Britain Has Finally Taken the Joke Too Far

As a people, the British have a unique sense of humour. When the Natural Environment Research Council launched a naming competition for their new £200 million polar scientific research ship, anyone who knew the British public could have told them it was a huge mistake. In the end, the name chosen was Boaty McBoatface.

This forms part of a much larger unofficial British sport of vandalising serious local consultations by submitting absurd names for new buildings, ferries and machinery. Scotland in particular has produced gems like "Gritsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Anti-Slip Machiney" for a snowplough.

In the same vein of general tendency not to take anything too seriously is the enduring popularity of our deadpan prankery: audiences applauding terrible contestants on purpose, loudly cheering when some poor waiter drops a stack of plates, or voting for joke political candidates, such as Lord Buckethead.

Well, the latter one is a bit awkward these days because clearly that joke has gone too far. In 2016, the Conservative party decided - clearly as a prank - that Theresa May was the Tory most likely to win the next election. Whatever you may think of May, she has the personal charm of a traffic cone; her robotic dancing etched in memory in equal parts mesmerising, terrifying and cringeworthy. The live broadcast from the Conservative conference, when she lost her voice while the letters slowly peeled off the wall in the background, was a masterclass in comedy.

As a national joke, it was a hard one to top, but the Conservative membership did their very best and selected Boris - a man with only personality and no obvious talent - to lead the country through one of the most politically challenging periods for decades. Up until that point, he was mostly known as the clown on a zip-line.

None of these jocund extravaganzas, however, come close to that of electing Labour under the banner of "bring back the adults". Disregarding the fact that of all the "isms", socialism is the least grown-up, this Labour government has been essentially one slapstick banana-peel skit after another. With the predictability of an early silent comedy movie, they have stepped on the political banana-peel at every opportunity, only briefly pausing to take a pie in the face or a poke in the eye. If Boris on a zip line was the Cirque du Soleil of British politics, our current Labour government is a bunch of drunken clowns at the last performance of a travelling circus about to be shut down for health and safety reasons.

The stand-out performance, however, belongs to Keir Starmer, his mind like a whirling Sufi dervish, his face a blank, abandoned canvas. He U-turns so often and so quickly that Labour MPs will regularly be sent out to TV-studios to defend a policy that has already been abandoned by the time they exit the studio.

With 10 Downing Street on fire in the background, he states - in a voice so robotic it can only be intended to make Theresa May appear human - that he intends to stay Prime Minister for at least 10 years. Little wonder Armando Iannucci has moved away from modern politics and is currently rumoured to be working on a stage adaptation of Dr. Strangelove.

As a TV-show, Labour would have been brilliant. The perfect pairing of the total calamity behind the scenes with Starmer's blank stare and robotic voice would have cleaned out at the awards. As a political reality, however, it is - to borrow a phrase from across the Atlantic - a total cluster-eff.

And sadly it is likely to get worse. As anyone who has tried to rescue someone drowning knows, in panic people are likely to flail and grab at whatever they can find. By the time of the next election, it is entirely possible that the UK may have joined the EU, left the EU again, gone entirely solar only to switch to full nuclear the following week, banned women from women's sports and painted all of London in rainbow colours.

Then what will the British public do; where do you go from there? I fear that the only way to top that would be to elect The Greens. Led by a man who thinks he can make women's breasts bigger by hypnosis, the party has made farcical comedy the bedrock of their existence. They made liberating Gaza their main local policy in Birmingham - and while their party manifesto states they will "create a fairer, greener economy", one of their new councillors in Halliwell turned up in a Lamborghini.

Quite frankly, I think the British public has finally gone too far. It's all laugh and giggles until the entire country is on fire and has been renamed The United Kingdom of Fuckup McFucky.