James Blunt, Al Murray and the Memefication of British Politics: Welcome to the First Meta Election

Red Nose Day 2001, and we were all summoned to the assembly to watch our most dickhead teachers make fools of themselves in the name of charity. There was a Spanish teacher dressed in all red, with dyed red hair and a red nose. One deputy-head put his feet – but not his entire unclad body, which would actually be something worth shelling out a quid for – into a bucket of baked beans, his George from Asda suit trousers rolled up to his calves. An English teacher did a comedy song, armed with an acoustic guitar. A black hole that consumes fun instead of light had yawned open in front of me.

Then they wheeled out Mr Arnos. Mr Arnos was the kind of teacher who went to the barber's and left with a feathered pluming mullet and a wet moustache. Mr Arnos was the kind of teacher who went to a shirt shop and walked out with an off-green short-sleeved shirt with a calculator in the pocket. I don't want to deal in cliches but it almost seemed at times that Mr Arnos was actively trying to make us all think he was a sex offender. For Red Nose Day, Mr Arnos had his hair and moustache shaved down to the wood with a razor in exchange for a meagre, sub-£100 schoolwide donation. We had to sit there and watch.

I remember sitting on floor as Arnos did a sort of post-shave lap-of-honour, pirouetting around the hall, saying "WOO!" and "WAHEY!" and slapping his newly-bald pate – and I remember thinking: twat. It was a very specific feeling. Twat. I could kind of feel it in the pit of my stomach, working its way up: Mr Arnos, you twat. There he was, twatting it around the stage in between the leftover scenery from Little Shop of Horrors, and all I could think was: god, what a twat. It's a feeling that has returned to me recently as we gear up to this year's general election, which is still 100 days away.

It being an election year means we already know that the first half of 2015 is going to be unendurable. Baby kissin'! Sellotaping balloons to a repurposed ice cream van! Shouting out of a muffled PA system at confused passersby! Billboards! Parody billboards! A historical sex crime comes to light! Six days of uncertainty as everyone tries to cobble together a coalition government! But also, in a zig from the usual zag, we're going to be subjected to months of forced banter as every political party in the UK attempts to trend on Twitter.

Essentially: this is the year that politicians have properly realised the internet exists, and they are trying to use it to get down with the cool youth vote. Are you cool? Are you young? Is there a chance you might vote? Well get ready for a Vine of Ed Miliband vaping, then, because that's what politicians think you want. Nick Clegg sadly trying to remember his favourite FKA Twigs song in front of Fearne Cotton. David Cameron's selfie stick. Natalie Bennett doing "Gangnam Style" off a Segway.

The worst thing is how long the election trail is set to rumble on for. It already seems like a lifetime ago, but the campaign only officially launched on the 5th of January. Yeah: while you were still working your way through the green triangles at the end of the Quality Street and trying to figure out what year it was, Ed Miliband was in Manchester, banging a podium with his fist and saying "food banks". Soon after, Ed Balls took time out of searching his own name on Twitter to call Russell Brand a "pound shop Ben Elton" on BBC News. And so the great everyone-is-a-fucking-pound-shop-version-of-somebody-else war of 2015 began.

Since then, we've had the Labour and Conservative Press Offices going at each other on Twitter over how to spell Tristram Hunt's name; Nigel Farage saying something semi-spurious about how he wasn't an alcoholic so every newspaper could run a photo of him gurning over a pint with his newt-turned-into-a-man-by-an-evil-wizard face; David Cameron saying Barack Obama sometimes calls him "bro"; the Greens going on the "remember we exist" offensive by citing more members than UKIP; the public launch of a men's rights political party; UKIP forgetting to pay their domain name bill so their homepage went straight to 123-reg; Chuka Umunna walking out of a Sky News interview because he hadn't read a letter and James Blunt going studs-up on the real problem with modern Britain: reverse classism in the music industry.

But this is the new face of politics in the UK. It's Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich; it's outrage about a van; it's holding a pint on top of your head for a photo opportunity; it's getting stranded on a zipline. Who can go viral the fastest? Who can coin the most hashtag-friendly policy? Who can get Russell Brand to do a Trews about them? Who can get the most stories on the Buzzfeed homepage? The inevitable winner of the election, is who.

All of this has peaked – or troughed, depending on how you want to look at it – with Al Murray announcing he was dragging his Pub Landlord character screaming from the grave to go up against Nigel Farage as he contests the South Thanet seat. "The pound will be revalued at one pound 10p, so it will now be worth 10p more," Murray said, in a video that was apparently run by James Milner for a quick humour check. "Germany has been too quiet for too long. Just saying."

Ostensibly, Murray running against Farage is a joke at UKIP's expense: the look-at-this-awful-racist-running-against-Al-Murray headlines write themselves; the idea that if you're going to waste your vote, waste it on a pastiche of a racist instead of an actual one. But the circus freak nature of the whole sorry affair means there's some grim inevitability to the BBC doing a bleary-eyed in-character interview with Murray at 3AM on election night as Farage creaks across the post to an actual victory. A circus parade obstructing the view. That sort of thing.

Is this the future of British politics? This certainly feels like a transitional election, the tipping point in the change between two distinct political eras. While the 2015 campaign trail will still have its throwbacks – an intern from a tabloid newspaper jumping around Westminster dressed as a chicken; a Griff Rhys Jones-type threatening to leave the country; a member of an 80s indie band kicking off because David Cameron purported to like a song of theirs on Desert Island Discs – the 2015 election hints towards a glossier, shinier, US-style future. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that 2019 might see old-school British fustiness give way to a high-glamour, coach-around-the-country-greyly-shaking-hands goliath of an election, with George Osborne sporting HD-ready fake tan and anti-coke eyes eyedrops throughout. Clickbait-ready politics is just a stepping stone towards that.

Yeah, the internet existed in 2010, but 2010 was a snap election, remember – Gordon Brown only called for the dissolution of Parliament on April 6 for a May 6 vote, meaning that – while it wasn't exactly a surprise election, seeing as Brown had been carrying a palpable air of doom around with him for months beforehand – the campaign trail was relatively short compared to this year's mammoth five-month slog. Four weeks, top and tailed. Done.

But even in that short time we managed to have: the BNP getting aggro with the concept of Marmite; a weird airbrushed photo of David Cameron looking like an extremely beautiful dead nan; #nickcleggsfault; Gordon Brown calling that bigoted old woman "that bigoted old woman". It also bought with it the new format of live TV debates, giving an American flavour to the month-to-get-your-shit-together seat-of-your-pants pacing. The General Election 2010 was almost close to being exciting: an election on steroids, raging in a sweaty vest, a premature peek at a high-tempo future.

The longer lead time of 2015 leads to Party political self-awareness, and that can only be a bad thing. Already, Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem PR teams are locked in a room trying to figure out how to emulate UKIP's do-something-mad-and-go-viral strategy: months of this and they'll have all cribbed from each other and learned enough from trial and error that the news will be dominated by Twitter beefs and comments about donkey sex come May. The only obstacle is the news cycle: with the pace of online news being as relentless as it is, anything notable or in anyway meme-friendly is doomed to flare up in smoke as soon as it peaks. The Pub Landlord announcement dominated the afternoon it was made and then faded away before the Sunday broadsheets managed to print their character interviews with him. Now Al Murray has to spend five months thinking about that time he jokingly agreed to run for election while wearing the same unwashed blazer-and-tie combo.

There's a lot about this approach that makes sense – the Green Party's current struggle to get a voice in the TV debates despite boasting higher membership figures than UKIP and polling at much the same level as the Lib Dems proves that much of UK politics is about who can make the most noise: Nigel Farage's "be very abrasively visible" strategy has got UKIP a lot further than a less charismatic leader might have. Politics is about publicity – it always has been – and the election campaign is an even more revved up version of that: it's about being a very loud, visible face and saying the correct edged-along-the-centre quotes to win those pesky swing voters without turning off the party faithful. A delicate balance.

It's not necessarily bad that politicians are trying to talk to people on the platforms they use in the language they speak (unless Nigel Farage turns up and says "bae", then I'm doing a Phil Collins and fucking off to Switzerland), but it doesn't make it less painful to watch. And there's another danger to this: so far this election has been noise over substance, and the clown king of that is Boris Johnson. Do we really want a future where BoJo jets around the country in a 20-wheeler coach saying "wiffle" into the face of White Van Dan? Because that's where this is going.

Mr Arnos' hair, by the way – and, inexplicably, his moustache – took months to grow back. For a very long period he looked like Keanu Reeves in that bit in The Matrix where he wakes up all distressed in a tub of amniotic fluid. It's very hard to take someone seriously when they look like that, especially when they are trying to teach you quadratic equations. For a while he had to protect his cold little head with a hat. Whatever happens on May 6th, there's going to be a bit of that: looking around at the people who are suddenly in power and going, "I've seen you have an actual TV debate with Al Murray the Pub Landlord"; "I've seen you rank your favourite Radio 1 Live Lounge performances, and you picked Bombay Bicycle Club"; "I saw you cut your hair off for £80". Welcome to the meta-election, where everyone with aspirations of power is just a science teacher shaving his head in front of an assembly full of bewildered children.

@joelgolby

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