WE’RE in the midst of the most boring Westminster election campaign in living memory. Or at least, a BBC Loyal Ulster feature this week invited us to believe that this is the case.

THE politicians may be playing it safe, but personally I’ve been fascinated by the antics of the local media, whose coverage has been anything but dull.

The Beeb, for instance, had a leaders’ debate that wasn’t a leaders’ debate. What happened was, they said they were convening a leaders’ debate and then, when they went and tried to get the leaders to turn up, not all of them did.

It was at this point that the Beeb should have changed the name. I mean, if I decided to have a debate with only red-headed people and called it the gingers’ debate, and if I failed to get enough gingers and had to put a blond and a brunette in there, I wouldn’t call it a gingers’ debate; I’d call it a debate.

But not only did the Beeb crack on with calling it a leaders’ debate when 40 per cent of the people on the panel weren’t leaders, the Beeb then had an earnest conversation with itself about the frankly rather bonkers idea of having a leaders’ debate without all the leaders being present, as if it were the leaders’ fault that the BBC Ulster failed to sell the debate to them.   

Then we had a Belfast Telegraph interview with the outgoing North Down MP, Alliance’s Stephen Farry. The three main issues of interest, we learned from the story and the headline, were i) the Irish language, ii) Jimmy Savile and iii) men in women’s toilets. It may well be that if I knocked upon the door of a mansion with a sea view in Cultra in search of a vote they'd invited me in to discuss their concerns about bilingualism over a sherry. The blokes standing around the Kilcooley bonfire may well be shaking with anger because they can't say what they want about Jimmy Savile. And sea swimmers in Holywood might conceivably be secretly fearful about what's under the towel of every new guy that signs up.  

As for the candidate, I have no idea if Stephen was relieved to be speaking about street signs instead of the cost of living; I don’t know what his thoughts were when the next topic was who we can and can't call a paedo and not the state of the health service; and I do wonder if he was relieved when the next question was the number of blokes in bogs and not, say, the number of children in classrooms.

Then the Tele moved on to Jim Wells, who’s the TUV-Reform UK candidate in South Down. What I gleaned from this interview was that Jim likes a glass of unpasteurised milk and that smoky bacon crisps and dental fillings are no laughing matters, despite the Herculean efforts of his party to make them so.

And perhaps most importantly, Jim has a 23-year-old Nokia phone, which he believes to be “the oldest working phone in Northern Ireland”. Whether the Guinness Book of Records will show an interest after they refuse to visit the Larne boney again this year is not clear.

But the wait to find out is anything but boring. 

Polar legend is more fitting than Tories think

NADHIM Zahawi, who was sacked as Tory Chairman after failing to come clean about a HMRC probe into his tax affairs and was Chancellor of the Exchequer for an afternoon that cost £30 billion, has been trying to cheer up his comrades ahead of next Thursday’s electoral wipeout. 

ICONIC: A Very Gallant Gentleman – painting of Captain Oates by John Charles Dollman, 1913
2Gallery

ICONIC: A Very Gallant Gentleman – painting of Captain Oates by John Charles Dollman, 1913

He put up a picture on Twitter of Captain Lawrence 'Titus' Oates walking out of a tent into the mouth of a howling Antarctic gale during Captain Robert Scott’s ill-fated Polar expedition of 1912. Scott famously told his diary that Oates’ final words were “I’m going out now and may be some time.” In fact, “some time” turned out to be forever as the unfortunate adventurer was never seen again. Generations of Britons grew up thinking that Oates had sacrificed himself to allow his chums to carry on without him holding them back.

Under a famous painting of Oates hobbling away from the comforting lamplight of the tent, bent double against the wind and crippled with frostbite, Zahawi wrote: “True heroism. Captain Oates, taking himself out, walking to his death to save his comrades.”

The online jokes came thick and fast:

“He’s on his way to the bookies to stick £50 on his comrades dying before he does.”
“Captain Oates fleeing the tent to avoid a HMRC investigation of his tax affairs.”

It’s not entirely clear what Zahawi meant by the Tweet. Was he comparing himself to the doomed British hero, having decided not to run in the election? We don’t know. But what we do know is that the truth about the Oates legend – like the truth about the legends of Dunkirk and the Charge of the Light Brigade – is rather more grim than the schoolbooks would have us believe. And, funnily enough, the truth is a considerably more apt analogy for Tory woes than Zahawi could ever have dreamed.

Oates walked out of the tent on Paddy’s Day, 1912 (his 32nd birthday). In considerable pain and virtually immobile, he had been a huge drag on the five-strong hauling party for some time, to such an extent that on March 11, Scott distributed opium suicide pills to the group, in the hope that Oates would take the hint and do the other four a favour at a time when it still wasn’t too late. Oates declined.

By the time he walked out almost a week later, it was much too late. The remaining four died one by one on dates and in an order not known.

The simple fact is that Oates declined to do the right thing at the right time and his eventual decision to leave the tent was taken while racked with pain and the fever of infection. A bit like Boris Johnson refused to leave No.10 after he was found to have been lying about the lockdown parties and only cleared off when his role in appointing a sex pest to the whip’s office was uncovered.

Meanwhile, a 2002 biography revealed evidence that while Oates was in the army he raped a child of 11 or 12, who was then sent to Ireland to give birth to a daughter in secret.

I could swear I saw that on the side of a bus.