ANOTHER VOICE

The stress of reporting the Lib-Dems drove me to shoot dead the blonde with big breasts

MATTHEW PARRIS

Anyone who has endured, as I have, the cruel and unusual punishment of enforced attendance at every major politi- cal party's conference for each of the last ten years, has learned the myriad excuses a columnist can find for not attending the actual debate.

This dreadful process — you cannot dig- nify a conference debate with the term 'dis- cussion', 'deliberation' or even 'conversa- tion'; it is just a silly noise — occurs in a seaside hangar where a few hundred dis- tracted souls stare blankly at a podium tacked together in plywood and covered in fuzzy-felt, polyurethane foam or quick-dry- ing paint, upon which a score or more equally lost souls pick their nails and pre- tend to listen while some dry-mouthed wretch gibbers for his or her allotted time, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of pique and presumption, signifying nothing. Everyone applauds. The press then announce what it 'meant', their commentary being the product of a creative tension between what the party's `spin doctors' — careerist prunes— say it meant, and what the press wish to claim it meant. In truth, it meant little. Party con- ferences are a conspiracy between politi- cians and political journalists to hog the news media and fill them with stuff nobody would dream of entertaining in any other circumstances.

The parties make money and publicity out of conferences. The journalists make careers out of reporting them. And the secret of this happy symbiosis — the part- nership of hippopotamus with tick-bird is found in one tiny, key phrase, launch-pad to a million commentaries:

At the [insert party name] conference in [insert seaside resort] yesterday, Mr [insert politician] said. . . .

It's 'news', you see. It 'happened'. It must have, because the modern media's equiva- lent of the Greek unities are all present. Brighton, 14.15, Ashdown speaks. Unity of time, place and action. His thoughts com- mitted to paper and circulated to interested parties would have been the same thoughts, but unreportable as an 'event'. A confer- ence is an event. Reporters report events. You read the reports. Why don't we all go home?

And so it came to pass in my hotel room at Brighton a week ago that I was roused from my slumber by a woman on the tele- phone who told me to wake up and remind- ed me that she was a recording. 'Thank you,' I said, then blushed because I had spoken to a machine, then reflected that you cannot make a fool of yourself to a machine and blushed out of embarrassment that I had blushed to a machine. I went to the conference centre and tried to be inter- ested in the debate on gun control.

But it was no good. We've heard the arguments both ways a thousand times before and it was fanciful to suppose a Lib- eral Democrat would have thought of a new one. How could I find a new angle to this debate?

My friend Pete had told me that at the end of the pier there was a game called `Drug Wars' in which you could shoot peo- ple legally, so, drawn by similar motives to those which impel other men to join the Metropolitan Police, I went to the pier to try my hand. By a big video screen were two revolvers, each sheathed in a leather hol- ster, on either side of a control console.

The game went like this. You put 30p in the slot. On the screen a video involving a violent chase begins. You draw your revolver, point it down to load it, then aim it at the screen. You can shoot at the screen by squeezing the trigger. The 'shot' is a laser-beam. The screen displays a hole in whatever or whomever you've shot. And they die. By electronic wizardry your laser bullet diverts the video story itself to a variant reflecting the new assassination. Thus, if you shoot a drugs baron he falls down dead off the roof and leaves the story. If he points and fires his gun at you first, you lose one of your five lives.

Spectator readers, people of alert moral sensibility, will at once realise that the idea is to shoot the bad people.

I suppose I did realise this too — at the level of the responsible, conscience-led part of my super-ego. But once I got that revolver in my hand, something wild lunged from my unconscious and gripped my trig- ger finger. I became strangely excited.

A scantily-clad blonde with big breasts ran towards me on the video, screaming. I shot her.

I am not proud of this. You must not suppose me to have made a conscious choice to shoot her. But she had become hysterical and I hate people who panic. Bystanders, families, nice people who had come to Brighton for the day, eyed me with concern.

Then I shot another blonde. There is no excuse, but truth to tell, I had rather enjoyed shooting the first. Another blonde went running along the beach, Baywatch- style. I hate Baywatch and I really don't think women should dress like that. I shot her, too.

Perhaps the reason I then shot the sheriff was guilt; perhaps it was fear of arrest; but, as he stepped from his cop car, I cannot claim to have examined my motivation. I simply thought, 'the Law' — and shot him.

Maybe the reason I shot my fourth blonde was that, having eliminated the sheriff, I no longer feared the law; and, having burned my boats with polite society, I was careless of public disapproval. Bystanders had moved away. Shooting the fourth blonde had ended the game. Sheep- ishly I replaced the revolver and left the pier fast.

Reader, the stress and frustration involved in reporting a Liberal Democrat conference is intense. Pity me, forgive me, and accept my pier-end story as a redeem- ing one. For, if I ever doubted it, I now know that the case for keeping firearms from the reach of apparently peace-loving citizens is extraordinarily strong.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter of the Times.