The five politician freshers you’re sure to run into at City this week

Well, here you are at university. The promised land, after months and years of dreaming, a summer working at the co-op saving your pennies, and nights spent with your equally wide-eyed friends at home, imagining the world beyond the stuffy confines of Melton Mowbray, a world that soon, so soon, you’ll enter and blow off it’s antiquated feet.

Freshers, the time is now, the time is yours! You also get the added joy of joining university at a particularly turbulent moment in British politics, when everything is, to use the technical term, going to absolute shit.
To integrate you properly into this new land of academia and intellectualism, we’ve imagined the leading political figures of today as freshers if they were also joining your class of earnest young students. Welcome, class of 2016, to your future.

Jeremy Corbyn

You would gladly trade in the remaining five Stellas sitting in your room upstairs to be back in front of the television with your parents watching Bake Off (on the BBC), when you look up. That’s when you see him. He catches your eye and it’s electric, filling the whole room with energy, illuminating his face and those around you with a warm glow. He smiles softly, and you spend the rest of the night together, just talking and laughing and connecting with another person on a level that previously you had not imagined possible. He understands you, he gets you like no one else ever has, not even your mum. You feel a bit ridiculous saying it out loud, but privately you think this guy could be the answer to most of the problems facing society today, or at least make a very good start on fixing them. Everyone you talk to feels the same; no one really knows anyone yet, but most people seem certain that he is exceptionally cool, a bright light in your year, leading you forward.

Fast forward six months and you had kind of sort of forgotten he existed. You still remember that magical night you spent together, but instead of thinking of it fondly with a smile on your face it makes you feel a bit weird. You didn’t really see each other much once you’d found your own friendship groups, and when you meet now it’s still amiable but rather less awe-inspiring. You refuse to believe entirely that your initial impression of him was founded entirely on nerves and being slightly drunk, though. Surely you are more principled and world-wise than that? Of course you are, but people change.

David Cameron

You spot him at an event in CityBar, hovering with a group of lads identifiable only as prospective rugby team candidates. He is awkward, he is sweating. “Another round boys?” He is asking. You sense an opportunity. You head over with your friends. “Go on then son,” You say. “Who wants a jaeger?” Your friends cheer, as do his mates. You can see he is uncomfortable, he is visibly at a discomfort with buying drinks for you and everyone you’re with seeing as how he knows in his heart he will never sleep with any of you due to his unabashedly Eton voice and unfortunate permanent red face, but peer pressure is getting to him, he is wilting and then… The jaegerbomb is yours. “Cheers,” you tell him, but you don’t mean it, as you dart away through the crowds. He does not make the rugby team but you see him on Wednesdays for sports socials most weeks, and most weeks he buys you a jaegerbomb. In 20 years he becomes Prime Minister and takes away grants meaning that a lot of students will have to rely on posh boys for drinks for years to come though, so the circle of life is fulfilled.

Theresa May

You meet her on the same night; she is watching you dance poorly to Bruno Mars. You sense that she is far more Uptown than she is Funk. But you wink in what you hope is a roguish fashion anyway and attempt to get her to abandon her position guarding the bags and come join you on the dance floor. She shakes her head and looks away. You know that she has to be up early in the morning for church or hockey or communal knitting practice, and you respect that. She leaves about 15 minutes later, and you offer a wave and smile by means of goodbye. It turns out she lives across from you in Liberty Hall, and for the rest of the year your only interactions with her are increasingly irate Facebook messages about please turning the music down because after all it is a school night for goodness’ sake!

Boris Johnson

David Cameron’s cooler mate. This guy did make the rugby team, and boy does he know it. He doesn’t talk to you in uni, even though you’re on the same course, and didn’t even say hi to you that time in the library even though you were sitting right next to each other. However he always seems to be lurking outside Liberty Court at night with a couple of chino-wearing mates (He doesn’t live there; his dad paid for a flat for him next to Old Street roundabout) ready to ask you for a cigarette. For now, he is harmless, but one day he will happily forget all those cigarettes given to him by people from families that he and his buddy D Cam will shit on with their policies. You know this, and you dearly wish to slap him hard enough that he might remember it even years on in the Cabinet Room, but you can’t because your flatmate fancies him a bit and wants to invite him to pre-drinks at yours this weekend.

Nigel Farage

Damn it if you don’t think this guy is kind of alright. He dresses like absolute shit, sure, he participates way too much in lectures with comments that are entirely too controversial for a public forum and once his music accidentally started playing out loud in class and you’re pretty sure it was Shania Twain, but he can neck a pint faster than anyone you’ve ever met. You have a feeling that if you scratched a little bit below the surface of him you would definitely not like what you found, but you’re quite happy to innocuously chat with him sometimes at social events. He knows what he’s about, a Good British Lager, and you can get on board with that. Until you hear he’s running for CULSU President on a platform of “less foreigners”. Too far man, too far.