Prospective Politician Spotting

I stayed up to watch the election results for a while last night (Labour won again). I find the programme to be a strange combination of Very Dull and Quite Compulsive. There was also a strong sense of inevitability about the whole thing. Pretty much nobody appeared to think anybody else had ever had a real chance of winning.

The best telly bits are when they announce the results of each constituency. Get all the little men up on stage and then humiliate most of them by reading out the pathetically low number of votes they have received. After watching a few of these, I started to spot a pattern in the appearances of the various MPs and wannabe-MPs of the main parties.

It's easy to stereotype, so here we go:

Conservatives: Generally the best dressed, but they manage to look like stuck-up, up-tight, tight-assed assholes. A bit smug, with public school hair, they also tend to look somewhat younger than their rivals (possibly because they bathe every morning in the blood of virgins?).

Labour: This lot are well past 40 years old, slightly overweight and look like they are constantly fighting against breaking into a heavy sweat. They look uncomfortable in the suits they've put on for the night. Style is an alien word. The exceptions are the ones who want to be like that Mr Blair fella - for their description see "Conservative" above.

Liberal Democrat: There is more of a variety within the Lib Dems, but there is one unifying characteristic - they all look like school teachers. I'm sure I spotted one of them throw a piece of chalk at another candidate at one point.

Green: They look like hippies. Because they are hippies.

BNP: Mean looking skinheads. Not too surprising since that's one of the entry requirements.

After a while it became a fun game to try and work out what party people work for, just by seeing what they looked like. Unfortunately most of them wear coloured rosettes which makes the game easier.

City of York (I found out what it's really called!) remained Labour, with a rather large majority of ten and a half thousand (20%).