In defence of Nadine Dorries

Nadine Dorries’ appointment as the new Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport in the latest Boris reshuffle raised eyebrows – she’s hardly qualified, ran many of the responses, and she has a chequered past in reality TV.

Sure, Nadine Dorries wouldn’t be my choice for the culture brief, but she’s better “qualified” for the role than her predecessor Oliver Dowden. She’s written several novels about her upbringing in working-class Liverpool, which have sold into the hundreds of thousands as e-books. 

By contrast, Oliver Dowden emerged straight out of a Cameroon-sponsored chrysalis to take his place as the last culture secretary: Cambridge University, followed by a period spent in the Conservative Research Department, followed by a short career in PR.

“Germany’s culture minister is a trained art historian; France’s wrote a book on Verdi. The new UK culture secretary … ate ostrich anus on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here,” tweeted the European Culture Editor of the New York Times, Matthew Anderson.

You can easily play this kind of snobbery at its own game. The French culture minister Roselyne Bachelot has indeed written a biography of Verdi. It is described by one witty Amazon reviewer as a “book to be thrown in the rubbish bin”. It appears to be a collection of stories that could have been gleaned from a cursory reading of the available literature on the composer. It markets at £19.38 in hardcover. Merci, mais non merci, Roselyne.

While Dorries has to compete only with predecessors like Karen Bradley and Sajid Javid, who are hardly “culture vultures”, Bachelot is an enormous step down from previous occupants of the culture brief in France, notably the ever-quotable novelist André Malraux, one of the most outstanding talents in European culture of the last century. 

Whereas France once set the terms of the global conversation – in the awesome pre-eminence of its hold over film, philosophy and “la mode” in the mid-century years – its national culture is no longer the reference point for American and British culture that it once was.

In 2017, Patti Smith went so far as to buy the reconstructed home of the poet Arthur Rimbaud in northern France. Can you imagine modern American stars treating French culture with that special sense of reverence?

Read in that light, Bachelot’s appointment is yet another sign of the relative decline in French culture’s international reach. No longer do French culture ministers command the ear of world leaders. Malraux himself (who had travelled widely in Indochina in the 20s) had a famous encounter with Chairman Mao in 1965, and the novelist was personally consulted by Richard Nixon before he decided to change tack in the US-Chinese relationship in 1972.

There is another kind of snobbery implicit in the view that there is, on the one hand, high culture, while, on the other, there is reality television. Reality TV is pour les autres. This represents a major failure of the imagination. Reality television is, in fact, an immensely sophisticated (and whisper it quietly, popular) feature of modern culture. Its formats – many of the best of them created in this country, or invented elsewhere and finessed here – display a vast gamut of human encounters, experience, and emotional states in full force.

Many of the situations are inspired by game-playing and trickery by the controllers of the shows, but the most compelling scenes occur when contestants fight back against the format itself. They win the sympathy of a broader public by transgressing the rules on purpose or acting in ways that the format’s creators cannot contain. They show us that it is possible to take on the modern Panopticon, and sometimes even to beat it.

Reality television may seem to be in its infancy, but it has plenty of antecedents in so-called High Culture. Audiences used to lap up serialised epistolary novels like Clarissa by Samuel Richardson or the 19 instalments of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, even writing to complain when characters they liked were mistreated or met a sticky end. Now they take to Twitter after an episode of Love Island and spitball speculations about future plotlines and alternative histories.

It isn’t such a bad thing that our culture secretary has direct experience of a cultural product that is watched and enjoyed by millions, if not billions, of people, even if Dorries was perceived, according to The Independent, to have made a “lacklustre performance in the… ‘Bug Burial’ Bushtucker Trial” and as a result was first to be voted off by the public in the 2012 vintage of I’m a Celebrity. 

Bug burials! Beat that, Verdi.