Politics is nothing but fiction in our cynical age

GB News might well have stumbled upon the truth of our current political plight.

On the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s funeral, they brought the Great Man into their studio to be grilled by the heavyweight duo of Anne Diamond and Steve Dixon. It wasn’t the real Churchill, let’s be clear, but an impersonator called Stan who performs under the name “Winstan”. That didn’t stop the former Prime Minister from strolling imperiously around the set, flicking everybody some victory, and chewing up his trademark cigar. Nor did it stop Anne and Steve from interviewing him as though he were the real deal.

“Why do you think there is still so much admiration for you now?” asked Anne.

“I think probably because I was the right man at the right moment,” our former Prime Minister didn’t say. “I don’t think I could survive in the current climate, but I’d give it a go I suppose.”

Good old Winnie-who-wasn’t. Plucky as ever or never…

Stan might have lacked the qualities that made the real Churchill arguably (but let’s not start that!) the greatest statesman of the 20th century but he did, at least, provide a clear answer to a simple question, and that’s more than the current Prime Minister has been doing lately.

Watching the interview, it was striking how little it appeared to matter that this politician wasn’t real, but then, we live in a reality where it doesn’t obviously matter if any politician is real or not. We live in what Umberto Eco labelled a “hyperreality”: a version of reality we create through our chosen illusions. “Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion,” wrote Eco long before Johnson came to embody a hundred clichés and one bad haircut.

Yet perhaps that is the answer. Stan has proved the concept sound, so why don’t we just pick whichever grotesque parody version of a political figure best suits our prejudices? One side can have the spry BoJo, always ready with pop culture references and bottles of plum patriotism. The other could have a Johnson in thrall to Russian money, antidemocratic leanings, and Peppa the Pig. This, after all, is what politics has become or, certainly, what it seems to be after one of the least dignified weeks in Parliament.

Phantasmagoria has been a characteristic of Johnson’s time in office, projecting confidence whilst avoiding scrutiny during the leadership campaign, advocating responsibility whilst avoiding TV interviews during the election, all the way through to his preference for silly photo-ops, but it’s in Parliament where Johnson’s trickery has been exposed the most. Under this Prime Minister, Parliament has become an even greater parody of what it had become, with this week’s PMQs a new low point as the PM used “Dick Dastardly and Mutley” to ridicule the Opposition just minutes after the Speaker had asked for a greater sense of respect.

This came only days after the Prime Minister foolishly accused Sir Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile when the Leader of the Opposition was head of the CPS. Johnson wasn’t just exploiting some uncomfortable truth hidden in Starmer’s past but repeating a far-right meme (Starmer called it “parroting the conspiracy theories of violent fascists”) that has been debunked many times and would appall many of his own backbenchers. Now, of course, “debunked” does a lot of heavy lifting and here we would fall into the very popular game of creative research, but that is precisely what Johnson relies upon, having now doubled down on his claim. This is the Trumpian game of devaluing every authority except the subjective self and that way lies madness. Is there any wonder, then, why our headline politics continue to wallow in partisan fictions? Rarely is there even a here-and-now that any two of us can agree upon. It sometimes feels like we only agree on the time because nobody has yet politicised the debate around British Summer Time.

Conservative MP, Julian Smith, was one of the few clear-sighted enough on the Conservative benches to understand how this goes much further than partisanship. “False and baseless personal slurs are dangerous, corrode trust & can’t just be accepted as part of the cut & thrust of parliamentary debate” he tweeted, partially in response to a particularly weak defence of Johnson by Dominic Raab on Tuesday morning. He is entirely right. Not only do they corrode trust, such fictions (not always lies but often creative misinterpretation of the facts) ensure that our politics remain out of touch with reality. The challenge is surely how we make politics re-engage with real lives.

The first place we should perhaps look is within Parliament itself where Prime Minister’s Questions has been in decline for years. The Speaker repeatedly professes to be powerless when MPs insult and lie but, even if he is correct to insist it’s up to Parliament to fix itself, it surely lies within his power to control matters when our politics are infantilised as they so often are by this Prime Minister. How is calling the Labour leader “Captain Hindsight” any less damaging to the reputation of the House than any other use of “unparliamentary language”? At what point does a comical poke become an offensive prod?

Our Parliament – indeed, our politics – relies on the notion of honour and that might have been fine when people believed that “honour” mattered. Honour is less suited to an era of slanderous memes and cynical soundbites. Yet where honour fails, rules and laws should begin, as they do for the rest of us unprotected by parliamentary procedures. We need less of Speaker Hoyle’s ineffective whelping and more asserting control on all sides of the House. When, on Monday, Ian Blackford said the Prime Minister misled the House, the Speaker threatened to eject the SNP leader. Blackford was playing to the galleries, of course, and obviously expecting to be thrown out, yet the Speaker still gave him no fewer than seven chances to withdraw his comment (including one lame attempt to brush the matter aside) before eventually moving to send him from the chamber. Even then, he didn’t properly remove Blackford since the SNP leader had already retired.

It’s a trivial point but entirely symptomatic of the greater problem. If lies, slander, and crass insults from all corners of the Commons result in no consequences from the Speaker’s chair, then how can we be surprised when crass lies, slander, and insults become the norm in our politics? Any statistic quoted by any politician should be accurate or it should not be quoted and retracted when proven false. Parliament is being treated as though it’s merely an extension of the campaign stump, where any and all brash untruth is tolerated. Too often, we allow convenient fictions to persist when we should be working hard to establish common truths. Forget about Michael Gove’s plea for more “Christian forgiveness” in our politics. We need more Descartian thinking-therefore-I-am-ing. We need to start believing in some material truths because, at the rate we’re going, it’s becoming increasingly unclear what politics and politicians are for.