guess we’re due a bit more Diary of a Disaster, given yesterday’s inane lunacy, so here are my thoughts...

In what could be one of the worst decisions ever made by Parliament, the Brexit bill has now gone through, unamended. May, Farage and the extremists on the Tory backbenches have everything they wanted. Bizarrely, they were helped and hand-held through all this by Corbyn and the Labour Party. (His behaviour has been astonishingly bizarre  - whipping the PLP to vote in favour of an unamended Article 50, then calling for a protest against an unamended A50, then having Labour peers abstain when the Commons sent the bill back to the Lords, and then not even turning up for the protest. There are U-turns, and then there’s spinning around like a weather-vane that’s been doing LSD during a hurricane.)

The only realistic hope of stopping Article 50 would have come if Corbyn had been willing to stand up to it - and he's not. In fact he's consistently whipped Labour to vote in favour of it. The stupidity of this is eye-watering. He really has played all this in about the worst manner possible. In fact, he and McDonnell appear to have somehow convinced themselves that Brexit will create a socialist utopia, despite Britain being run by the Tory Party. It's almost as if Labour didn't notice that they lost the 2015 general election - or perhaps they're somehow still stuck in the denial stage, nearly two years later?

Thing is, I do agree with the critics on one thing - Labour is screwed. In fact I think they're in worse trouble than they realise. A once-in-a-generation collapse is on the cards for them in 2020. It may already have started with their 2015 implosion in Scotland. I suspect >100 seats might be an optimistic outcome for the PLP in 2020.

I think we can safely assume that the Labour Party is in the zombie phase - it's still out there, shambling around, but the life is gone. What credibility it may ever have had is spent, the media is implacably-hostile and the party's former base is being slowly alienated by the leader's tone-deaf ineptitude. (If Corbyn's managed to lose people like me - almost the walking caricature of a well-meaning Internet clicktivist lefty - then he has no hope.)

Anyway, trying to divine any political strategy from the Labour Party is useless - there isn't one. Also, given their utter failure to function as an opposition over the last 6+ years, I suspect their demise will be nothing to mourn.

But I apparently still think that Mrs May won’t be forever.

So, aside from Labour, what might happen?

I seem to be dubious about the general assumption that we're faced with a generation of unbroken Tory rule. Let me see if I can unpick why...

1. Theresa May has been unimpressive so far, and Brexit means her ministry has a truly-unique opportunity to blow itself up. Brexit is presumably due in March 2019 on the current 2-year timetable. The next general election is May 2020. Generalised Tory truculence, their usual poor planning and their rabid backbenchers mean that a 'successful' Brexit looks wildly-unlikely. Consequently, TM could well be going into the next general election faced with the worst economic situation since the 1930s. This certainly won't help her. In addition, business might be less willing to write a blank cheque to a Tory administration whose policies had directly-beggared many of them within the preceding 18 months. (A lot of the usual Tory donors may even be bankrupt by then, and thus have no pennies to rain on their friends.)

2. Corbyn is in his seventies (and, perhaps, stuck in the '70s). On a purely-personal level, I don't wish him ill and I certainly don't wish to sound like I do (I do think that at least in his own head, he probably does mean well). But, in 2020 he'd be 71. Even politicians don't live forever, and leadership of a party has to be a stressful job. Even if he won't quit, it's possible someone more vigorous may be in charge by then.

3. Nature abhors a vacuum, and I’d say Labour are certainly somewhere below the 62 millibar level right now. (Goodness knows their behaviour keeps making my blood boil.) A huge political space has opened up to the left of the Government - sooner or later, something or someone’s going to move into it.

4. The Lib Dems could come back from the brink. Cameron's majority in 2015 actually came from the Lib Dem collapse, not Labour's tumble in Scotland. (One untold story of GE2015 was that Labour actually made net gains in England.) But, post-referendum, the LD vote appears to be reviving. A lot of us, myself included, are prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt again. (I haven't forgotten tuition fees, austerity, Lansley's NHS bill or the five-year smack-in-the-face that was Cameron's coalition ... but all the other parties treat the 48% like we're syphillic AIDS-infested lepers.) The Tories remain fixated on Labour, but what if their flank was actually vulnerable to the LDs? May's working majority is only 17 - even  a modest LD revival could be enough to put her out of a job.

5. This is a bit more speculative, but I've been wondering whether or not 2018's planned redistribution of seats in the Commons might backfire. There is some historical precedent for overly-clever gerrymandering schemes to malfunction (see for instance the 'Tullymander' case from the Republic of Ireland). This particular scheme is arguably overly-clever - it's been set up in such a way as to obfuscate the fact that it is gerrymandering. And the current redistribution plan is based mainly on the assumption that Labour are the Tories' main electoral enemy - re: point 3 above, if the theory is wrong and the main enemy is actually now the LDs, then May et al. may well be trying to apply the wrong prescription to the wrong problem. Also, once the plans are published, presumably the opposition parties will study them and change their own behaviour accordingly. (Except, possibly, Labour, who may well carry on with their current 'limp out into road, lie down, wait for speeding car' strategy.)

6. There might - might! - be some evidence that the media are edging off of the Tory bus. The Chancellor's recent budget received a remarkable amount of criticism in the press - particularly-ironic given that raising Class 4 NICs is actually one of the least-crazy things this government has done. But, most journalists are in the small category of self-employed earners whom the NIC hike will hit, hence their disdain. If a complacent Treasury manages to piss off the journalists, and no-one seriously fears a Corbyn ministry, then the press might feel more comfortable being more aggressive toward the Tories. Given the mindless fawning that Cameron and Osborne received in the press, this would be quite welcome.

7. The opinion polls have the Tories on an enormous lead, but that's not really what we're seeing in council elections and parliamentary by-elections. The possibility that the polls are just wrong can't be disregarded. And I have wondered whether perhaps in the aftermath of 2015, the polling firms overcompensated and have artificially-inflated the Tories' lead. If so, a surprise in 2020 seems possible. (Or perhaps a lot of Tory supporters will feel perfectly relaxed and safe, and just stay at home on the day, with entirely-predictable consequences. After all, everyone knows The Other Lot [whoever they may be] can't win, just like Tr*mp and Brexit, amirite, so why even bother?)

8. And lastly, the remaining possibility: some totally-unexpected but obvious-in-hindsight event (like Brexit!) that completely rearranges the political landscape and derails a lot of  careers. What that might be, I can't tell you, but the chance of something like this can't be ignored. (There are a few things I've wondered about. What if the BoJo bomb finds some way to explode - perhaps resigning in a huff during a difficult Brexit summit - or the dreaded Tr*mp does something that sends ripples of chaos all the way down into our internal politics, or side-effects from Brexit cause another big bank to collapse, or Scotland votes for independence in 2018, or the LDs get - guess what? - 48% of the vote and the least-likely landslide win in the House ever, or, or, or...)