The two leaders of the Tory and Labour parties were interviewed yesterday and both seemed the most inauthentic and robotic types of people. They were the leaders but they didn’t act like leaders. They were the ultimate decision-makers but they looked like they hadn’t made a decision in their lives. They were live and sentient humans but they seemed to be wound up at the back and shoved on to stage. They look incapable of leading. Perhaps they don’t lead. Perhaps there are others who do it for them.
When you learn to code you learn about the “front end” which is the bit that people see or the user interface and the “back end” which is the digital engine that does the number crunching. Both of these ends make a programme work. So many programmes and websites and so on have very different “back end” ways of working depending on what they actually want from you. Some “back end” workings take far more than just the input you give them at the “front-end”, they take more details from you (this is what they call ‘cookies’). So what you see and do on a programme might not be what you want, and you think you are controlling the programme when in reality it is controlling you. The digital age is a wonder.
This is the topic of today because there just seems to be no other reason for the dismal state of our politics than the visual puppetry on display on our television screens and radio broadcasts. There are no genuine answers to questions, no personalities, no sense of coherence and the various mistakes or oddities we see just wouldn’t happen if the politicians had any semblance of common sense. This election is bland, devoid of thought and reason, as if we are sleepwalking to a Labour landslide. The grown-ups have gone home and the children have taken over. The party that was once high on fiscal responsibility is now promising the earth in tax cuts. The party that once campaigned to spend money like there was no tomorrow is now being evasive about the need for tax rises and fiscal tightening. This is a weird election and there can be only one real answer to this save rank incompetence on a historic level; the men in grey suits.
The ‘men in grey suits’ phrase refers to the political sharks that we don’t see or know about. Far from a conspiracy, there are people who run the parties from the inside, who are backed by big donors, who often sit on important boards like the TUC or executive directors for a major investment firm. They may be full time political people or part-timers. If you have seen ‘Yes Minister’ they are the Humphreys of politics. They advise or in some cases they pull the strings. Far from a conspiracy, it can explain the daft decisions politicians make that seem devoid of reason, sense or political reasoning. The weak politicians who somehow rise through the ranks are often on the good side of the men in grey suits and those who seem too difficult to control are often not around for long if the mysterious people have their tentacles deeply buried in the heart of the party. You can see when they are in action; things get leaked to the press, things people said somehow magically turn up in tomorrow’s newspaper, television interview extras somehow circulate, photographs turn up, CCTV footage is found. We all make mistakes, but they seem to be very public when they need to be for some.
Kir Starmer looks like he is being controlled by men in grey suits. He trots out the same lines as if by clockwork. “My father was a toolmaker” is a line he is being told to say, not advised to say. If you were in control of your own body and mind you wouldn’t repeat the same thing over and over again unless you were mad. Kir Starmer is not mad, we think. Starmer, when asked why he came across as a robot suddenly lagged as his mind desperately searched for an answer that didn’t revolve around “because i was told to say all of these things”. Starmer can’t communicate well nor can he debate well. He cannot make people turn to look at him in a room. He can’t answer a question and instead reverts to type. If he is asked a question on his personal life and what makes him relatable he said he eats Harribo sweets. How did he get to be leader?! On tax, he is being told to say nothing. On immigration he is being told to say nothing. On the campaign trail he is led from sterile room to sterile room to say exactly the same things; he does not relent from the script. Yes, he is probably making sure he says nothing wrong in order to just walk into government but did he really get into politics just to be a lame duck Prime Minister? Does he want to change things or just be in power…wait, don’t answer that one. He can’t make decisions about his own party as he flip flopped on policy, about expelling Diane Abbott and whether he actually supported Jeremy Corbyn or not whilst serving in his shadow cabinet. He is displaying all the hallmarks of a yes man. He can’t think on his feet. He gets rattled easily on stage. He’s the right man for the men in grey suits.
Rishi Sunak on the other hand has gotten a very awful set of men in grey suits behind him. Why? They are torpedoing his campaign. Sunak called a General Election in the pouring rain speaking from a script that was defending a massively unpopular record in government with the polls showing a 20 point lead for Labour. He left the D-Day commemorations early to go and do an innocuous ITV interview that wouldn’t be aired for 5 days. It was found out that Sunak didn’t even want to go to the commemorations in France in the first place. Footage of Sunak saying sorry to the interviewer because the commemorations “dragged over time” was leaked to the public. David Cameron, who was at the commemorations at the time, didn’t stop Sunak from leaving. Sunak said as an example of being deprived as a child he didn’t have a Sky satellite dish. Information was leaked out to the public last Monday that the Tory party had run out of money. The parachuting of Sunak aides into safe seats like the chairman of the Tory party has completely alienated the grassroots Tory members. There are so many mistakes it can’t be as a result of incompetence. Let us speculate that all this is happening because the men in grey suits want to torpedo Sunak’s premiership. Why? So that all the ills of the Tory party and their disastrous performance in the polls and the election can be pinned all on him. The men in grey suits are turning this whole election into a “we hate Sunak” show so the party can bounce back far easier afterwards. Sunak is not in control, other people are.
If this hypothesis is true it explains why the leaders are so terrible. It explains why there is no personality in politics, and if there is they are hounded out for being difficult to control. The men in grey suits always have time on their side; it’s just a matter of time before they get their way. They do the intruige and the public do the rest. Weak politicians are easier to handle, easier to manipulate, easier to help front the programme working away in the back, easier to remove. The men in grey suits hate populism. The people control that. That isn’t right. Let’s paint the public out to be racist, xenophobic or something to ruin their credibility. Wait, did a politician slip through our grasp and into power? Let’s badly advise him to turn up to a party and take pictures of him during COVID. Wait, another one has slipped through and become Home Secretary? Let’s get our puppet Prime Minster to sack her despite her popularity. This insidious hypothesis becomes more and more believable when you consider the optics for the public to be bad but the optics for the inner workings of politics to be good.
For this hypothesis to have any credibility there has to be a reason behind this. There has to be a really important reason for such a devious amount of intruige, puppet-strings and the manipulation of power. Surely a country with mass immigration ensuring profit maximisation for large businesses with taxation rules that choke small businesses into mountains of costs for compliance, having de-industrialised due to net-zero sending manufacturing to far more profitable ends of the world like India and China, whilst maintaining the opioid of the masses with club football owned by major foreign companies and taxing the civilian population for everything they have whilst surveiling them more than in China itself, could not possibly be the playground for vested interests in the shadows? Conspiracy theories are dangerous, and can send people down rabbit-holes that only get worse and worse. The paranoia of the unseen is a dangerous concept and should not be dabbled with without the intelligence and forethought to know when to stop. But when you look at the state of our politics you can’t help but think; what has happened, and why it is happening?
There is one more thought for you. In 2015 UKIP got 3.8 million votes and 1 seat. In this election the Reform Party will probably get between 4-8 million votes, depending on what happens in the next 2 and a bit weeks, and are projected to get maybe 3 seats. This is surely a democratic outrage. What kind of awful representation is this? Forget your political leanings, surely democracy should win over all? Despite your premonitions about the Reform Party, you should agree that if they get votes that should equate to seats. Yet the discussion at the moment is dominated by a sneering “oh, but they’ll never get any seats so haha”. The blasé attitude people have to a gigantic democratic deficit is astonishing. So why is this happening? It suits the men in grey suits. Let’s have everyone forget the gigantic flaw in the democratic system that keeps us in complete control. Let’s sweep the democratic deficit under the carpet, and let’s keep the unelected House of Lords there whilst we are at it, despite the Lords being the largest unelected legislative body in the world outside of the Chinese Communist system. Any other western country would be shouting this problem from the rooftops. But when the men in grey suits will do anything to stop that discussion from being had, we are not discussing it.
Why aren’t more people questioning things or providing alternatives outside of a supposed control of politics by a clique of people we don’t see? Well, they might come for you. They might troll through your social media. They might de-bank you. They might send a hate-mob to find you on social media or in public and make your life hell, maybe even get you cancelled from your job or life altogether. They might make your friends disassociate from you. The costs to offering an alternative are great. So, if you are reading this and want to do something with little cost to you, maybe you should think about your vote a bit more; it’s the best you have with as little cost to you as possible. Without courage all we have is freedom and democracy; are you willing to use it?
The conspiracy theorists that we know of are generally rightly laughed at especially when it comes to things like holocaust denial and the 9-11 inside-job plot, but that is because if we believe them then we would engage in a crime almost as if not worse than the crimes we want to ignore. We let people off the hook. But what if we say there are men in grey suits who control our politics to the point that it is weak, devoid of reason, coherence or sense to the general public and we are wrong? Nothing. What if we say all these things and we are justified and ignored? Nothing good.
Just keep watching. Watch the politicians closely. Maybe, just maybe, the men in grey suits will make a mistake, or you might just see the silhouette of a puppet-master.
This article first appeared on the TDL Times…for now… For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.
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