Blame is the Spur

"The honeymoon period is over Rab. We want results"

With the nation swept away on a tide of Cleggmania, it is tempting to think that real life really is stranger than fiction. But for those who cannot get enough politics from the election campaign the arts are doing their bit to help fill the gap.

Roman Polanski’s new film based on Robert Harris’ novel, The Ghost is currently on release whilst Posh and Stiffed are playing the theatres. The latest edition of The Review Show sought to place these and other recent political fictions in context and explain their attitude.

The focus was almost solely on New Labour and Tony Blair and this led to the conclusion that, in the words of Toby Young, since 1997 the once ‘illusioned had become disillusioned’.

It’s hard to deny that New Labour have been at the sharp end of the satirists’ and playwrights’ pens over recent years. But even before Blair took office, BBC 2 screened Guy Jenkin’s comedy Crossing the Floor, the story of a Tory Home Secretary who sought to further his career by deserting and beleaguered Government and joining a renewed Labour Party.

The Labour Party are shown as craven in their attempt to take on this Tory turncoat and we learn that the Labour leader is ‘young, charismatic, handsome and only slightly demented.’ Tory/New Labour cross-dressing and media-driven mad leaders might seem commonplace today but were in fact seen as hackneyed even in 1996.

A review in the Independent bemoaned, ‘its cast of sleazy Tories and sleek New Labour spin-doctors (the baddies here) is so over-familiar that one can only hope for a surprise Lib Dem victory to give us some fresh targets.’ Fourteen years on, the reviewer’s wishes may be about to come true.

Indeed, take a step back from the 1990s and you notice that disillusionment and ideological strife have always been at the heart of fictional depictions of the left and its struggles with parliamentary socialism whether in the prime time ITV drama Bill Brand or pre-war novels such as Company Parade and Clash.

Apart from documenting these struggles, political fiction has also been a useful reflection on (and indeed is sometimes used as a tool for) an immanent critique that has a grand place within parts of the British left: ready to see betrayal and compromise on behalf of the leadership around every corner.

Not long after Blair’s election, the 100th anniversary of Nye Bevan’s birth was marked by Trevor Griffiths’ TV play Food for Ravens. As well as marking the man’s life it was clearly seen as an early warning about the principles New Labour was abandoning Bevan often plays this role.

But go back over sixty years and the same thing – this time deploying another totemic figure in Labour Party mythology, Ramsey MacDonald, thinly disguised as Hamer Shawcross – can be seen at work in the Boulting Brothers’ film adaptation of Howard Spring’s novel Fame is the Spur.

The film critic Raymond Durgnat wrote that the film was a direct attack on the Labour Government of the time but released in 1947 - and taking account of production time - this doesn’t quite seem right. Rather the film is better read as another precursory salvo, warning how Labour Governments will always let you down.

The last word should be left to Rab C. Nesbitt’s pal Jamsie Cotter. Raising a toast to the scenes on the TV of Blair entering Downing Street for the first time he’s reminded that his Giro hasn’t arrived, ‘Aye, I blame that bastard Labour Government…The honeymoon period is over Rab. We want results.’


Matthew Bailey

Stiffing the politicians?

"...if we no longer trust politicians why should we trust a playwright’s view of politics? "

On 14 April 2010 a new play, Stiffed!, will start a four-week run at the Tabard Theatre in London. Stiffed! has been written by two journalists ‘who have experienced first hand the workings of politics’ and promises to be ‘a riotous satire on the inner workings of parliament, the press and politicians’ which will poke fun at both Cameron’s Conservatives and New Labour. Stiffed! will open in the midst of the general election campaign in which voter mistrust of politicians is at all time high, and presumably the Tabard hopes to tap into that mood.
The play is described as ‘new’. But all the advance publicity suggests it will however revisit territory already made familiar by first Guy Jenkin (A Very Open Prison, Crossing the Floor) and then Alistair Beaton (A Very Social Secretary and The Trial of Tony Blair) and Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It) since the middle 1990s.

These political satires all start from the same basic proposition: all politicians are bastards. Politicians are presented as weak and if not necessarily corrupt at least as afflicted by serious moral flaws, and consumed by the desire to promote themselves rather than represent the interests of the people. Some of these satires are motivated by serious anger – Beaton for example writes as someone disappointed by New Labour, especially Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq.

It is arguable that taken together these satires contribute to the populist distaste for politics. Some might think that last year’s expenses scandal vindicates that distaste: if we mistrust politicians as a class it is not because we have seen a few plays and television shows but because they do not deserve our trust. But given the increasing stress amongst academics on how political ideas are constructed – by the media in general - the possible role played by such fictions in shaping how we see politics is something that requires further exploration.

A significant step in that direction was taken last December when Nottingham University's Centre for British Politics held a conference to look into how politics has been represented in fiction. It benefited from the participation of Alistair Beaton, Tony Saint – who wrote the recent BBC4 comedy On Expenses – and other writers such as Maurice Gran and Lawrence Marks who gave the world Alan B’Stard. Interviews, transcripts and paper summaries generated by the conference have now been put on the Centre website and some of the academic papers will also be published in a special edition of Parliamentary Affairs in 2011. At the very least, the conference provoked the question: if we no longer trust politicians why should we trust a playwright’s view of politics?


Prof Steven Fielding