The current Labour government grows ever more farcical. Despite its promise to ‘tread lightly’ on people’s lives, we’ve seen war declared on farmers, private schools, pubs, humour at work and even allotment owners. This week came the news that drivers over the age of 70 must take compulsory driving tests, with a mandatory ban if they fail – presumably so that, when younger relatives start ushering them towards the ‘assisted dying’ clinic, they won’t be able to make a quick getaway. Starmer, on winning the election, promised the ‘sunlight of hope’, yet things have rarely felt gloomier. Rachel Reeves may have wept for the nation in parliament last month, but its miseries are so often of her devising.
You can’t help wondering what The Thick of It would make of it all. In Armando Iannucci’s satire on 21st-century politics, which ran from 2005–2012, ludicrous policies like the above, some of them apparently dreamt up on the hoof, might have been all in a day’s work for characters like Labour MP Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front) – whose greatest policy idea is wooden toys – or Lib Dem Fergus Williams (who buys a bank ‘out of social embarrassment’). But how would Peter Mannion MP, the series’ urbane, likeable Tory, react to them?
Mannion (as played by RSC stalwart Roger Allam) is an old-school Conservative from the Major or late-Thatcher era. He studied classics at university, still smokes and, though married, has the mandatory lovechild with a parliamentary colleague.
Increasingly adrift in the 21st century, Mannion is an analogue politician in a digital world. Dressed stubbornly in suit and tie, he winces at phrases like ‘silicone playground’ and can’t even grapple with the functions on his Nokia dumbphone (‘Is this “settings”? I think I’ve just taken a photo of my feet’). Called a ‘digitard’ by one character, he’s described by another as being ‘tuned 24/7 to the Yesterday Channel watching Cash in the Attic and wondering why it’s taking place inside his head’.
Much of the comedy in Mannion’s scenes comes from seeing this relatively dignified politician (apparently based on David Davis, but with an obvious smattering of Ken Clarke as well) wrestle with the new touchy-feely, hug-a-hoodie inanities of David Cameron’s Conservative rebranding.
‘I’m modern!’ he protests at one point. ‘I say “black” instead of “coloured”. I think women are a good thing. I have no problems with gays – many of them are very well turned out, especially the men. Why is it this last year I’m being made to feel as if I’m always two steps behind, like I can’t programme a video or convert everything back to old money?’
‘You’ve still got a video?’ his aide asks incredulously. Mannion is a Victor Meldrew before his time, a man tormented to a state of anguish by the sheer silliness of modern life. He is endlessly afflicted by spin doctors and spads who feel the most useful thing he can do is take his tie off; by newspapers which catch him smoking or holding (catastrophically) a bottle of champagne; by members of the public who leave toxic comments on his blog (‘You always have a pained expression on your face. Do you take it up the chutney?’). Frequently, losing his cool, he starts to spit out strings of expletives (you need to hear Allam, a classical actor with a voice as beautiful as Michael Gambon’s, snarling the f-word to realise how it’s done or why that word even exists).
In calmer moments, he lapses into an ironic lethargy several steps beyond despair as though, realising the futility of his existence, there is little else to do but make drawling, jaded asides about it. In a post-Blair world of ‘uniparty’ soundbites and ‘caring’ initiatives, conservatism itself seems to be collapsing. Asked by Tory director of communications Stewart Pearson – the bane of his life, whose mission is to ‘detoxify’ the Tory brand – if he’s ‘up to speed’ with the ‘new line’, Mannion lapses into sarcasm:
Well, I don’t know, am I? Because I get people stopping me in the street and saying ‘Are you still for locking up yobbos?’ and I say ‘Yeah, of course we are!’ And then I think, are we? Because maybe I missed a memo from you. Maybe I should understand yobbos now… or not even call them yobbos. Call them young men with issues around stabbing.
If Mannion, with his grey suits and black sense of humour, represents an age of lost common sense, Stewart Pearson (Vincent Franklin) is the man who has no intention of finding it. A kind of walking rainbow flag, always dressed in brightly coloured shirts (untucked and open two buttons), Pearson is the coming era made flesh. He’s the kind of man (we all know them) who drinks ginseng tea, wears a high-visibility tabard to ride a bike, and whose dementing natural habitat is the whiteboard brainstorming session: ‘Let’s architecturalise this… Let’s graphicise and three-dimensionalise our response… Time is a leash on the dog of ideas.’
In a post-Blair world of ‘uniparty’ soundbites and ‘caring’ initiatives, conservatism itself seems to be collapsing
‘What was that word I used this morning?’ he demands of Mannion at one point. ‘You used a lot of words,’ says Mannion wearily. ‘It was like a fucking Will Self lecture.’ The Thick of It ended in 2012 – a year or two before ‘woke’ came in to land – but now and then you find it deliciously ahead of the curve.
In an episode of series 4, Mannion is summoned by Stewart to attend an out-of-town ‘thought bubble’ group seminar – the kind of life-sapping, compulsory, organised infantilisation we’re now accustomed to from our betters. At one point, the characters take part in a 20-questions bonding game where they must guess the political concept written on their foreheads. Mannion, with the word ‘inclusivity’ flapping above his eyes on a Post-It note, asks a series of increasingly exasperated questions. ‘Am I a sensible, solid concept?’ (‘No’). ‘Would I be comfortable talking to Andrew Marr about this concept on television?’ (‘No’). ‘Am I “diversity”?’ ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ he snaps when he rips off the label. ‘Inclusivity’s practically the same as diversity.’
Did the writers know then that in the coming decade these two abstract nouns would batter us over the head until we were gurgling in prone stupefaction? Or that the age of Stewart Pearson – that era of bullying power-play shrouded in bright primary colours – had barely begun? Most of us these days have become some form of Peter Mannion – looking at the wreckage of things we once believed in (Radio 4, the sanctity of certain prizes, Oxbridge, the National Trust, you name it) and, like him, asking in bewilderment: ‘How the sow’s tits did this happen? Nothing matters any more. Politics, faith, values, whatever your thing is. Nothing.’
How would Mannion have survived an era of take-the-knee, pronoun badges and rainbow lanyards, or reacted to a government bent on destroying all that he and his supporters hold most dear? It’s certainly kinder to him – though a loss to the viewer – that we were never allowed to find out.