Four men in suits and one woman, are waiting for a bus at a request stop. The stop has ‘Birmingham City Council’ on it. Each of the five in the queue have a rosette announcing their names and their candidate status for Council Leader. It doesn’t matter who they are though. It’s raining, they are sad.
In the gutter a paper hyperlocal blog announces the hashtag #Brumleader, it’s melting with the water.
Worse than the rain, the old-fashioned routemaster bus has just driven past the stop, splashing the leadership hopefuls from a puddle. The bus’s destination board says ‘WMCA via Central Government Edict” Driving the bus, grinning inanely in a hat, is stoned chancellor George Osborne, while hanging off the back door pole is John Lewises’s Andy Street. His name is on the conductor’s badge he wears, the tickets flowing from his machine have ‘cuts’, ‘blame’, and ‘Noddy Holder?’ written on them.
One of the interchangeable councillors says to the others, “I thought it was going to be a Metro Mayor”.
The caption reads ‘Too shy to put their hands out.’
