Start the boats

The government stalls as it attempts to reach electoral success across the UK’s flooded roads.

There has been so much rain in the UK these past few months that much of the country is flooded.

City streets and remote pastures alike are under inches of brown water, and while the sun has made a fleeting appearance in recent weeks, the water table is now so high that it only takes a light drizzle for rivers and streams to burst their banks once again.

Faced with the life aquatic, Brits have taken to amusing themselves by attempting to drive their cars through swollen fords, bursting streams and flooded underpasses.

Exchanging dry footwell carpets and working engines for clicks and likes on TikTok and Instagram, very few of these motorists seem to get through the water unscathed, their cars’ electrical systems incapacitated by a tide the colour of yet-to-settle Guinness, fringed by a creamy sewage foam.

As if the UK needed any more metaphors right now, it seems that water is on everyone’s brains, for these foolhardy motorists have an analogue in the UK’s government and its driven pursuit of anything, however unrealistic, to secure a few seats at the next election.

Hell-bent on seeing the other side of dire polling figures and not sinking without a trace at the next election, the government continues to point the bonnet of its now rather tired jalopy towards what may appear to be tantalisingly close shores, yet which are, in fact, totally unobtainable.

You almost feel for them. From the driver’s seat, it must seem that only a few watery metres lie between the electoral opprobrium of unchecked immigration, and ballot box approval from Reform party voters.

Yet even the most careful navigation of the currents, surveyed with a keen eye for judicial bow waves and submerged obstacles placed by its own right wing, results in the inevitable loss of forward momentum and an unceremonious dismount from an immobilised vehicle.

Still the government comes, however, having patched up the damage or, where the car is unrepairable, bought another vehicle from Tufton Street’s Arthur Daley, who promised a reliable runner with one careful lady owner called Liz.

Lining the motor up to face the narrow stretch of water once again, noticing the smudged tax disc and strange rattle, the driver shields his eyes from the sunlit economic growth that lies across the water before him.

Once again, the vehicle is gunned towards more promising polling. Once again, reality hits as hard as cold water entering a cylinder head. The car fails, the initiative stalls, and the polls remain static.

So much lies on the other side of that swollen stretch of water: a functioning health service, lower inflation, energy security and greater housing supply. Even the water looks cleaner on the other side, the sewage having been treated by water companies instead of being simply dumped while the authorities look away.

To have any of these nirvanas in its grasp would give the government succour at the ballot box. Which is why it is so set on reaching them, but also truly believes success is possible with a steady throttle, a firm hand on the steering wheel and some gaffer tape over the radiator grille. Yet despite its best efforts, each attainment may as well rest on Mars, not the other side of a ford on the A614.

Failure to reach the dry shores of polling success is driving the government to distraction. Pointing onlookers to diversions such as small boats, statues, and the use of pronouns, as the government once again pushes the vehicle back to dry land, it seems to hope that some new topic will instead go viral. A team of spads is no doubt hard at work trying to bring back the ice bucket or milk crate challenge to offer up an easier route to electoral success.

A smarter bunch might realise that one particular sleight of hand the government has itself used to distract the electorate from its failures might, in fact, provide a way of reaching the far shores of improvement at the polls.

The government continues to tell us it is working to ‘stop the boats’, with little evidence that it is doing so. Yet only one of the rubber inflatables that brought a mere 6% of the 742,000 net migrants to the UK in 2022 would be sufficient to cross that damned ford, where so many of the government’s fleet of Ranger Rovers have failed. Maybe it is actually time for the government to start the boats.