Iannucci, I salute you

My favourite TV programme of all time is Armando Iannucci’s ‘The Thick Of it’.  This goes way beyond comedy into the realms of pure genius.

When I watch an episode – even if I have watched it a dozen time before, I roar with laughter.  But here’s the thing, there are no jokes.  This is all serious stuff.

Does anybody not think that this is exactly what politics is like.

When I can stop laughing I want to consider the serious side of this.

How many times have we heard, read or realised that so many politicians are career politicians, never had a job, straight out of Uni studying law, politics&economics or history.  Perhaps worked up the ranks of the trade union movement where the shop steward, who was the mouth and who was shit on tools, resides.  Whatever their route, there are very few politicians with real life experience.

We decry them for their ineptitude and lack of experience.  Watching Kezia Dugdale grapple with simple arithmetic in the Scottish Parliament should be shown in school to alert kids to the danger of not paying attention in class.

Here’s an exercise that will give you hours and hours of fun.  On Wednesday morning (it will have to be in May now) log on to iPlayer and watch a couple of episodes of The Thick Of It.  Now flick to PMQ’s.  This is a great example of cause and effect.  Armando Iannucci must crease himself every Wednesday lunchtime as he watches his observations play out in real time.

So here’s the serious side.  Politicians produce a set of initiatives for their manifesto that they think will appeal to the electorate.  Their job is to sell this to the public.  Never mind actually doing any of this – that’s not on the table at this point.  Why do you imagine they can’t explain the numbers?  they don’t know them.  Their Special Advisors have given them a bit of a heads up – but this is still ‘Imagineering’.  The politicians are after one thing and one thing alone – your vote, nothing else.

Close your eyes and imagine the scent just before the Referendum when Lord Sir Gordon Brown did his speech on the Vow.  Somewhere, is a room a Peter Capaldi figure would have switched on the TV an stared in disbelief.  ‘What the f*ck is that muppet doing – somebody get him to f*ck out of there.

A short time later, there would be the confrontation where the Capaldi figure says ‘you better hope to f*ck they don’t vote NO ‘cos if they do I’ll rip your f*cking arm off and whack you over the head with the soggy end, you f*ckin dipstick’.

These sort of conversations will abound in rooms and corridors all over Westminster on the 8 May 2015 as if Armando Iannucci had written their scrip for them.

Lord Sir Gordon Brown was the longest serving Chancellor of the Exchequer.  Please don’t tell me you think he locked himself in a room and emerged later with the budget? please don’t tell me that.  His subject is history! the history of the Labour Party.  Not as much as an Accountancy for Dummies.

Politicians are just salespeople.  They flog concepts, they flog promises, they flog hope for the future.  They don’t have a ‘scoobie’ how that will, or could, be achieved.

Once elected the Civil Servants get into a hundred huddles to decide what the new party in power can actually do.  ‘I know you said you would control immigration to the tens of thousands – but that is going to have to be hundreds of tens of thousands – that way you are delivering on your promise.  Oh, and when you said you would get 100,000 back into work, thank goodness you did not mention anything about being paid!’

Faceless, unaccountable, unelected and immovable Civil Servants run the country and always have.  They bring a set of options to the Minster in charge and tell him or her they can have any colour as long as it is black.  Of course, the Minister has no option.  His or her job is now to convince the public that their promise wasn’t really broken.  And if it was even a tiny wee bit broken that was because the last lot left them a right f*ckin mess to clear up and it will all work out for the best.

Armando Iannucci – I salute you!

Nothing comes between the Politician and their Civil Servant master.  They have a bond that is hundreds of years old.  Nothing, that is, until now.  The SNP have brought honesty and integrity to Scottish politics.  They are now threatening to bring their inflammable honesty and integrity to Westminster and burn it to the ground.

My heart goes out to Armando Iannucci.  If the SNP succeed, what the f*ck will he have to write about?