Charles Moore devotes his Monday column in The Daily Telegraph to a partial analysis of the Jon Stewart clip that we highlighted a couple of days ago.
But partial it is. Although Stewart focused mainly on the utter triviality of the election campaign, Moore chose to look at just the segment where Brown, live on The Jeremy Vine Show, hears himself describing Mrs Gillian Duffy as a "bigoted woman". With evident glee, Moore recalls Stewart saying: "You actually see the moment when a man's political career leaves his body."
This is all part of a developing pattern. In inverse proportion to the vapidity of the campaign, we see the media hyping it up, blathering about the "excitement" of it all, and the closeness of the "contest". To that extent, the media have as much at stake in this election as the politicians. They too are part of the bubble and they have to convince themselves that this election is real – that it actually means something.
Not to do so would mean admitting that they, alongside those self-same politicians, have been living a charade. Moore, like the rest of them, therefore, is keeping up the pretence that we are dealing with serious politics.
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