British Satire at its Most Fertile Ferment

Edward Tew, in The Sunday Times, 7 July 2024,where the title runs this: “Farewell to the Tory clown show, a true satirist’s dream”

For the last six years I’ve been engaged in a secret love affair with Jacob Rees-Mogg. This may be news to him, considering we’ve never met, but I’ve fantasised about him being given a sponge bath by his nanny, pushing women and children off the Titanic on his way to a lifeboat, as an object on Antiques Roadshow and even poking his “plonker” through a suet pudding for his premium OnlyFans customers. I’m not a pervert, I’m a satirist.

As a regular contributor on Dead Ringers, the Radio 4 satire show, where those fantasies were aurally realised, Rees-Mogg has become my favourite character to write for. I love him for what he allows me to create (and get away with) but his views, particularly on abortion, and the proper way to wear a suit, often seem as though they’re from another century. This makes him the perfect target. It’s been a joy to write about him, but now it seems to be over.

In losing his parliamentary seat, Rees-Mogg joined Michael Gove, Matt Hancock and, of course, Liz Truss in a brutal exodus of the key characters of the past 14 years. No more gold wallpaper, no more three prime ministers in a year, no more tractor porn, no more fields of wheat, no more Boris Johnson suspended from a zip wire and no more suitcases of wine. To borrow an old phrase, we never had it so good.

The scale of what we comedy writers have lost can’t be overstated. Just listen to Truss’s terse interview at her count. Near total denial of the key role she played in this electoral calamity for the Conservatives. Truss lives entirely in her own world, a place where she was right all along and lettuces don’t exist. At times her brain seems to echo with little more than the sound of Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off.

This makes her a gift to satirists. The best comic characters have a complete disconnect between how they see themselves and how the rest of the world sees them. Truss thinks she’s Margaret Thatcher, the rest of the world sees her as Alice Tinker from The Vicar of Dibley. Ideal comedy characters like her don’t come around too often and this incoming government looks decidedly short on them.

Boringly, Keir Starmer seems to know precisely how many children he has; Rachel Reeves doesn’t strike me as someone who will be outlasted by a green vegetable; and, although I can’t be sure, Wes Streeting has almost certainly never self-administered an impromptu eyesight test at a castle. The new Labour government seems sober, bland and, if we’re very lucky, possibly even competent. It’s death to comedy though. There is, after all, no fun in competence.

So where might the comedy come from in the new government? Our freshly-minted foreign secretary, David Lammy, looks like the best bet. He once made a genuinely astonishing appearance on Mastermind, in which he thought that Marie Antoinette had won the Nobel prize for physics. Let them eat quarks! He also thought Henry VII came to the throne after Henry VIII, which makes you wonder if he believes Charles II is about to make a stunning comeback. Whether Lammy can deliver Truss-level comic opportunities remains to be seen, but we can only hope.

Other fertile areas are Starmer’s total inability to go five minutes without referring to his father’s job as a toolmaker and his confusion about what is and isn’t a woman. A recent Telegraph headline referring to Starmer that could have come from The Day Today read: “Blair is right that a woman has a vagina and a man has a penis.” Imagine going back to the year 2000 and showing someone this headline.

There may be comic mileage in this government after all.

There’s no doubt, though, that people like me are going to have to work much harder to be funny about those in power. There is now a yawning chasm of character and colour in the government, and that means more of a focus on the substance of the politicians and their policies, rather than easier superficial targets.

That may actually be a good thing, even for the comedians. Chris Morris, the man behind The Day Today, gave an interview back in 2019 in which he complained about satire that “placates the court”. When politics is a clown show, playing the jester isn’t all that difficult, whereas if we can make Starmer funny we’ll have really earned our coin.

Morris said that satire should try to change things and the real test is whether “the people you’re lancing can get off your spike”. A tricky thing to live up to on BBC Radio 4 at 6.30pm, but no doubt a noble thing to aim for despite Peter Cook’s view that satire changes nothing.

Perhaps the most symbolic image of the last 14 years of Tory government was of my old squeeze, Jacob Rees-Mogg, lounging on the front bench like a Victorian school master after administering an enthusiastic six of the best to an eight-year-old for being left-handed. Louche, entitled and almost obnoxiously relaxed about his high position in the world. It was, for want of a better word, a wonderful moment. A comic encapsulation of everything that was going wrong.