It’s a titanic struggle between two tortoises – and not a hare in sight

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/03/race-of-the-tortoises-stewart-lee

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The Thracian slave Aesop is historically lauded as the master of the fabular form, pitting simplistically symbolic creatures – the wily fox, the lascivious bat and the slothful sloth – against each other in tales that have delighted fans of prescriptive anthropomorphic narrative for generations. But the current race towards No 10 has an audacious illustrative purity that even Aesop would have balked at.

For this election has represented naught so much as the titanic struggle of two tortoises, and not a hare in sight, slouching towards Downing Street to be born, their mouths full of masticated Byron’s burger and fumbled bacon respectively, meaty drool and hot butter spotting their wattled chins.

And beneath a shady tree on a green hilltop, Nicola Sturgeon, a confectionery-gobbling bunny in a pink scarf, her paws wet with tempting chocolate, taunts them both in a husky regional accent. “Haven’t you heard of Cadbury’s Caramel? You’ll just have to take everything easy!”

A vast swath of polls, all open to different interpretations, has attempted to inject drama into the minuscule differences in the rates of the two testudines’ progress.

The pattern is becoming predictable. On Mondays the Tories surge. Then, at around 10.14pm that evening, the two parties are neck and neck. By Friday, Labour is in the lead. So, working on a hunch, I met my eclipse-chasing showbiz science friends Professor Brian Cox and Dara Ó Briain, the Judith Chalmers and Cliff Michelmore of space, on Westminster’s College Green, to see if they could suggest any explanation.

From behind a portable Casio keyboard, Cox communicated with me by doing a bendy-legged bee-like dance, and appeared to interpret the data thus. At the weekend, corpulent Tory voters stuff themselves with pheasant and gala pie, while traditional Labour voters exist on gruel and hope. The gravitational effect of the moon then pulls the now heavier Conservatives momentarily into the lead until the collective muscle mass of the traditional Labour voter, bulked up by his weekday physical toil in a dying manufacturing industry, gives Miliband’s party the midweek edge. Then equilibrium is once more achieved on Friday.

I wanted to tell the moon-mad musical professor that his idea was stupid, based on out of date stereotypes, but Ó Briain was standing between him and me, and Cox was entirely obscured. And I thought what an amazing cosmic coincidence it was that God, or nature, or whatever, had made Ó Briain, if stationed in a particular position, exactly the right size to obscure Cox so perfectly.

(You must never look directly at Professor Brian Cox, remember. Always view him through a colander or a hole cut in a cereal box, or you will become impotent.)

Other, more reliable, experts suggest the two tortoises’ apparent progress rates are skewed by the methods used to harvest data.

Polls taken online score higher for Labour and Ukip, while Conservative voters appear to favour the telephone, as this device can also be used to order groceries from Waitrose and leave messages with the duty log saying that the BBC is leftwing; Liberal Democrat supporters respond best to voting intention surveys posed in the form of cryptic crosswords, to be completed around the kitchen table by all the family, in a bonding session that is both fun and educational, during which perhaps some of the older teenagers are allowed wine, cider, tobacco, marijuana or LSD; SNP voters, meanwhile, prefer to communicate their preferences via a series of burning braziers mounted on a chain of Pictish hill forts, as they prepare flaming brands, ready to torch English cities and destroy our collective way of life for ever, as surely as Adolf Hitler and his Nazis set out to in the second world war.

Other experts point to the simple human emotion of shame as a factor in clouding the polls. Door-stepped by a clever-looking researcher, they say, many Ukip supporters may be too embarrassed to admit their true voting intentions. But having been on tour around Britain these last few months I think this position displays a degree of metropolitan ignorance. Outside major multicultural population centres, Ukip is sometimes viewed as a genuinely legitimate political option.

Indeed, in Yeovil, I had already ordered myself a baked potato in the cafe opposite St John’s church before I realised the eatery was festooned with Ukip banners. In my north London rainbow utopia an establishment decorated thus would soon be deserted, but here the man behind the counter carried on as if it were normal to proffer toasted sandwiches while professing support for a party that did electoral deals with Polish Holocaust sceptics. My potato arrived. It was tiny, overcooked and horrible. I sat alone and ate it resignedly, purple pound bunting fluttering around my ears.

Stewart Lee is on tour and will be at Leicester Square theatre, London, from 21 September