Satire is dead

The BBC has done two very good comedy satirical TV shows over the years: Yes, Minister and The Thick of It. I have thought about the latter one a lot, even though I didn't watch it, but as Brexit and the pandemic played out in Westminister, scriptwriters for those shows could not have come up with such storylines. It has been remarkable, and not in a good way, how successive PMs painted themselves into a corner, agreed to anything to get out, then complain about the very terms they agreed.

But it comes to the matters of today.

In the Independent, the scriptwriter, Tom Peck says that his job is now impossible: "What choice do I have? Without wishing to pull the wizard’s curtain back too far, there are only two ways to satirise something. One is to exaggerate it, and thereby to make clear its absurdity through magnification. And the other is to defend it, and in so doing show it to be indefensible.

So how, exactly, am I meant to carry on? In the middle of the first lockdown, the one when people really were terrified, when they were dying alone, when newborn grandchildren were held up against the windows of grandma’s house, and funerals were happening on zoom, Boris Johnson invited a hundred people to party in his garden."

How can he possibly pke fun at that, that the Prime Minister has launched an inquiry whch will now look at whether the PM's own Permanent Secretary (using the term "we" to invites to the party on May 20th) sent invites to 100 people and whether the Prime Minister himself attend the (garden) party in the garden of the Prome Minister's residence from which his flat overlooks so if he didn't go, the Prime Minister could have seen the party?

Johnson could have asked homself he had in fact attended the party he, apparently, help organise?

You couldn't make it up. Well, you could but would be rejected on being to bog a stretch, and yet, in the real world, here we are.

Johnson failing to leave the safety of his fridge today to face an Urgent Question in the Commons, instead sent out the Paymaster General to answer said urgent question. No other Ministers were present, which is pretty much unheard of. And the only defence, if you could call it that, is that as there was an ongoing inquiry that Johnson has called he can't answer questions on that until the report is published by the person he appointed to conduct the inquiry.

That is where we are.

And yet, no one really wants to take over from Johnosn if he were to resign or forced to. Brexit is still a mess and then there is COVID in the middle of a 4th or 5th wave, I lost track now. So, it might be hard trigger a no confidence vote, and yet there is almost no support for him in the party, the "red wall" new influx MPs are wondering what party they now represent, and what their virgin Tory voters are thinking of their choice in to trust Johnson.