There’s no way to say this that will make it sound less weird: that was the week that teenage girls started to say they fancied Ed Miliband.
It began with 17-year-old Abby from Preston, who appointed herself “spokesperson of the Milifandom” and promptly got the term trending on Twitter. Soon, people were (only half-jokingly) posting things like “ed miliband can cut my deficit” or “ed miliband is bae” and passing round a Vine of Miliband gazing dreamily into the camera to the sounds of the saxophone bit from Careless Whisper. “This all started out as a joke but now i think i legitimately fancy ed miliband,” one teenager confessed.
By the end of the week, Miliband was being asked on Radio 2 what it was like to be a sex symbol, something it’s fair to say no one foresaw the previous week. But there’s a simple explanation: we have reached the part of the campaign where politicians and the media are all dog-tired, have no idea which bit of the country they’re in today and have a form of snow-blindness from the blizzard of policies the parties have pumped out. Everyone has gone slightly mad.
Former No 10 staffer Theo Bertram, now at Google, explained the phenomenon in a series of tweets: “This stage of the campaign is where you make bad decisions. The noble desire to win – for your party, even your country – is now competing with the base desire to sleep. For it all to be over.”
This is the time when strung-out spin doctors think it’s a good idea to dress up their activists in ridiculous outfits to embarrass the opposition. “The chicken costume is a mainstay,” tweeted Bertram. “Terror pervades party HQs when a new outfit emerges. One of the generals has ordered it be worn. Please let it not be me.”
Further proof of this thesis came on 20 April, when former planning minister Nick Boles appeared to be having a Game of Thrones-inspired hallucination. “Winter is coming. White walkers are massing north of the Wall,” he tweeted. “Who can stop them storming Castle Black and marching on Queen’s Landing? Not Mance Murphy and his fiery Free Folk. Not Ed Littlefinger … Only Dave, Lord of Witneyfell, head of House Tory, Hand of the Queen, can save the Seven Kingdoms.”
Unfortunately, Dave, Lord of Witneyfell – otherwise known as David Cameron – had other things on his mind. First, he claimed on Magic Radio that William Hague would make a great James Bond because: “he does yoga, he can probably crack a man’s skull between his kneecaps”. Then he told a gaggle of hacks about the time he got dumped in Frinton 33 years ago. See? Get that man a pillow and some Ovaltine, or who knows what will happen in the next 10 days.
Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman
