Just found a quirkily amusing piece by a comedian who publishes random diatribes about people in the news under the heading I See You Stories. Just a bit of fun, but I love the bizarre combination of poetry and invective s/he directs at Angela Eagle:
www.facebook.com/ISeeYouStories/photos/a.572035576233853.1073741829.552777451492999/855236554580419/?type=3&theater
Pasted for those who can't see fb:
I see you, Angela Eagle.
I see your nervous blinking and the sag in your shoulders, the defeatism pouring off you in tangible waves. You seem tired, Angela Eagle, and the tremulous wobble in your voice betrays your uncertainty. Who can blame you, really? It's been a ridiculous bloody week and frankly the whole sodding thing seems to be collapsing like a house of cards. The masks are falling off left, right and centre and to just about nobody's surprise, it turns out those masks in the centre are actually a bit more to the right than they've been pretending.
It's been an omnishambles of the highest order, a weapons-grade fuckstorm of idiocy, with just about every politician in the country either falling on their swords or struggling to pull others from their backs, caterwauling and jockeying for position like a panicking shoal of fish in a feeding frenzy. Boris Johnson has been exposed as the cowardly little follow-through blusterfart we've always expected him to be, crapping the bed at a house party and trying to sneak out the back door before anyone notices the smell. Michael Gove has popped up to insist he's the man to sort out the mess, despite the fact he's got all the charisma of a hungry lamprey and claps like a haunted mannequin. Jeremy Hunt even considered running for PM, like a man turning up to save children from a house fire even though he smells of petrol and nobody's sure where he was an hour ago. And then, on top of all that, Theresa May looms over the horizon like the undead lovechild of Thatcher and Enoch Powell, as if she's taken one look at Stephen Crabb and decided that actually, he isn't quite homophobic enough to be leader.
What Labour should have done seemed like such a foregone conclusion at first. At a time when it became painfully obvious that the deprived communities the political classes have been brushing aside for decades saw Brexit as a means of voicing their contempt, it should have been easy to push a clear anti-austerity message that promised to protect their interests and secure their futures. Heck, maybe you could've even put forward a sensible plan for negotiating with the EU when it became painfully obvious the Leave camp didn't have one. Obviously the belly of the PLP was rumbling like crazy but it would have probably been a good idea to swallow a few Imodium and get behind the leader their membership overwhelmingly elected to capitalise on the Tories imploding. Instead they tried to exorcise what they naively thought would be nothing more than a Corbyn-scented fart and what we're left with is a Labour landscape that looks like someone filled a pressure washer with Bovril and fired it through a colander. They've purged themselves into oblivion and Corbyn's still hanging on like a stubborn tagnut.
You just can't get rid of him, can you, Angela Eagle? You've found yourselves stuck with Schrodinger's leader, a man who seems to both contradict and reinforce every compliment or criticism levelled at him. His support is nothing more than a cult of personality, even though you whine that he hasn't really got one. He's dull and incapable of motivating people, even though he's got the largest electoral mandate from the membership of any leader in history. He can't win an election, even though he seems to be quite good at winning elections. He doesn't have the strength of conviction to steer the ship through troubled waters, even though he's still at the helm when you lot have poked 172 holes in the hull. It's time for real change, even though that's exactly what he's advocating for and the PLP hasn't learned that Scotland and the swing voters clearly have no interest in a watered-down Tory party when the SNP and UKIP seem to be offering actual alternatives.
Unlike some, I don't fully buy the argument that this coup is nothing more than a Blairite resurgence. It's unlikely that all 172 of you have completely failed to acknowledge the apparent desire of the membership to move the party to the left and whatever happens, I'd like to think that Corbyn's legacy will at the very least have been to steer the unwieldy tanker a few degrees in that direction. But however unelectable he might seem to Labour MPs, the timing of the attempt to oust him has been fucking ridiculous and there's not a single viable alternative among you. Nobody's willing to issue an outright challenge to him because they know they'd be annihilated. Instead you've tried to push him out the back door at a time when just about the entire electorate is disillusioned with the failures of the democratic process at every level. Is it really a surprise that a man who's voted with his conscience rather than his ambitions for more than thirty years has more conviction than you were expecting?
But you got caught up in it regardless, Angela Eagle, and you've prematurely thrown your hat into the ring.
I see you, Angela Eagle, looking up at the moon and dreaming of new horizons. I see the throng behind you, pushing you towards the great scaffolding, Hilary Benn whispering in your ear that there's a whole new world out there to conquer. I see the crowd of 172 behind you, chanting your name in a low whisper, supportive but hardly vocal. I see them carry you on their shoulders, hosting you into the cockpit, strapping you in. You're in a rocket the PLP built for you out of the debris of New Labour, and your fuel is the quiet groundswell of rebellion.
I hear the engines roaring, Angela Eagle, and I see you pushed back into your seat by the rising G-force. I see the tears streaming from your ecstatic eyes as you're elevated from your position, blasting into the stratosphere, the PLP fading beneath you just as quickly as they first raised you up. I see you firing past the clouds, the great cheer of apparent victory bursting from your throat as you pierce the heavens.
I see the engines gutter and flicker out, Angela Eagle, silent in the void of space. I see the bright and glorious moon, a new political landscape just out of reach. You're out of gas, Angela Eagle, pushed up in to the stillness of oblivion and away from the cacophony below.
I see you drifting, Angela Eagle, the support below you now a thousand miles away. I see you frown. This isn't quite the glorious new dawn you were expecting, is it? It's like coming fourth all over again. Oh well. At least from this weird abyssal limbo you can look down and watch it go to shit all over again when the Chilcot Report comes out.
The Eagle hasn't quite landed, has it?
Still laughing at weapons grade fuckstorm of idiocy.