The Rigmarole Devours its Children
In his review of Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie, Mark Kermode said that, generally speaking, the more fun the cast has making a comedy movie, the less fun anybody else will have watching the movie.
This is why, for example, you wouldn’t turn over complete control of a Star Trek movie to a group of obsessive Trekkies. The film would probably turn out to be an unwatchable disaster, loaded with decades’ worth of crowbarred-in ships and fanfic arcs, and brimming with obscure references that only the Trekkie junta themselves would understand.
Like Star Trek, the ‘wacky rigmarole’ of British politics is essentially a form of entertainment. Much of the Westminster village, and especially political journalists, are more interested in the exciting soap opera of gossip, scandal, U-turns, rises and falls, and loves and losses, than they are in the actual business of how the country is being run.
This is a problem in itself for, er, the business of how the country is being run, which is relegated to a boring sideshow, no matter how much it actually affects people’s lives. But a recent Times profile of Liz Truss and her ‘ascent’ reveals just how deep the rigmarole goes.
The profile’s headline asks if Truss is “the new Iron Lady,” and features a picture of the Foreign Secretary that’s very obviously intended to make her look more like Thatcher, from the piercing stare and half-smile, to the unusually bouffant hairdo. Truss isn’t the first senior female Tory to face tenuous comparisons to Thatcher, and she won’t be the last. In fact, one wonders when we’ll have the first senior female Tory who doesn’t get compared to Thatcher.
This mildly sexist trope is the tip of a whole iceberg of self-reference floating in the middle of the rigmarole. There are even words that British politicos, and only British politicos, use — ‘chuntering’ (because John Bercow said it), and ‘frit’ (because Thatcher said it 40 years ago), to name a couple.
The cycle of self-reference is also present in the moment Truss is perhaps best known for: a bizarre, if entertaining, speech to Tory conference in 2014, where she grinned through an abnormally enthusiastic screed about pork markets and the like. In the middle of that speech, you can find, shoehorned in apropos of nothing, a reference to Harold Macmillan’s slogan from 1957: “when it comes to British food and drink, we have never had it so good!”
Barely half a minute after invoking Supermac, a furious Truss bemoans how much cheese we import. “THAT. IS. A. DISGRACE,” she fumes, a line has itself been invoked countless times since. And so the cycle continues.
British politics loves references to itself, but it struggles with references to anything outside. Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example, can be relied on to generate a good 24 hours of Twitter ire whenever he quotes Catholic liturgy or Shakespeare.
Part of this is undoubtedly down to anti-Catholicism and anti-intellectualism (most of the ire comes from people who think the height of wit is constructing twee fake swear words like ‘wazzpuffin’ or ‘spaffwhopper’), but there’s also a sense in which British politics nerds just don’t like British politicians making references to things that aren’t British politics. Rees-Mogg could quote Gremlins 2 and he’d probably get a similar reaction; he could quote Roy Jenkins and nobody would bat an eyelid.
Our politics is so absorbed in its own (post-war) history, and so disdainful of references to anything else (with a couple of notable exceptions: modern American politics, Hitler), because the rigmarole is run by its own fandom. Love of classic rigmarole episodes from the ‘80s and ‘90s got many people into politics in the first place; and now they’re the writers, the cast, and the crew.
Just as leaving the Trekkies in charge of Star Trek would be a terrible idea, this is terrible for British democracy. Our political culture is becoming increasingly myopic and uncultured, as fewer and fewer people in Westminster have much of a hinterland beyond Westminster and its recent history.
The rigmarole is eating itself, absorbing itself, going beyond entertainment and becoming more like a rarefied kabuki theatre that interests its hardcore fandom but leaves most voters disengaged; where everything that happens, and everyone that matters, has to be crammed into a handful of ageing tropes that Westminster politicos find comforting and entertaining, irrespective of how they relate to reality.
How long will this go on for, and how will it affect our lives? We don’t know! But like everyone involved in the making of Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie, they’re having their fun — and you get to watch!
