Politics in the UK seems to have become calmer these days, with just the usual low-level turbulence, such as the former Conservative health minister John Matt Hancock who thought it was a good idea to go on a reality TV show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. That required him to fly to Australia and do some really disgusting things, leading him to either resign as MP or be forced out by the party, it is not clear which.
During his I’m a Celebrity stint – in which Hancock was repeatedly chosen by viewers to undertake tasks including rummaging for meal tokens underground surrounded by snakes and spiders, and eat food including a cow’s anus and a camel’s penis – officers from the West Suffolk Conservative Association suggested he should step down.
…Hancock, who was first elected as an MP in 2010, served as culture secretary before becoming health secretary under Theresa May, keeping the job with Boris Johnson and throughout the bulk of the Covid pandemic.
He resigned in June last year after footage emerged of him kissing a friend and work colleague, Gina Coladangelo, in his ministerial office, a breach of his own Covid-19 rules.
I find this action inexplicable but maybe Hancock thought that his future as a cabinet minister was over and that he could make more money this way than by being an MP .
There are also the some other minor scandals that have had the Conservative party ‘remove the whip’ from some MPs for some unspecified transgressions, meaning that. they can no longer sit with the party in parliament but are considered independents.
All these are the kinds of story lines that could have been lifted from the British satirical comedy series The Thick Of It that ran from 2005-2012 that I am currently watching. It features brutal political infighting in the UK where everyone seems to be unprincipled, ambitious, and power hungry, willing to do anything to destroy political opponents and even those on their own side in their efforts to rise to the top. It seems to be not that far from reality. The creator of that series Armando Iannucci created an American version of it in Veep.
Peter Capaldi stars in the series as Malcolm Tucker, the prime minister’s hatchet man and political strategist whose job is to keep everyone in line and do damage control when they mess up. He is a foul-mouthed bully whose bare-knuckle tactics are designed to keep everyone in fear. It is a career defining role and he reprised it in the film In the Loop (2009).
The show features Tucker and ministers dealing with one scandal after another. But even that show might not have been able to envisage the sheer chaos of the 45 days in office of Liz Truss who immediately after taking office, along with her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, tried to ram through major policies that spooked the financial markets and sent the value of the British currency tumbling. She then fired Kwarteng and appointed Jeremy Hunt who reversed almost all those policies before she herself ignominiously resigned
In a recent interview, Kwarteng says that they simply got carried away in their enthusiasm to make major changes.
Kwasi Kwarteng has admitted he and Liz Truss “got carried away” when they wrote the disastrous mini-budget that led to both of them leaving their jobs just weeks after they entered Downing Street.
…“People got carried away, myself included,” Kwarteng told the Financial Times. “There was no tactical subtlety whatsoever.
“There was a brief moment and the people in charge, myself included, blew it.”
The article in the FT quoted an unnamed aide describing Truss, who left Downing Street after 49 days once her position became untenable among Conservative MPs, as “overcaffeinated” in her decision-making process.
“She was in this mode where everything had to be done immediately. I was worried she was going to blow up. She kept on saying she only had two years to do things,” before a potential election by January 2025.
Kwarteng said he had urged Truss to “slow down” over reforms, but a cabinet minister told the FT that she felt “invincible, almost regal”.
This is a shocking admission by people who are leading a country and are expected to exercise sober judgment, since so many people’s lives depend upon their decisions
The old saying that pride goes before a fall seems apt here.
Here is a mashup of clips of Capaldi from The Thick Of It with clips of Liz Truss.
While watching The Thick Of It, I was interspersing it with the British police procedural Prime Suspect starring Helen Mirren. So indelibly etched in my mind was the actor Capaldi in his over-the-top portrayal in the former show as an overbearing, unscrupulous, ruthless, unprincipled, and hyper-testosterone-fueled monster that while watching season 3 of the latter (that was made in 1993), I was surprised to see him play a sensitive and frightened trans woman who is the main attraction as a singer in an LGBTQ night club. He looked and sounded so different that it took me a while to register that it was the same actor.
Here is a clip of Capaldi in Prime Suspect.
It’s Matt Hancock, and he has neither resigned nor been forced out by the party -- he’s simply declared that he will not stand at the next General Election. He currently appears to intend to remain as the Member of Parliament for West Suffolk until then, whilst picking up an assortment of TV jobs and publishing his pandemic memoirs on the side. If I were one of his contituents I’d be furious, but then I wouldn’t have voted for him in the first place.
It’s Hat Mancock to most people I know.
One of the “really disgusting things” he did on that reality show was attempt to justify his actions as health secretary during the pandemic, and his actions during lockdown when started banging one of his colleagues, and was caught on CCTV canoodling with her. He knows no shame. I’m surprised one of his constituents hasn’t stabbed him already.
Entertaining review of his pandemic memoir here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/10/matt-hancock-hero-of-the-pandemic-nhs-staff-would-laugh-if-it-werent-a-tragedy
Peter Capaldi, on the other hand -- holy shit he’s good. I thought I’d be a Tom Baker fan all my life, but Capaldi as the Doctor is fucking amazing. Unfortunately there’s not really one episode you can watch in isolation -- his absolutely best episode “Heaven Sent” is unbelievable, but garners a lot of its power from what goes before and immediately after, despite being on its own terms a one-man show (apart from a couple of brief lines from Jenna Coleman) and a tour-de-force. It’s not just the best episode of Doctor Who ever (I hear you, fans of “Blink”, or “City of Death” for that matter -- fight me) -- it’s a strong contender for single best thing I’ve ever seen on telly. It’s a puzzle box, a horror movie, a terrific piece of acting and writing and I can’t praise it enough and NO other actor who’s played the Doctor -- John Hurt included -- could, I think, have done as well as Capaldi. I think it’s the eyebrows. That he’s an Ascended Fanboy just makes it even better.
To know he once played guitar in a punk band with Craig Ferguson is another delightful nugget.
Side note: if you’re binging The Thick of It, you might wonder at how suddenly the apparent main character, Hugh Abbott, disappears. The actor portraying him was busy getting busted for possessing images of child abuse. You couldn’t write it.
Thanks for the clarification on the abrupt disappearance with no explanation of the Hugh Abbott character . I had been wondering about that and assumed that the writers decided that a female minister would provide more opportunities for humor by mixing in gender issues. I thought that change was for the better.
Capaldi, monologuing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJP9o4BEziI
I could explain the setup, why there are two Jenna Colemans, what that suckery pink thing is to the right of the second Jenna Coleman is, who the woman in the background is, who Kate is and who her father was and why that matters, and what’s in the boxes, but I don’t think you really need it. You need to know the Doctor was a pivotal figure in a… large… war, and took steps to stop it, steps he later regretted.
Nah. Doctor Who, or at least New Who, seems like a joke you need to want to be before it becomes interesting. Sort of like wrestling and its notion of kayfabe, it just required to much intentionality on my part to be compelling. I remember Old Who differently, but then that may be because I was very young at the time.
[OT]
Dr Who has been thoroughly retconned by now — originally was a peripatetic fugitive, then became an action hero, and finally became a mythical demigod of cosmic significance whom every single entity in the universe holds in awe.
The reboot did the second, but the third and final ignominy was by Moffat.
I well and truly gave up before Capaldi was cast, I’m sure he would have been a fine Doctor back when the Doctor was just the Doctor and not an epic heroic demigod.
Though, in a typical “this is fiction and none of the characters are based on real people” disclaimer kind of way, it seems obvious that Malcolm Tucker was based on Alastair Campbell. For those who don’t remember, Campbell was Tony Blair’s media enforcer / campaign manager / spokesman.
I recall that Iannucci claimed Tucker wasn’t based on anybody in particular, but that Fiona Millar, Campbell’s wife, approached him at some media shindig and complimented him on how perfectly he’d captured her husband’s character. I can’t remember where I read that, but I like to think it’s true.
Though I’d stopped watching Dr Who decades before Capaldi’s stint as the Doctor, I had been hoping I’d hear about him going full on Tucker at a Dalek or two. I believe he never did, which strikes me a lost opportunity.
The Tucker/Campbell connection is/was so obvious to Brits with passing knowledge of politics that it barely merited comment. It’s on the same level as observing that Johnny Fontaine in “The Godfather” sounded like Frank Sinatra.
@John Morales, 6:
You come across as someone who saw Doctor Who briefly in about 1965, and whose knowledge of the show since is based on reading a couple of blogs written by people who’ve not really watched it much either. (IMPORTANT NOTE: What follows assumes Jodie Whitaker’s time as the Doctor never happened -- more in this later)
It sounds like you don’t know what “retconned” means. Example:
Yes… and that hasn’t changed. The First Doctor was exactly that. No retconning has happened at all, at any point in the show’s first 55 years or so.
Well, yes, that’s a thing that happened. It’s called “character development”.
Well, yes, also true… assuming by “reboot” you mean the time when Doctor Who stopped being shot in black and white and recast its main actor for the second time, i.e. 1970. Pertwee’s Doctor was absolutely an action hero in the James Bond mould, what with his fast cars, gadgets and Venusian aikido. Thinking making the Doctor an action hero was something that happened this century is just comedically ignorant.
You clearly have absolutely no idea. I do wonder why you’re even commenting, such is the lack of knowledge.
You didn’t even make it to the 50th anniversary episode? Shame, it was pretty good. “No sir -- all THIRTEEN” got a cheer from the audience in the cinema where I watched it.
All of the above, as I say, assumes you ignore (as I do) the travesty that was the Chibnall era, and the vandalism of the lore that went along with it. To be clear: I was well on board with casting a woman. Whitaker wouldn’t have been my first choice (my fantasy casting was Phoebe Waller-Bridge or Cate Blanchett), but she was good in “Attack the Block” so I was OK with it. No -- it was the writing. It was fucking terrible. And Chibnall really did do the thing you’re accusing Moffat of -- making the Doctor not just another Time Lord, but in fact a super-special nobody-really-knows being who was the origin of the Time Lords.
THAT is a retcon, and it fucking stank. Thankfully, Chibnall is gone. Whitaker too, and I feel sorry for her having been involved in comfortably the worst era in Doctor Who history. I’m actually angry that the first woman properly cast in the role was so poorly served. I’m even more annoyed we didn’t get to see more of Jo Martin, the Fugitive Doctor, who was an oasis of excellence in an otherwise terrible era.
Anyway, I’m going to stop ranting about this now. Capaldi rules. That is all.
sonofrojblake:
Perhaps to you, I do. Hard to say why, though.
So. It was not on TV while I lived in Spain, but I did see the original (1965) movie in… um, around 1969 or thereabouts — and when I came to Oz I watched the actual TV show. In Black and White.
I saw pretty much all aired episodes (on ABC TV) over lo many years, so yeah, I’m versed in those until the big hiatus. Lots of repeats, lots of lacunae, lots of cliffhangers too.
Much silliness, much el-cheapo production values, but still fun.
Even as I grew to be an adult.
Then the hiatus.
Then it got rebooted in the mid-2000s, and not long after the Doctor killed his first human — which at the time I thought broke character big time. Was not impressed. That totally changed the character. I recall ranting about it at the time.
The Doctor used to be kinda like an Asimov character: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
Over time, it got even worse, and then fucking Moffat got onto it, which caused me to give up. Not worth the aggravation, nostalgia be damned.
Anyway. I bet I’ve seen more episodes than you, actually. Just not the post-Moffat ones, which you hold in such high esteem.
So what I should sound like — based on what I’ve written — is someone who was a habitual viewer but gave up after Moffat fucked up the whole conceit.
Which is total bullshit, outside your head-canon.
(And part of the conceit was that the Doctor pops around in time, so that the chronology of the episodes is not linear in his timeline — before I gave up, I noted a couple of episodes where this was a thing, which is good, though it was done badly in my estimation)
Yeah, right. Like the stupid action-hero Sherlock Holmes movies, right?
(Character development!)
Yeah, well. Glad for you that you think so.
(I hear some people think coprophagy is pretty good, too — but not for me)
de gustibus and all that.
FWIW: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsMVmNwkaV-Xwt2KapxriEvtLU70AV9BN
Ahahahahahaaaaaaa. “the original movie”. You crack me up.
First, apart from Mehendri Solon (Brain of Morbius) and Magnus Greel (Talons of Weng-Chiang), just off the top of my head from Fourth Doctor DVDs I can see from where I’m sitting. I can’t be bothered thinking of any more, but I’m comfortable positing there are neither the first nor the last.
Either you didn’t rant within the hearing/reading of anyone who had any knowledge of the show, or you simply don’t recall being corrected along the lines of the above.
Picture me smirking. You’ve not even watched half the post-reboot stuff, you think the pre-reboot Doctor never killed a human, you think there’s an “original movie” -- I’ll take that bet.
Don’t get me wrong -- there are almost certainly people who’ve seen more episodes than me. There are people who’ve seen all of “The Tenth Planet”, for example, before the BBC wiped it. But the number of people who saw all of that, AND all the other lost episodes, AND all of the rest of the show to ’89, AND all the post-reboot stuff… I think I can probably count those people on my hands. And I know you’re not one of them.
Ah, so you’ve not read much/any Sherlock Holmes, either? Good to know. Pop quiz -- which martial art was Holmes versed in? And what was Holmes’s reaction when Dr. Grimesby Roylott bent his poker?
Lol, this fight about who is a better Who fan is hilarious boys. It must be bigger on the inside than it appears from out here.
sonofrojblake:
The 1965 movie; the TV series was not broadcast in Spain at the time I lived there, so my first exposure was that movie. Which, at the time, I thought was awesome. And it’s the original movie in the sense that, before it, there was no such movie. It was the first movie.
Mmm. Fair enough, but I still recall my feeling on watching the scene at the time — the specifics, not-so-much.
I read every single canonical work (by the original author) by the time I was 14 years old, mate. And he most certainly was not an action hero, but a thinker.
(And your quiz is stupid, since anyone on the internet could find the answers with a few clicks)
Now, if you want to think the recent movie (you know the one, with the stupid plot and the stupid action featuring the guy I thought was shitty in his other action films) constitutes character development instead of (basically) being fanfic, you go right ahead.
All this slanging and bragging, and neither of you supposed fans has listed off the Doctor Who original novels* you’ve read? Pretenders!
* Obviously I am not referring to the novelisations of tv episodes.
For you, Holms: I have read zero.
(But I have read most of the Black Library, FWTW)
There’s a story, probably apocryphal, and I don’t recall who precisely the protagonists were supposed to be, but told of an experienced Labour MP talking to a new arrival in the House, who refers to the Conservatives sitting opposite as “the enemy”:
“No, no, lad, they’re your opponents. Your enemies will all be on this side of the House!”
On the Who-wars, I watched practically every episode before the great hiatus (one of the earliest -- pre-Daleks -- actually gave me a nightmare); my favourite Doctor was Patrick Troughton*, and I still think the shift toward “action hero” with Pertwee was a big mistake. I watched a few post-hiatus episodes: “Meh”, but I can believe Capaldi was good in the role.
*Who, as it happens, my father served alongside in the Royal Navy during WW2.