Less, Minister...

Back in the Here-Be-Dragons days of 2019 — December 8th, 2019, to be precise — when I was still a Sunday Telegraph restaurant critic and turning up for lunch with ‘a bit of a cold’ wouldn’t result in Hazmat suits surrounding the table and pointing thermo-guns at your temples, I reviewed the Peers’ Dining Room at the House of Lords, which had opened to the public as a sort of posh pop-up during the pre-election recess.

My friend and I had a fun afternoon. When a mouse dashed across the floor while we were pre-prandial-ing in the PoW’s Peers’ Bar the copy pretty much wrote itself. However, at the end of the review I veered off-topic, away from the cheese platter being fought over by rodents:

In between courses we clocked our fellow guests, apparently a modish combo of hereditary peers and people who buy their own furniture. If you worked here, whether as MP, peer, catering staff or security (there was a lot of security, for which we were entirely grateful) I imagine you’d feel at the epicentre of everything that matters.

And yet, journeying down that corridor at the centre of the seat of parliamentary democracy – past the Commons, Strangers’ and Peers’ Bars; literally, the class system as a series of drinking dens – this particular Westminster outlier (I haven’t visited the Palace of Westminster since I was a kid) found the whole set-up almost comically, belief-beggaringly, unfit for purpose. And that was before the mouse.

Why on earth is this creaking beauty, the Palace of Anachronism, still home to Parliament? It should so clearly be mothballed as another ancient British tourist attraction, with a handful of leftover Lords/Ladies wandering around in their coronets and capes, available for selfies with tourists.

The actual business of governance should be relocated to a modern, 21st-century, rodent-free “campus” somewhere else entirely. A centrally located somewhere, in which MPs work and then go home, back to their real lives – rather than hanging around gossiping and schmoozing in fusty bars and dining rooms that look like 1753/1853/1953 but very much not whatever 2053 needs to be. Just a thought.

Anyway, because everything is branded with portcullises it was terribly tempting to nick the cutlery. Instead, despite having been told not to, we took discreet selfies.

Thing is, there’s something about the place that makes even relatively sane-and-sober (just the one glass, thank you) 50-something small-l ladies wearing sensible shoes want to snigger and break all the rules. Not that there’s a precedent for Telegraph columnists entering politics or anything, however I think it’s probably just as well I never felt compelled to work in Westminster.

Look, I’m not normally so delighted by myself/inordinately lazy that I recycle two-year-old reviews as ‘new’ columns, however far from age having withered it this one appears to have been buffed to a veritable mirrored sheen by the passing of time — just call me Nora Stradamus. And as we continue to be consumed by cortisol even after the adrenalized psychodrama that was Waiting for Sue Graydot, I’ll venture even further.

During the pan(ic)demic we suffered from collective brainwashing, largely as a result of seeing and hearing (and being ‘nudged’ by) too many politicians (Matt Hancock) we really didn’t need to see and hear from — certainly not on a daily basis — and hearing/seeing nowhere near enough from the ones we may have wished to. While in England we seem to be over the worst of this particular madness, in the People’s Republic of Ardern things are still considerably more deranged than they were even during our own months of peak paranoia. All of which, I think, points to an overwhelming need not for more governmental interventions in our lives but a great deal fewer. Less ‘Yes, Minister’ — more ‘Less, Minister’.

Aside from the political journos, the lobby hacks, the policy wonks and those keen Oxbridge PPE undergrads looking to get a proper hancock on their careers, I’d hazard that the majority of normal human beings are bored rigid by this much daily ‘public politics’ — something that’s happened mostly since the referendum.

An ‘exciting’ PMQs is simply the performative branch of politics. Nothing meaningful comes about as a result of these sessions, all they really do is reassure the bemused viewing public that their own hunches are correct: that, for eg, this government and its ‘opposition’ is a shouty theatre-of-the-absurd in which the clearly deranged spout nonsense at the merely stupid (or, depending on your position, vice-versa). Meanwhile, the stuff that really matters still goes on elsewhere, largely behind closed doors. Or on Whatsapp.  

Given that it’s not taught in schools (unless you’ve been to the kind of school where you’re automatically expected to end up running the country), I don’t think most British people understand how the Commons functions, day-to-day. I don’t really have a clue myself. All I see is a series of crumbling edifices propping up what looks to be a near-comedically outdated method of running a country.

And while I am not about to defend Boris Johnson’s (in)actions during lockdown, it strikes me that a PM living and working in Downing Street in the 21st century is bonkers. I can’t think of another world leader other than POTUS who ‘lives above the shop’ — and the White House is hardly comparable to the 200-metre-long 17th century ‘street’ of townhouses that looks as if it has been constructed as part of Warner Bros Harry Potter studio tour: ‘And to our right, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and any non-binaries who have yet to cancel Ms Rowling, is the former home of the Manager of Gringotts...’.

I hear that the PM and his missus are a bit worried about the planet. Sadly, there’s no chance of Downing St accommodating cutting-edge sustainable/renewable energy sources anytime soon. Clearly, it should become a museum/visitor attraction asap (‘And to our right, the broken swing belonging to Wilfred Johnson and his sister Romy, the last children to live at Downing Street...’), while future PMs should be housed elsewhere in London— or better still in a new-build Canberra-style political ‘capital’ — within a super-secure, state-of-the-art, low-energy, fit-for-purpose, live-work-space Passivhaus designed by a British starchitect.

By the standards of the 21st century, the Houses of Parliament are interesting and pretty—but also pretty bloody weird. The layout echoes the shape of the former St Stephen’s Chapel, the distance between the government and opposition benches is (of course it is!) the width of two swords and over in the Lords the speaker sits on the ‘Woolsack’ adopted in the reign of Edward III — 800 years ago! — to remind everyone present of the importance of the, uh, wool trade. Which they don’t even do in the People’s Republic of Ardern, where it actually still is.

Look, I adore ‘history’ as a subject. I appreciate Britain’s rich and diverse past. Hell, my youngest son goes to school on the site of the Battle of Hastings — the kind of immersive experience that ensures those lucky kids really ‘get’ history. However, it’s also high time ‘Theme Park Britain’ shut up shop. As I watched yesterday’s clash in the Commons I was constantly reminded that the process of Government and the surroundings in which it is conducted enables a monumental disconnect between that Government and the majority of the Governed.

When No10 is still run as if it were the 19th century, with the family of the PM sharing ‘their’ garden with off-duty civil servants wearing lanyards, the Covid-era ‘rules’ were always likely to have been ‘broken’. However, more importantly, this absurdly anachronistic set-up is now on the brink of dangerously undermining a democracy that deludes itself it is modern and forward-thinking. What chance, currently, is there of sending out a convincing message to the rest of the world that Britain is seriously on the same page as the rest of the 21st century?

Finally, indulge me for a moment while I head off-piste again. In Episode 3 of the most recent season of the fine TV satire Succession, advertisements using the phrase ‘We Get it’ was the in-house Comms Chief Hugo’s response to the unfolding HR crisis at the fictional corporate media giant Waystar Royco, modelled on the Murdoch empire. (‘A bit like those ladies on the [Waystar] cruise ships got it?’ responded Roman Roy. ‘It’s a bit like, yeah, yeah, we get it already, stop moaning about the rape...’’ agreed his sister, Shiv).

‘I get it’ said the PM in the Commons on Monday Jan 31st, in the light of Sue Gray’s report. (Nearly everybody else: ‘yeah, yeah, we get it, too... Resign’).

Admittedly, as a former TV critic, I like to join these kinds of dots and relish the intersection of fiction and fact. And of course if Succession’s creator Jesse Armstrong is now (albeit inadvertently) writing the scripts at No10 we can be very confident that our politics will continue to be highly entertaining while, simultaneously, being pretty bloody awful at ensuring anybody believes a single word a PM says in the House of Commons ever again.

Just putting it out there, yeah?