Dr Strange-Gove and No10’s multiverse of madness

Perhaps our parents were right to warn us about comic books rotting our brains. In the era of Marvel’s domination at the box office, it’s increasingly hard to be surprised by very much. There was a time when Michael Gove appearing on BBC Breakfast and adopting various comedic voices would have been the oddest moment of the week. That’s no longer the case. Not when the current Multiverse of Madness runs so much deeper and, certainly, not when Tory MPs can gather at Number 10 for the latest garden party where they can discuss whether this government is out of touch and taking the cost-of-living crisis seriously…

Turn up the special effects a little more and let’s wave our arms around in front of the green screen as some CGI monstrosity is projected behind us. Be thrilled as Boris Johnson survives another scare in the council elections, where his Tory party loses only 490 seats compared to the 491 seats they might have lost… Gasp at such a close call before… Bang! A black hole opens in the heart of Westminster. Watch as scientists warn us that it’s caused by a government that has run out of ideas.

It’s time to call The Avengers! Here’s The Punisher (aka the Home Secretary) and The Culture War Machine (the Secretary of state for Culture, Media and Sport) and suddenly there are as many as 38 new policies announced, including Johnson’s renewed commitment to ban Tory-to-Labour conversion therapy.

And so it goes: a government run like a movie franchise of self-sustaining mumbo-jumbo.

There is something distinctly Marvel-like about this administration but it’s not so much the spectacle as the convenient way that the narrative is handled. It is becoming quite evident that there’s a formula behind the chaos. As our heroes find themselves in another impossible bind (“Surely Boris is doomed this time!”), there’s always another hero with the superpower needed to save the day.

This time it’s the Master of Thousand Voices (well, three, and a couple of those were iffy) distracting us long enough to get the government rattling along again. Our job as the audience is not to look back and consider how incongruous it all is. Remember how Partygate was once a thing? Before that, it was Peppa Pig threatening to bring the government down. Remember Owen Patterson? And wasn’t there something about a bridge to Northern Ireland or was it Valhalla? Or was that the last Thor movie?

Don’t stare too intently at the screen or you’ll see the deus ex machina whirring away. Think too deeply and you might even remember it was just a few weeks ago when the Chancellor stood up and announced some tax rises and very little in the way of support for those hit hardest by the current crisis. That would be it until the autumn, we were told, only to learn moments after Prince Charles finished reading the Queen’s speech, that Boris had something else planned.

Gasp as Captain Britain pops up to save the day.

Or perhaps not.

Just like Marvel movies, everything is about finding pleasure in the moment and ignoring the crude populism. Ignore, too, the obsession with power, in this case, a government vowing to ditch the Human Rights Act for the sake of everybody who has felt limited by their rights to liberty, freedom of expression, and a fair trial… These are the modern superheroes who live by a different moral code. They combat evil wherever they find it, using their overpowered might to prevent the rampant election fraud that saw a single prosecution around 2019’s general election.

Forget too that at the beginning of this movie there was a promise to build 300,000 homes by the middle of the decade…

Ignore that it was this government that signed the Northern Ireland protocol they’re now so eager to discard.

Forget what happened before. Focus on the now and the next before the credits roll.

But just before you leave the theatre, here’s a brief sneak preview of the next spin-off, and is that Sue Gray lurking in the shadows? And just like Marvel movies, it will be months before we find out, by which time the previous supremely forgettable movie will be just a vague memory. We’ll think to ourselves “last time it couldn’t have been that bad”, as we settle down to give them another chance.

And then another and another…