Hello good-bye

I think I’ve found a new kind of nostalgia. I may be the only one who’s so far willing to admit it, but I bet there are others who have been feeling the same thing.

The source is not your usual bit of pop culture, jolted to life in the back of your mind by a sound on the radio or smell on the summer breeze. You won’t find this being chewed over on any rose-tinted Channel 4 retrospective.

In fact I’m almost ashamed to admit it, for fear of being haunted by visions of a million talking heads guffawing at such a notion. Well, they can cackle all they like, because I’m naming the source right now, and that source is by-elections.

Come again?

You read that right. By-elections. Those dreary punctuation marks of politics. And no doubt my mention of the word is already inspiring as much excitement amongst readers as any other branch of English grammar. But I’ll wager there are some who aren’t sighing into their semi-colons; and here’s why.

Labour’s recent battering at the polls, culminating in last week’s loss of Glasgow East, has been reported in a very evocative way. Booming headlines and feverish reports and endless articles breathless at the size of the swings against the sitting party…it’s all seemed strangely familiar. Only with the respective colours of the winners and losers reversed.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s the decline and fall of the Conservative government was being foretold every few months, so it felt, in a by-election defeat. To an impressionable teenager about to vote in an election for the first time, this was heady stuff. It felt like history was limbering up for another turning point, and I was going to play my part in nudging it round the corner.

The Tories’ hopeless performance blurred into a motif that haunted news reports for nearly a decade. It went on and on, from just before Maggie was ousted right up to John Major’s farewell. Then it stopped. No more ‘historic swings’. No more ‘bloodbaths’ in places like Wirral South or Newbury. The age of the by-election bombshell seemed over.

Now it’s back, and I’m feeling the pull of those Martyn Lewis-fronted TV bulletins like never before.

I always knew the time would inevitably come when the ranks of blue would be once again on the march. But now it has, I didn’t expect it to whip up quite such nostalgia for the days of the Citizen’s Charter or John Selwyn-Gummer feeding his daughter a cowburger.

Ian Jones edits the Digi-Cream Times blog