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April 1, 2015updated 29 Jan 2016 6:48pm

Stephen Hill handicaps the general election's runners and riders

By Spear's

Who knows who will win the Grand National Election? It looks more like a circus at this point, says Stephen Hill

This is the most bizarre Grand National Election I have ever known. At the starting-post there is a blue horse with a Europhile Toff jockey up top, with silk top-hat, who promises to create two million new jobs for the next wave of EU legal immigrants; he’s still determined to come first, but his odds are only evens at best.

Then there is a swivel-eyed jockey on a red horse, who can’t eat a bacon sandwich and mount his saddle the right way round, as he heads determinedly straight back to the past – and I don’t mean last Christmas – but back fifty years, to those disastrous Wilson days of sandwiches and beer at Number 10 for the unions. He’s at evens too, which indicates that 50 per cent of the nation can’t think and drink beer at the same time, let alone do some work.

There’s a jockey on a yellow horse with ‘I Love Y’EU’ tattooed all over its hind-quarters, who thinks he was part of the Europhile Toff’s last government, which was at least half successful; he and his wilting mount, however, are at 100-to-1 against winning anything outright, but at evens for a final place with any other horse available, regardless of colours.

Next there is a horse covered in the Union Jack flag, which wants all foreign runners banned, to stop money leaving the country unnecessarily. Then there is a yellow and blue horse, with a strident motor-mouth up top, striped like an exotic tropical fish.

We have a horse with a cardboard cut-out of a dragon around it from some outlying backward province nobody has heard about for years. Then a dark green horse lines up, once-owned by a whining reverend from Belfast.

And finally a light green pony with a little old lady from Brighton up, who thought she was going to a green gymkhana. I make that eight runners.

Then the Queen enters the Royal Box, takes one look at this motley field and is plainly not amused at such a paltry lot of old nags. Then they’re off, with the red horse running fast in the wrong direction, which immediately improves the blue horse’s odds.

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There are going to be a lot of spills and thrills in this race, that’s for sure. So, for starters, here is a fact some runners don’t seem to know yet: to have a referendum on Europe, a referendum bill has to be presented in the new parliament before going to the Lords; there this bill will be thrown out by an assorted bunch of red and yellow supporters along with any other layabouts they can drag out of their bars and nose-bags.

The Commons then send some gartered old fool to retrieve a medieval device from the armoury, called the Parliament Act, which is used to neuter and bash all these Lords into submission.

All this takes time: the bill can only get to this point and pass into law at the end of 2016/early 2017, meaning the earliest date for an EU referendum is in May in two years’ time. And do you know what happens on 1 July 2017? The UK assumes the presidency of the EU. Ha!

Now everyone’s cheering on the horse running in the Union Jack, and the blue horse to come in first – not with an outright win but with the Europhile Toff falling off at the finishing post. The next race on the card is the Coalition Stakes… Riders and runners to be weighed in on May 8.

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