I can’t bear it, so I’ll bare it…

I’m already on truckloads of paracetamol to dull the pain of the biff-boff of electioneering. Biff – No more junk food adverts for obese kids watching BGT says Johnny Ashworth, the shadow to Jeremy Rhyming Slang. Boff – cap on energy bills chirps the blue Thunderbird Greg Clarke. Biff – bleed more out of those on over £80k says John McDonnell. Boff – net migration will come down to tens of thousands. The biffing and boffing mostly excludes the woefully underpowered Lib Dems and the indifferent SNP, whose leader – Jimmy Krankie – has temporarily recognised that her silence is golden.

Following the dispiriting Tory surge in council elections (why would local people vote for cuts and grammar schools?) and the mildly cheering news about the new French president, what are we to make of the state of Europe and the UK at the moment? Both in a good deal of bother, I’d say.

At home our main parties are grabbing soundbite-policies as short term foreplay to get the voters onside. Bugger the ideology, lets toss some tasty morsels to the common man and woman. Jezza and Theresa Maybe both claim to be champions of working people. Well Cap’n Birdseye still clings to the definition of the working man who was hacking at the colliery coalface in D.H. Lawrence’s time. Mother Theresa’s definition is closer to the truth but her motives are less honest than Jezza’s. At least he is an unreconstructed Commie sticking, mostly, to his guns. She sticks a damp finger in the air each day and decides what will win her the most votes.

Both have swallowed the idea that the 52% v 48% Brexit vote was a landslide. Tim Barren Farron is not the vibrant provocateur to take the pro-Euro fight to the main stage. Why, at this vital time in our history, have we been landed with a Liberal leader who doesn’t like gays? Where are Vince Cable and Nick Clegg when you need them? They have the integrity and the language to mount a proper Liberal response. They have done their time, I suppose – and got bloody noses for poking them in where the Tories didn’t want them.

The French are in more of a mess than we think. The mainstream parties like neither Macron nor Le Pen. A third of all who voted went to the far right. That beats UKIP into a cocked hat. There is a strange confusion about who represents what in Paris. The conservatives are called Les Republicans. Sarkozy’s people. Macron seems to float between Liberalisme (eg. supporter of free markets and right of centre) and Socialisme, which I think means socialist. It’s all Greek to me. Now there’s another basket case bubbling up again.

As I watch the painfully awkward gait of Mother Theresa, dressed uniquely in over-engineered dung-brown designer-PM gear, I do think, who are you? Who do you think you are? Jezza, who I trust just as little, is rather more of an open book. Why are these two the only options? Far right and far left. No one in the middle. Things fall apart the centre cannot hold. Here, France, USA. I can’t bear it. I’m switching off the telly until election day. Count the bare-faced lies between now and then. And more ad hominem arguments than you can shake a stick at. Pass me the paracetamol, I need to be strong and stable.