Fridge-hiding, the final frontier in election WTF-ery

We begin with a fact-check. This general election campaign has officially been going on since around the mid-cretaceous period. Its final day saw an update to the list of things you shouldn’t keep in the fridge, with the likes of honey, potatoes and avocados now joined by “the UK prime minister”. All the party leaders embarked on a frantic cross-country campaigning dash on Wednesday, but only one of them … no, I’m sorry. I can’t face it yet. Give it a minute.

At dawn, Boris Johnson embarked on a sort of softcore Confessions of a Prime Minister tour, which by 10am had already seen him dress up as a milkman, then pop something in someone’s oven. What next? Pool boy? Cable guy? At this rate of innuendo it seemed reasonable to assume Johnson would simply be barebacking grateful activists live on the lunchtime news. Of course, his version of all this does subvert the classic porn trope. Traditionally, it’s a blue-collar guy coming to the suburban professional’s house while he’s out at work. In this case, it’s an old Etonian milkman knocking on the door of working-class homes. Someone’s certainly going to get screwed, but not in a sexual way.

Unfortunately, things would take a wrong turn for Johnson back at the dairy – a sentence I might once have found mildly unusual, before I realised that Johnson’s workwear adviser for this election was probably going to get a CBE in the new year honours. This week alone, Johnson has dressed up as a fisherman, a digger driver, a milkman, a builder and a baker. How old is his election strategist? I assume they say basgetti instead of spaghetti, and still wear pull-up nappies at night. Yet despite the relish with which Johnson embraces cosplaying as a working man, he always seems oversized and grotesquely out of place in these scenes, as though a vast unlicensed buttock implant has just been cast in Camberwick Green.

Anyway: the fridge. Back at the Modern Milkman HQ, a producer for Good Morning Britain, filming live, asked whether the programme could get a chat with the prime minister. “For fuck’s sake!” said a senior Conservative source called Rob Oxley, still live on air. At which point the prime minister scuttled into a large fridge.

Time for a historical perspective, perhaps: despite having an underground bedroom as part of the war rooms complex, Boris Johnson’s hero Winston Churchill declined to sleep in it any more than four or five times in the entire second world war, including during the blitz when London was under sustained nightly bombardment. Without wishing to go out on a limb, then, it is difficult to imagine Winston Churchill fleeing a lone Pathé news camera to conceal himself inside a refrigerator. Johnson’s move forces an urgent reordering of the top three most embarrassing places British politicians have hidden because they couldn’t handle the consequences of their actions. This now goes: 3. Edinburgh pub – Nigel Farage. 2. Disabled loo – Ken Livingstone 1. Fridge – Boris Johnson.

Because the smallness of the man could not be conceded, Tory campaign staff attempted to insist the interview request and the prime minister’s presence in a fridge were correlated but not causal. According to the Guardian’s deadpan report on the matter, Conservative sources – I don’t know which ones, but “for fuck’s sake” let’s have a guess – claimed that Johnson was “categorically not hiding” in the fridge, from which he later emerged carrying a crate of milk bottles. Instead, they fucksaked, his aides were taking a moment to prep the PM for a separate, pre-agreed interview.

Spellbinding. They honestly would have been better off going with something along the lines of: “As you could see from the fact he’d rather steal a phone than empathise with the picture of a sick child, the prime minister is an extremely cold man. We had word from the dairy manager that one of the units was nudging over 4 degrees and the whole batch would have to be scrapped, so we whisked the prime minister in there to lower the temperature. Hey presto – milk lollies for all. The guy’s like Elsa or something. Let’s get Brexit done and sign an ambitious trade deal with Arendelle.”

For their part, for this final day, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour wanted to talk about the NHS crisis. Not sure what the costume is for that – perhaps a grim reaper’s cowl, although that would make Corbyn look like he was playing Ben Kenobi in a panto version of Star Wars. Inevitably, though, the Labour leader couldn’t help talking about the fridge. “I’ve not come here to deliver milk,” Corbyn informed a rally in Middlesbrough, “or to hide in a fridge.”

Yet hilariously – and indeed malarially – the Labour party then issued a formal statement featuring the following sentence about Boris Johnson: “He is hiding in fridges to dodge interviews precisely because his fake Brexit slogans can’t stand up to scrutiny.” Oh man. Who knows whether in retrospect this will look like the moment Labour were finally defeated by Johnson’s WTF-ery? But I can’t help but notice Her Majesty’s opposition have just immediately normalised the idea of hiding in fridges as a political act, suggesting that it’s something logical a prime minister might do “precisely because” of something else, as opposed to what it is: a prime minister, of an actual country, hiding in a fridge. Guys, you can’t fit this into the old attack templates. You’re fighting a war against a fridge-hider. There aren’t any established conventions. This is frontierland – we passed the rules five fucksakes ago.

And what of Britain’s next prime minister, Jo Swinson? Alas, even she was unable to dodge the fridge-iverse. I kept seeing her supporters say versions of “You know what? She’s turned up to every TV interview and debate. She’s never hidden in a fridge.” So let the record show there’s a new benchmark. Here we are. This, then, is us. On the eve of polling day for the general election of 2019, the fridge is now the black hole of UK politics. None of us can escape its event horizon, so I can’t say “see you on the other side”. In totally scientific terms, there is no other side to see you on.