The Peaceful Transfer of Power

(on desire in the year of elections)

I’d just done the school run and was sitting on the top deck of my favourite London bus when an ex-boyfriend started hitting me up for sex. I texted back that he might instead ask his current girlfriend. He said no no, he’d prefer it were me.

“Then why are you dating her?”

“Oh” he said, this one was obvious: “She is electable”.

To be clear, he does not want to be a politician, but he is highly ambitious.

“I am electable!” I protested.

“No you’re not. You’re Jeremy Corbyn.”

This is a crazy thing to say to a Jewish woman.

“Yes, you’re Corbyn. You’re worshipped by a core few - and I’m one of them - but you’re far too extreme to be palatable to a general audience”.

I disembarked the bus and switched to a phone call: “In what way am I too extreme?”

He seemed pleased I’d asked, as he had a list ready:

“Your body. Your opinions. Your hair. All your writing. Your emotions. Your romantic history. They’re all too extreme.”

“But you see a future with your girlfriend?”

“Yes I do. She’s Keir Starmer! She’s electable”.

He made sure I never knew her name, referring to her exclusively as “Sir Keir”.

I realised “unelectable” is what I used to consider being a “jar opener”. The object of my affection is a jar of jam that no-one has ever been able to open, so the jar is handed to me and I try with all my might and it finally unscrews and I hand it back, and then the girlfriend after me gets to eat the jam.

At first I had laughed about being labelled the Corbyn of Love. But then, as sometimes creeps up with something you find hilarious, the day progressed and it started to upset me.

A dual UK/US citizen, I found myself thinking back to the time (over a decade earlier) when I was living in America and a friend set me up with Cory Booker, now Democratic Senator but then Mayor of Newark, the New Jersey city that is both central to Sopranos lore and the setting of all Philip Roth novels. We’d had drinks with my friend at her hotel and at the end of the evening, Cory and I tried to swap numbers. I had a flip phone and wasn’t good at texting yet. I tried to add him into my contacts but it was fiddly so I gave up and put “TBM” then handed the ungainly slab to him to add the number.

“What’s TBM?” He asked, “Like to be continued?”

“Tall Black Mayor. If I urgently need one, I’ll press this button”. I envisioned myself as Larry David in a wiggle dress which, I will admit, does not sound that electable.

I got home and we texted for the rest of the night - Cory was charming and funny - but, as much as I’d enjoyed talking to him, I knew that to go on a real date, there would be a check on me and I knew there was no way I could pass it. When he’d talked about prison reform, I’d said I’d just published a book about mental health without saying it was my mental health. “You’d better not google me HA HA”. He must have because I never heard from him again. I felt momentarily bereft - I could have been the First Lady of Newark! If only I weren’t so unelectable.

The template for a woman’s romantic predilection is said to be imprinted by the age of three from their Father’s behaviour. What then, to make make of the core election memories of my Dad? First: he had a Glaswegian named ‘Hughie The Hat’ living in his office doorway- living there to the extent that Dad registered it as his address so he could vote in the election that Tony Blair won by a landslide. I was 20, it was my first time voting and Dad made me walk Hughie - who was seriously wobbly - with me to make sure he cast his vote, too.

THEN in the 2019 election, because we were so cataclysmically disheartened by Corbyn but couldn’t not vote Labour, Dad cast his vote for him whilst enacting a peaceful protest. He walked into the polling station, wax coat, flat cap, and a wooden clothes peg attached to his nose. I haven’t gone into it with him, but from my perspective, it was ultimate Jewish humour: making a joke instead of saying how much it hurt to see the leader of “our” party defend a mural where Nazi caricature Jews break the backs of the workers. Ha ha ha. The same bleak laughter as knowing you’re unelectable.

Then a man with reason and decency rose through the Labour ranks. No, not him. To my great surprise, it was my old friend, Tom Gray, once a vocalist for the Mercury prize winning band Gomez, now the Labour candidate for Brighton and Hove. I was surprised by this turn of events. I’d lost touch because, when we were close, I was in the grips of the mental health crisis I’d write about in my first memoir. There’s a lot from back then that I can’t remember due to hospital stays and the trying of different medications. And probably the chloroform of shame.

But I do remember Tom - who was the only person I knew on the Britpop scene who was younger than me - staying with me in my New York apartment. It was a walk up studio where I had all my bras displayed on the wall, crucified for my sins. I stole toilet paper from restaurants and gallery openings because I’d maxed out on lingerie. I hung silver curtains meant to evoke Warhol’s Factory. In retrospect, trying to evoke a conglomerate of mad, damaged narcissists is not going to de-accelerate a breakdown. I don’t remember how Tom and I first met but I remember him making it into the screenplay for Your Voice In My Head, him in pyjamas, looking at me in polite horror as I bounced around the walls of my tiny apartment. How patiently he reasoned with me.

He said at one point in the friendship “We shouldn’t sleep together”. And I was bewildered because that hadn’t been on the cards. Tom was never, ever boring. He was just solid, funny and undamaged, and that didn’t compute in my brain to romance. I’ve recognised but not yet found a way to fix this mis-wiring, hence the five years of celibacy I wrote about in ‘Busy Being Free’.

Tom founded the Broken Record campaign, to lead reform for musicians around streaming. He’s chair of the Ivor Academy. If elected, he will become the first Labour MP for Brighton and Hove for more than a decade. Finding out he’d done all this - has a nuclear family and actioned good in the world during years I was just trying to keep the trap door in my head from opening up again- momentarily broke my heart for what I haven’t been able to navigate myself.

In sync the way single parent families often are, my daughter asked if she could have a day off school to cry, as she described in the language of a nine year old, a feeling of ennui she was wrestling with. She asked if we could watch a film that could make her cry fastest and hardest, to get it out so she could go back to school. I understood this to be sneeze weeping, a sinus rinse for the emotions. I couldn’t show her ‘All Of Us Strangers’ yet so I put on ‘Lassie’, the 2005 version with Samantha Morton and John Lynch and Peter O’Toole so old and frail he’s like a harbinger of Joe Biden’s calamitous debate appearance (Biden’s debate could only have gone worse if, as in Lassie 2005, a tiny dog dies defending his owner, Peter Dinklage). We cried and cried and she went back to school the next day.

I let my kid miss school because she was consumed by ennui, and my love life is all over the internet: I am fundamentally unfit for public office. It is kind of a peaceful way to make art, to make love - knowing that you are unelectable. If you are in Brighton and haven’t voted yet, vote Tom Gray. My personal campaign slogan would be: “Vote for Tom Gray. He will respectfully stand his ground against your bad behaviour and in a non-punitive way suggest you get your life together.”

Cory Booker, meanwhile, has many achievements as U.S Senator, including advancing women’s rights and affirmative action - things that I believe in and benefit me. Why does electability matter if - like my ex-boyfriend - you aren’t in politics? Well, you might want to be one day. Tom Gray’s path definitely isn’t standard but there are portals from music to activism. There are even portals in and out of madness. You might change. You want the option to.

.Photo by Alexandra Cameron

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