God help me, I’m about to make a metaphor. Anyway, earlier this month playwright Ken Armstrong wrote a blog about Yorkie bars, the UK chocolate that comes in what is meant to look really big and chunky. It isn’t, but compared to some other chocolate bars, okay. Part of his point was about the bar’s original TV adverts in the 1970s and how now it seems casually misogynistic, but also back then it was a big, fat lie about just how big and fat the purportedly chunky bar was.

I remember the ad, I remember how it hadn’t seemed as overtly misogynistic then, but also that the makers went on to label the bars childishly. I can’t remember the wording now, but it was something like a strapline saying the bar wasn’t for girls. Some bollocks like that.

But.

His blog has put me in mind of all the Yorkie bar’s rivals, and it’s this that I want to twist into an analogy for our present times.

All UK chocolate bars that have been continuously made since at least the 1970s, except the Yorkie, now come in really clever wrapping. Rather than tight around the chocolate, they are very loose and there has got to have been some serious thought put into how it doesn’t all just collapse in transit.

But that serious thought didn’t go into, I don’t know, the best practices for preventing chocolate going off in some way. The serious thought went solely into lying.

The job was to produce a wrapper that made the bar seem to be the size it used to be, until you’ve bought it, opened it, and found it’s shrunk. All chocolate bars are now smaller than they were, and probably more expensive even adjusting for inflation, and it’s a shame, but I’m okay with that.

I’m not okay with the wrapping. I can admire the process, it’s engineering and doubtlessly true effort went into consistently achieving the effect as you make literally millions of the things. But it’s the lying.

Whoever started this off knows what a chocolate bar is supposed to look like, so they go to all this effort to make it appear to be that even as it no longer is. The image, the perception, the lie.

These things are not chocolate bars any more, they are present-day politics. Recently, I had a Conservative MP come to my door saying she planned to unseat the local Labour candidate because there was no place in politics for all the corruption that was allegedly going on. I couldn’t help it, I laughed: a Tory saying she’d fight corruption is like a Republican saying guns are bad — and then also doing something about that.

But this MP at my door knew corruption was a bad thing. I’m not going to accuse her personally of any corruption, she may be a fine and upstanding human being. Although if she is, she ain’t going to get far in today’s Conservative party.

Every politician knows the truth and talks about the real issues, then either doesn’t do anything about them, or visibly profits from doing the opposite. The UK has this asinine thing where you can lie your teeth off to Parliament, but if you’re called a liar, I mean if that correct word is said, then that’s what’s seen as shocking and the person saying it is ejected from the room.

Tories and Republicans both have this history of being about business and standing on your own feet, and they both shout about it. Labour in the UK has this thing about being for the workers and it shouts about it. But Tories and Republicans can no longer actually do any business, in the UK they repeatedly do things like awarding shipping contracts to firms that have no ships. Labour should be cleaning up and riding on all the anti-Brexit sentiment here, but instead it’s just talking about how the government should do Brexit better.

Politics has always been short-term and that has always been an enormous failing of every political system. But right now we universally see politicians knowing what should be done, what is true and what is needed, and wrapping up their speeches and their bills in terms that suggest they’ll do it, yet never will.

And we have to swallow it.