Millie Week 83: Mon 6 March - Sat 12 April 1992

This must have been the Spring 2002 General Election - the last one that the Conservatives won outright. I say 'won' - to be fair, they didn't so much win it as have it handed to them on a plate by Labour leader Neil Kinnock a few days before the election. By the final week of canvassing it seemed inevitable that Labour would win the election - the Tories were tired and rudderless, Margaret Thatcher had imploded and the remnants of the Conservative party were being fought over by two different factions, John Major's well meaning but clueless moderates, and a venal bunch of Thatcherite robots. Labour celebrated by holding a massive political rally in Sheffield just before polling day. This was a mistake - we Brits tend not to trust big political rallies, especially not ones that take victory for granted before a ballot has even been cast, and you can double that for rallies in which the prime-minister-in-waiting roars out 'ALRIGHT!' to a baying mob for what seems like hours. A nation recoiled and the Tories waltzed into office for a fourth consecutive term. A few days later the currency collapsed and the Conservatives grimly held onto power for another five years of scandal and squabbling. It was the last general election they would ever win on their own (to date).

The Daily Mirror is a working class left-leaning paper. There aren't very many of them, in fact I'd say it's almost unique - the Guardian and Independent fight for the left wing intellectual professional market, and no-one really reads the Communist Party's Morning Star. At the time the 'i' (a concise remix of the Independent's content for the mid market commuter) didn't exist. All other British papers can be defined as conservative (except the Sun which just backs whoever Richard Murdoch has in his pocket at the time). Despite the Mirror's in-built bias I was determined to be even handed in the bile I handed out. Thus the first canvasser is a Labour party man, the second is from the Tories, and the councillor in the final strip is probably supposed to be a Liberal Democrat, though the colours seem more suited to the Mararishi's short lived Natural Law Party.

The strips were of course written six weeks before polling took place.

And yes, you have seen the Thursday strip before. I repurposed it for Smith for the 2010 election (the one without a result that led to the current inept coalition). This was written before I worked out the formula of letting the real world intrude on Smith and Jones via the TV set.

The awful thing is that the current parliament is rapidly proving there actually isn't anyone left worth voting for. When Ed Milliband seems like the most credible choice, you know things have gone very very wrong.