I see you, Rupert Murdoch.
I see your whispery head, your hangdog expression, the malevolent balls of obsidian that function as your eyes. I see you shaking your head as you watch the exit polls come in, your flaccid jowls dangling, flapping about like the labia on a jogging Boglin. You can’t believe it, can you? You lead all those children up the mountain pass and fed their bodies to the Grand Shadow and it’s all been for what? A hung parliament and an even bigger fucking mess.
And good Lord, what a riot it’s been. It seems to be Opposite Day, where the loser wins and the winner loses. That must be exciting for you, Rupert Murdoch - maybe it means for one day you get to be something other than the walking distillate of all the evil in the hearts of men. Theresa May has shat the bed so badly that now only vermin are willing to share it with her. The curtain’s come down on her muppet show and instead of packing it all in, her response is to fire Hitler and Waldorf. She’d blame her own fart in a lift on a blind person’s guide dog.
Turns out that not everyone likes May’s planned approach to Brexit, which seems to be hurling bags of flaming dogshit from a Spitfire over Brussels. She ran a disastrous campaign and ended up as strong and stable as Rod Hull on a wet roof, getting a worse reception than even he did wherever she bloody went. She thought the entire herd would follow her into the abattoir but it all went wrong and now none of us know where the fuck we’re heading.
And who do we get in this exciting, slimline, beach-body ready minority government moving forward? Damian Green, who looks like a bad Tumblr artist tried to do a portrait of Sid James on a golf ball. Andrea Leadsom becomes Leader of the Commons for no other reason that May thinks she has more experience with squabbling children. And Michael Gove’s back, because the Universe is actively spiteful at this point and of course he fucking is. That stillborn greyhound is now Minister for the Environment, even though the only one he has any experience in is an undrained swamp.
And then of course, we get the exciting addition of the DUP, in a move that made Ruth Davidson pull a face like a woman who’s just walked in after a long day at work to find a labrador period on her white sofa. After all the terrorist sympathiser smears on Corbyn, this is our fucking outcome. I can’t wait until Julie Etchingham asks Arlene Foster “what’s the naughtiest thing you’ve ever done?” and she has to admit that forcing terrified and humiliated teenage girls to fly abroad for an abortion doesn’t even scratch the fucking surface of it. If you’re looking for a barometer on just how fucked up such an arrangement is, David Cameron probably wouldn’t have considered it on moral grounds.
There hasn’t been a winner this fatally compromised by their own hubris since Lance Armstrong. If Theresa May had any common sense she’d launch another investigation into parliamentary expenses, because Boris Johnson and a hundred others are definitely claiming thousands for whetstones behind her back right now.
And then of course there’s your best pal, Rupert Murdoch. Ol’ Jeremy Corbyn, the absolute boy, overjoyed at second place and with his arse now officially superglued to the head seat at the table. Not since M-Kat have the young been so energised and there are now dozens of constituencies teetering on a knife-edge so fine that a mosquito’s queef is all it takes to tilt them one way or the other. Despite the hostile press, the desperate smears and the PLP treating Corbyn’s back like a knife rack he’s led a positive campaign that dragged the Labour Party back from the edge of annihilation to the shining, wonderful glory of a distant second.
Which is what it is, and we need to be honest about that. There’s still lots of work to do and we can’t wish the result into being something other than what it was; Corbyn’s made incredible progress, but hearing Shami Chakrabarti say “if anyone’s won the election, he has” made me facepalm so hard I high-fived the back of my own skull. It’s time for Labour to concentrate on the work of offering a unified and coherent opposition to the burning bin lorry full of corpses that is our current government.
Which just leaves you, Rupert Murdoch. Except there’s not much to say, is there?
All this is just a testament to your fading relevance. It just leaves you storming out of the room, your fists clenched, your heart slightly more filled with hate than it always is.
Because your grip is slipping, Rupert Murdoch, and the age of the red-top is fading into the distance. You ran every smear and every insult you could get your clawlike hands on and even with all the vitriol you could summon, you couldn’t land that killshot you craved so desperately. You’ve been so convinced of the efficacy of your own bile for so long that you thought screaming “DON’T YOU REMEMBER THE SEVENTIES?” into the faces of people born in 1999 was actually going to work.
And you know what? After years of your gutter filth spilling into the public sphere, if there’s any positive to take from a Labour loss, it’s the thought that it was a loss good enough to shake you to your foundation.
Empires fade and die away, Rupert Murdoch. With any luck yours and the Rothermere's will drown and lie unmourned in the septic tank of history.
I see you, Rupert Murdoch. I fucking see you.
Sam Gore is a British stand-up comedian. You can read more of the I See You Stories on the Facebook page.