What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times by Marina Hyde

Author:Marina Hyde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fridge-hiding, the final frontier in election WTF-ery

11 December 2019

The prime minister now has something in common with honey, potatoes and avocados

We begin with a fact-check. This general election campaign has officially been going on since around the mid-Mesozoic period. Its final day saw an update to the list of things you actually shouldn’t keep in the fridge, with the likes of honey, potatoes and avocados now joined by ‘the UK prime minister’. All the party leaders embarked on a frantic cross-country campaigning dash on Wednesday, but only one of them … no, I’m sorry. I can’t face it yet. Give it a minute.

At dawn Boris Johnson embarked on a sort of softcore Confessions of a Prime Minister tour, which by 10am had already seen him dress up as a milkman, then pop something in someone’s oven. What next? Pool boy? Cable guy? At this rate of innuendo it seemed reasonable to assume Johnson would simply be barebacking grateful activists live on the lunchtime news. Of course, his version of all this does subvert the classic porn trope. Traditionally, it’s a blue-collar guy coming to the suburban professional’s house while he’s out at work. In this case, it’s an old Etonian milkman knocking on the door of working-class homes. Someone’s certainly going to get screwed, but not in a sexual way.

Unfortunately, things would take a wrong turn for Johnson back at the dairy – a sentence I might once have found mildly unusual, before I realised that Johnson’s workwear adviser for this election was probably going to get a CBE in the new year honours. This week alone, Johnson has dressed up as a fisherman, a digger driver, a milkman, a builder and a baker. How old is his election strategist? I assume they say ‘basgetti’ instead of ‘spaghetti’ and still wear pull-up nappies at night. Yet despite the relish with which Johnson embraces cosplaying as a working man, he always seems oversized and grotesquely out of place in these scenes, as though a vast unlicensed buttock implant has just been cast in Camberwick Green.

Anyway: the fridge. Back at the Modern Milkman HQ, a producer for Good Morning Britain, filming live, asked whether the programme could get a chat with the prime minister. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ said a senior Conservative source called Rob Oxley, still live on air. At which point the prime minister scuttled into a large fridge.

Time for a historical perspective, perhaps: despite having an underground bedroom as part of the war rooms complex, Boris Johnson’s hero Winston Churchill declined to sleep in it any more than four or five times in the entire second world war, including during the Blitz, when London was under sustained nightly bombardment. Hand on heart, it is difficult to imagine Churchill fleeing a lone Pathé news camera to conceal himself inside a refrigerator. Johnson’s move forces an urgent reordering of the top three most embarrassing places British politicians have hidden because they couldn’t handle the consequences of their actions. This now goes:

3 Edinburgh

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