Farewell Change UK, Gone and Also Forgotten

Farewell, Change UK. I didn't want it to end like this. RIP you will live on forever. Really can't believe this; I want to run to you.

On Tuesday, after an absolute bloodbath in the European elections – in which the party only won 3 percent of the vote, failing to elect a single MEP – Change UK announced that six of its 11 MPs had defected to become independents. MPs Heidi Allen, Chuka Umunna, Sarah Wollaston, Angela Smith, Luciana Berger and Gavin Shuker have all left the party. Former Tory Anna Soubry has been chosen to lead what remains of Change UK, an announcement that has been greeted with a collective shrug, because, who cares?

Maybe the British public wasn't ready to return to centrist politics. Could it be that we like the bear pit of the culture wars more? Maybe we really want to see left versus right duking it out like mid-90s Gladiators contestants with giant foam hands? Maybe we failed to realise that Chuka Umunna was just trying to help everyone get along? To find a third way?

In fact, most of Change UK’s problems can be attributed to their simple, mistaken belief that anybody cared. Why would voters care about a party consisting of MPs no one had ever heard of, apart from the handful of people who'd read that one profile describing Chuka Umunna as the "British Obama" in 2008? (A descriptor that Umunna himself was accused of adding to his own Wikipedia page, all the better to highlight a comparison that no one ended up buying.)

Change UK is that earnest polyamorous couple you get stuck talking to at a party, chatting about compersion and consensual non-monogamy while you sip your drink and plan your escape. Sure, centrist politics is – like polyamory – a nice idea in practice. But sometimes life doesn't work out that way.

Despite having high levels of banter coming out of the gate – a much-shared image of Change UK's renegade MPs enjoying a Nando's dinner was, as political flexes go, genius – it's hard to write an obituary of a party that basically never was. Still, in Change UK’s four short months on this planet they did achieve some stuff: they beefed with petitions website Change.org, which accused them of stealing their branding. They also became the first political party to suffer the ignominy of having their logo rejected by the Electoral Commission for being too shit, after it rightly ruled that no one had a fucking clue what their proposed #TIG hashtag actually meant.

Other highlights of Change UK’s all too brief time in British politics included the digging up of racist tweets posted by their top candidate for a Scottish constituency, and having another candidate condemned by the Muslim Council of Britain for Islamophobia. ("I have never – not once – expressed anti-Muslim hatred or bigotry. I have always been clear that any criticisms I may make are about Islamism [sic]," candidate Nora Mulready said of the claims.)

But it all really went wrong for Change UK in the run-up to last month’s European elections. Allen and Umunna had been advocating for the party to forge closer ties with the Liberal Democrats, while Soubry pushed back (Allen and Umunna were probably right: the Lib Dems did better than expected in the European elections, gaining 20 percent of the vote, to Change UK's 3 percent).

Failing to win a single seat in the EU election – despite spending £87,000 on Facebook advertising, more than any of your opponents – is the political equivalent of getting mugged off by every girl in the Love Island house, voted off in the first week, then calling them "slags" in your exit interview with Caroline Flack (i.e. very humiliating, and hard to come back from).

Is the British public ready to return to the glory days of late-90s centrism? Do we want a youngish politician in a shiny blue suit to look earnestly into our eyes and talk of a "third way"? Do we feel like pure shit and just want our centrist politics back? Maybe one day. But for now, all this gleeful mania of milkshaking fascists and giant Trump blimp balloons and daily cancellations in the Twitter town square seems like more of a laugh. Goodbye, Change UK. We hardly knew ye.

@thedalstonyears