Manchester Gorton in leaflets

Gotta love yourself some first past the post, am I right? All eyes are going to be on us in Manchester Gorton tonight, a seat held by Labour since 1935. Will Afzal Khan retain the 76% he scored in 2017, or thrillingly drop to, I dunno, 73%? What about 69%? I mean, whatever, it’s all to play for. Every vote counts, so how to choose who to vote for? We’d better have a look at the party leaflets!

Brexit Party

‘Brexit must be just the start.’

Let’s take a minute to drink that in. Brexit must be. The start.

The start? The fucking start? Well there’s a threat and a half. What else do they have in store for us, one wonders? What other hitherto innocuous but potentially highly divisive issues do they plan to put to the people?

• A referendum on whether it’s called ‘dinner’ or ‘tea’
• Clotted cream then jam, OR jam then clotted cream
• Cats v dogs

Conservative Party

Our local Tory candidate is called Sebastian Lowe. Well, he says that’s his name. But can we believe him, given that research has shown that 88% of Tory ads are misleading?

Applying the 12% truth rule, all we can say with certainty is that his name starts with ‘Se’.

Se has the rictus grin of a man who’d never set foot in Manchester Gorton before last week and has now discovered Tories are about as well-loved round here as people who call their tea ‘dinner’.

Oh it’s lovely there, CCHQ told him. You’ll go down really well.

Bad news for Se is that he’s about to find out that candidates who come third in Manchester Gorton don’t get to decide anything about anything. If he wants his say he’ll have to wait for the cats v dogs referendum like the rest of us.

Labour Party

I just had a look in the cliche box and found a fine tooth comb, and went through Afzal Khan’s MP’s leaflet with it. Weird thing, right, there’s no mention of a Labour leader. Like, at all. A major party without a leader, how delightfully unusual!

Look: here’s Afzal with Lotte from Fallowfield, who is definitely a young person he just met on the street and not at all a member of the local party.

And here’s Afzal showing how he’ll ‘deliver better public transport’ by holding up a picture of a bus made out of stripes. He also takes the opportunity to defend Labour’s Brexit policy.

The wheels have come off, it’s not fit for purpose and you can’t even tell which way it’s going. And as for the bus etc etc.

Here’s Afzal coming on all Mad Max

I’ll tell you who can definitely relate.

That’s right. Se.

No leader tho! WTF?

Liberal Democrats

The first thing to note is that there’s no classic Lib Dem misleading graph, the centrist buzzkills. Still, it’s always poignant to see young hope dashed on the rocks of bitter experience, and this leaflet clearly went to the printers some weeks ago, while they still had high hopes for this election.

Hmm. Well that, as they say, aged well.

Recent polls? Well I suppose in the way that compared to the first life on earth the Roman empire was ‘recent’.

‘The youngest person to hold the position.’ All very good, but have they set themselves rather a low bar here, do we think? Younger than Vince Cable, you say? Sprightlier than ‘Ming’ Campbell?

Anyway, hope that’s cleared things up. Happy voting!