Sitting gathering dust on a shelf in my living room is a boxed set of The Thick of It, only begetter of the ‘omnishambles’, and the stomping ground of the inimitable Malcolm Tucker – a man incapable of uttering a sentence without curse words punctuating every phrase.
The Thick of It is only one in a line of fabled television sit-coms that draw their inspiration from politics.
I was brought up on Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister. For all the accuracy of their depiction of civil service guile and ministerial incompetence, they are affectionate lampoons of the political process.
Buried among my DVDs though is an altogether more sinister political satire. The original House of Cards brought the obsequious and murderous Francis Urquhart to our screens. Many prime ministers have blood on their hands, but none quite so directly as his.
Like the current candidates for the Tory Party leadership, Urquhart ‘went to Oxford’, finishing school for many of the British political elite.
It was there that Hunt studied PPE – the so-called prime ministers’ degree – Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Boris Johnson studied classics, and continues to this day to trot out Latin phrases with all the abandon of a Tridentine priest.
Until recently, it was quite possible to tell the difference between fact and fiction. But no longer.
Last Friday’s imbroglio at the flat Johnson shares with his partner Carrie Symonds, just hours after his victory in the MPs’ section of the Tory leadership poll, came with a comic timing so unbelievable that a script editor for The Thick of It would have sent it back to the writers’ room for reworking.
Personally, I care little for the tittle-tattle of people’s private lives. We all have them. But there is more to this story than tittle-tattle. There is a string of concern.
First off the neighbours were right to be alarmed at the commotion, to knock the door to check everything was all right, and to ring the police when no-one answered.
Some sections of the media pilloried the neighbours at the weekend for their actions. That makes me queasy. Many of the same papers sent reporters to trawl through stars’ waste-paper bins, hack into phones and blag private information through misrepresentation.
I’m not suggesting this was the case here, but too many victims of domestic violence in the past have been let down because neighbours turned a blind eye.
Passing the tape they made to The Guardian is something else, and worthy of debate. The Guardian’s decision to publish, however, was unquestionably right.
In the hullabaloo (a Johnsonian word if ever there was one) that followed, few have focused on the interesting fact that, at first, the police denied anything had happened at Johnson and Symonds’ flat. It was only when it emerged tape-recorded evidence was available that the police confirmed an incident had taken place.
As for the fallout that has followed: those of us (and there are many) who do not subscribe to the cult of Boris Johnson are hardly surprised by this turn of events – but horrified at the prospect he will be given control of a country.
The story plays in to the reckless, carefree and cavalier image he has cultivated over the decades since he was fired from his first job as a journalist for lying.
To his cult following, Friday is an irrelevance precisely for the same reasons.
Rational people are shocked, and Borista’s are unperturbed. Just like Brexit, the same set of facts brings people to radically different conclusions.
Whether Johnson makes it through the next four weeks intact, and fulfils his lifelong ambition to enter Downing Street, remains to be seen. He is a ticking time-bomb waiting to go off. For the UK’s sake it would be better going off before the Tory backwoods men and women cast their votes.
But then we have Hunt, much mispronounced. He is pitching himself as the ‘safe pair of hands’, yet in his speech to the hustings in Birmingham on Saturday he promised the DUP – yes the DUP – a place on the UK negotiating team with the EU. You might say he is mad too. In the words of Francis Urquhart, ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’
