A Patchwork Election

For Americans accustomed to superficial reports covering British politics Muriel Murch’s personal essay about last Thursday’s elections is wonderfully offbeat and richly detailed. As a Brit, she obviously feels back home in the U.K. after her travels. Her monologue expresses affection for dear old Albion at the same time as her powers of observation point out its quirks.

Take her very first sentence, with its gentle ironies, its spoof of horseracing: “This spring may be lost as the May sunshine recoils to March storms but change is in the air as the British politicians gallop through the muddy turf of their constituencies to the finish line.” The candidates speaking in televised debates might just as well be jockeys muddling—or muddying—through the course.

Or else check out Murch’s description of the incumbent: “Gordon Brown is a lion weary with the battle. He looks heavy and sluggish. His face and voice are baleful. The sins of his predecessor, Tony Blair, have fallen on his shoulders.”

Murch finds a bit to admire about the Conservative candidate who won the most votes last week, David Cameron, but, alas, “he has a soft lisping voice that however hard he tries has not the battle fire of Gordon Brown’s Scottish highland roar.”

Here’s what Murch says about the Liberal Democrat who, as of today, will be working to form a new government with Brown: “Nick Clegg skipped across [the] stage, not quite like a court jester but certainly adding an annoying distraction with his good looks. He carried an air of reason, as he asked, like an ardent suitor, so firmly and sweetly, for your vote if not your maiden-head.”

Somewhere between “The Talk of the Town” squibs at “The New Yorker” and the fabled, now defunct magazine, “Punch, “ Murch’s essay stakes out its claim as humorous satire. We Yanks need to learn more about the Monty-Pythonesque nature of politics in what was once our mother country.

To an extent listening to Murch is as edifying—and it’s certainly cheaper—than flying across The Pond.