The Correspondent Two-thirty at the dentist’s…

My heart sank as I waited in the dental clinic. Nothing to do with the great service I always get there. Just that the distraction-TV had shifted from Sky, usual on previous occasions, to GB News.

It’s not my watch of choice, and I was early.

It probably didn’t help that the Levanter had come in thick and I had just recently finished reading Sinclair Lewis It couldn’t happen here.

Lewis is an American Orwell-like writer who sets out, first published 1935, to describe a dystopian vision of an America fallen under the control of fascist leadership. I won’t get into the book here but Lewis clearly had some sort of hotline into the future that showed him Trump spitting expletives and Hegseth modelling his Jerusalem Cross tattoos as he likened the rescue of the airman lost in Iran to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. But let’s not get into religion here either.

TWINNED
Where the Left often sins by getting wrapped in undiscerning, blindfolded punctiliousness - I mean twinning Brent with Nablus (near Gaza), er, really! - the Right cloaks the future in magical thinking, whilst making sure the rabbits stay in the right hats and the spell on the punters lasts long enough for them to pay up before the snake oil wagon moves on.

Setting aside our own local politics - we’ll get to that, er, eventually - it’s looking more optimistic for ‘moderate’ politics in Spain than it is in the UK. Vox, according to a 40dB poll for El Pais, has plateaued and PP is close, but ahead of PSOE 31.1% to 28.6% with Vox at 18.7% (so risk remains for a nasty coalition).

There are a whole load of reasons to prefer a PSOE government even outside of selfish, Gibraltar progressive, reasons. I never thought I would see the day that I would hope, if PSOE fails, that the PP is solid and moderate if it gets in so as to run the country without its arm being twisted by Vox.

Naturally I would prefer a solid majority PSOE government, not only for the overall positive approach to the issue of relations with the Rock and support for the Campo, but because of late they have been leading Europe on sensible, principled thinking, not least in relation to the mess in the Middle east.

And, not that I give up on Pedro Sanchez’s ability to string a government together with a fishing line and box of old teeth, but we really need to be ready for the challenge of change. In Spain and UK.

Less chance do I see for PP’s sister party in UK, the Conservatives. The Tories have always been a safe party for us.

Never in my student days would I have thought I would see people like Michael Heseltine as the ones who, 40 years later, would be talking great sense on issues like Brexit and holding together, lobbying for, the principles of democracy.

EL PREMIO?
Yet Keir Starmer who is solid, hard-working, principled and focused, is like the man who wins the Lotto and then dives into his worst years ever. The 2024 win wasn’t, it turns out, quite the prize it seemed.

Clever psephologists - el que hace lo polls, to you and me - have worked out that if you removed all the tactical voting and reflected what traditionally happened with swings in elections, Labour would not even have had a majority in 2024. The guesstimate is that they would have been 6 seats short. That’s what I heard Professor Rob Ford tell Guardian journalists on their podcast.

Then there are the nationalists outside England - SNP, Plaid Cymru (and to some extent Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland) - who are all holding hands to see if they can, if necessary, isolate Reform who are UK’s ascendent nationalists but of a different ilk.

Reform look to do well in the May local elections in UK.

And, given my co-podcaster, former Labour MP Andrew Mackinlay’s warnings, all softly uttered as from a droning bagpipe, that the Union Jack underpanted Nigel Farage is a real danger i.e. has a real chance of winning at the next General Election, everyone needs to be ready for a simple reality: this rollercoaster that started, in our minds with Brexit, ain’t over yet. No one is about to sing.

Andrew, of course, not only has great experience and a good gut, he has also been following and sharing the ElectoralCalculus and other polls which are all pointing to Reform doing well in May with 27/28 % to Labour at 19%, Conservatives at 18%, Greens 16% and LibDems 12%.

DOUBLE WHAMMY
So even his dream of a benign Labour coalition, whispered by the LibDems, is not a certainty.

Trump happened twice, and Farage can happen soon.

As I write the prediction is that Reform would be 60 seats short of a majority (326 is the magic number) which is no doubt why so much is invested in Conservative parliamentary floor-crabs like Jenrick, Rosindell etc who might be able to pull in survivors from a distraught, Tory wreck. As with PP, I would much rather see Badenoch flourish than such a sight comparable to the fallen crew of Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa.

DOUBLE ON ICE
In the current standing for a General Election, according to ElectoralCalculus, Labour and Conservatives stand neck and neck at 18.5/18.6% whilst Reform are a good 8 points ahead.
For good reason Chief Minister Fabian Picardo, when interviewed live on GB News by Nigel Farage last June, ensured a Union Jack was bursting over him in the background and soaked Farage in assurances on our Britishness like a barrel of Pusser’s rum.

Whoever runs UK and who ever runs Spain, whatever internal challenges they may have with their own nationalists, success for Gibraltar is to be left out of their internal machinations and on the best side of their external politics. The less the better.

All of which makes it a pity if the Labour party decides, after May, that replacing Starmer is the only way to get a ‘restart’ for the Labour government, one that would ‘spend, baby, spend’.
Starmer is a good PM for Gibraltar, as Cameron would have been but for ……. the Brexit referendum.

MARKS TWAIN
If there is a lesson to learned from the two Marks who have ticked boxes in recent global politics, I suspect Carney has the edge over Rutte. Characters like Trump and Farage just aren’t for whispering. Ask Sinclair Lewis, rhetorically of course.

Politics that avoids principles, that mocks democracy, never ends well for the majority of people.

By the time the General Elections arrive in Spain and UK, we will, hopefully, have made the UK-EU Agreement on Gibraltar so fluid and effective for both sides of the border that no government will feel it worth interfering and fixing what we don’t let get broken.

By then, maybe, my dental clinic will be showing Sky or BBC. Not that the news is better, but at least its news and not opinionated ‘news’.

Bedside reading: Jazz Revolutionary by Jonathan Grasse
Podcast at https://substack.com/@dominiquesearle