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New Labour was beyond parody Untrammelled power is no laughing matter

Not old-fashioned, tired or boring. Credit: Johnny Eggitt/AFP/Getty

Not old-fashioned, tired or boring. Credit: Johnny Eggitt/AFP/Getty


April 26, 2022   6 mins

We all knew it was coming. Blair’s ascension had been heavily trailed for months. It would have taken a miracle to stop the landslide. The Conservatives looked preposterously old-fashioned, tired and boring. You could say what you liked about young neoliberal Tony in his swinging blue jeans — that he was all surface, that he was a Tory really — but only bullets could stop New Labour now.

Our son was 18 at the time and had lived his entire life under a Tory government. My mood in the weeks ahead of Election ’97 was positively gleeful. As The Thick of It‘s Peter Mannion said a decade later as Labour’s own dynasty entered its fag-end phase: “Our tanks on their lawn at last, fuck a doodle-doo!”

Did the Blair years change satire? Not really. Maybe. Sort of, accidentally. The first Blair government happened to coincide with the growth of heartless piss-taking on the internet — that was new. And a young, earnest, sexually-active prime minister was bound to provide a welcome target for satirists bored senseless by John Major and his dreary retinue at Castle Greyscale.

We saw the elevation of “spin” to Dark Arts status, even though it has been a standard political ploy since Henry VIII’s first divorce. The appointment of Thomas Cromwell Alastair Campbell as press secretary defined New Labour’s presentation style, and his method and strategies paved the way for a new satirical landscape. Here was a journalist brought in at the very top, issuing orders to civil servants, enforcing the ministerial line on public statements, keeping the spads on message. Essentially Blair’s official spokesman, but with a senior civil servant’s salary and the influence of a deputy prime minister, say, or an editorial in the Sun.

In those balmy first months of summer 1997, however, the focus was very much on Tony: his barrister’s smile, his soft-Left dress code, his political philosophy of “whatever works, yeah?”. Private Eye portrayed him as a trendy vicar, irritated by church affiliates and parishioners alike. Steve Bell did him as a glinty-eyed Thatcher clone. Rory Bremner nailed the voice and mannerisms but, like many, struggled to find an ideology to satirise. As he told the BBC in 2007: “As soon as you got a handle on some area it would just vaporise and disappear and they’d be off somewhere else…”

Nebulous politics were hip, fading seamlessly into the wider cultural vacuity of Cool Britannia. Post-modern Union Jacks winked at us from everywhere — an Oasis guitar here, a Spice Girls frock there. Everyone was mad for Britpop and football and ecstasy and an end to boom-and-bust. Happy days. In PR terms, pride in New Labour’s New Britain was whatever worked, yeah? Whatever made us look good and feel fabulous. Dolce et gabbana est pro patria mori, as somebody should have said at the time.

The great satirical chronicler of the rise and fall of New Labour was Armando Iannucci. Earlier in the decade, with Chris Morris and a brilliant team of writers and performers, he had entirely reset British satire, first on radio with On The Hour, then on TV with its mad descendant The Day Today. The format spoofed news stories through the prism of a news format which was itself satirised, Morris anchoring as a demented Paxman. When Blair was basking in warm hosannahs as the New Labour Messiah, Iannucci was there at the start of the Great Experiment with his new show, Saturday Night Armistice. He was there too at the end with The Thick of It as the hot air balloon deflated and Blair parachuted out, allowing Gordon Brown to navigate the last few hundred feet as the economy, with Labour in it, crashed.

Iannucci was taking the piss out of Blair even before the evangelical shine dimmed, at a time when New Labour was all about a new hope and Sure Start and billions pumped into education and health; when Blair’s public approval ratings were up there with Diana, Princess of Wales and Fatboy Slim. Armistice featured a soft toy called Mr Tony Blair whose inanities could only be heard by Iannucci. It seemed jarring to me at the time, Blair as a platitudinous gonk, but it was, as it turned out, merely prophetic. I spoke to Iannucci recently about satirising Blair in those early years. “We started portraying him as the Sun King,” he said. “That whole sense of him feeding off how good he thinks he is as a person, his saintliness, his good works. It wasn’t like we were trying to bring him down, just to pierce that sense of mass hysteria…”

In due course, the satire became less about the Mandelsons and Prescotts of New Labour. “All the ones that the impressionists would automatically do, they were all gently eased out,” said Iannucci. “Anyone with a hint of idiosyncrasy had to go. Blair wanted managerial clones of himself, safe and uniform. Thatcher and Major had tended to appoint ministers who had a bit of clout, some expertise, in their subjects. Under Blair, it was much more the case that ministers were required to do what Number 10 wanted. Message control — that was what the whole Blair thing was about…”

He mentions Excalibur, the party’s “rapid rebuttal unit” which compiled computerised data on Labour’s opponents, allowing it to mount agile and aggressive counterattacks during the ’97 election campaign. By 1999, aggressive counter-attacks were seen as a bit tame. The party appointed a Head of Attack to lead its election campaign using Excalibur 2. “They didn’t want to make the mistake of not preparing,” Iannucci said, “and then went crazily the other way…”

As the Millennium dawned, so did something else. Satirists realised that the key strength and weakness of the government was the Blair-Campbell axis. Until now, the most famous media bulldog had been Thatcher’s scrotum-chewing press secretary, Bernard Ingham. In those days the job meant protecting your boss. Now it meant being his locum. By the time the Iraq war happened, Blair’s moral compass was already spinning in its grave. The Public Finance Initiative was revealing itself to be a massive siphon, sucking money from taxpayers to developers from here to eternity, ASBOs were already a badge of honour for young criminals, and Parliamentary oversight was becoming an afterthought rather than a statutory condition.

And every week, as the misery in Iraq increased, I thought — loads of us thought — of Bush and Blair and their prayer breakfasts, with their mad conviction that they were on a mission from God. How we’d have loved to hear the other side of those prayers.

This audacity of self-belief: how it trumped political process, how pure it was. Iraq exposed a contempt for accountability, a legacy we enjoy to its fullest with the current shower of crooks and clowns. As Iannucci told me: “Because they were crushing the personality out of the Cabinet, the subject was therefore going to be the process. It had to be. It’s why we went into the process itself with Thick. We were thinking about what happens to people when they have untrammelled power. You know, ‘I invaded Iraq because I thought it was the right thing to do’. That’s not enough — you need proof! This is what happens if anyone at any point on the political spectrum believes they have a mission, that only they can fix this…”

As an exercise in satirical archaeology I recently watched Iannucci’s Election Night Armistice. It went out live on the night in 1997 and honestly, it’s all there even before Blair slipped into his monogrammed pyjamas at Number 10. I’d missed most of it at the time because, like every other pissed Old Labour voter, I was mostly glued to the unfolding source material. But on Armistice, here was the sensationalist media taken to a logical conclusion: someone in a giant penis costume — the Sleaze Cock — was on the streets badgering senior Tories. Sally Phillips was the Whore in a Helicopter ready to invent a tabloid affair with the first MP elected.

And some bits were comedy microcosms of the fearsome governmental narrative control we were to see in the years to come. Spin Olympics, in retrospect, was eerily prescient. Here, flanked by a Thatcher-era PR guy and a Lib Dem treasurer is 30-year-old Derek Draper, former chief adviser to Mandelson, who would go on to have a chequered career in the Labour Party. Unlike the other two — the Tory ebulliently clueless; the Lib Dem sober but useless — Draper is utterly, utterly brilliant. He understands how the game works, here and in real life. In the first round, the contestants have to spin some awful thing a politician has said: for example, David Blunkett: “I hate Muslims.” For comic effect Draper channels furious sanctimony to insist that Blunkett was talking about the way Muslims are stereotyped by the media, and deplores the way that this show itself threatens to denigrate and harm minorities.

Round Two features a random policy generator, which nonsensically burps up: “We/would like to/nationalise/Europe.” Nevertheless, Draper talks it up, arguing that individual EU nations would be improved. A Wheel of Spin is spun: Talk Tough. Without missing a beat he says “… and if they don’t like it they’ll just have to put up with it…” The wheel spins again and again. Do a U-Turn: “… though of course each nation will have control over its own affairs…” Go Negative: he does, firmly disavowing the policy without breaking his tone of sincerity. It’s a tour de force, and an astonishing glimpse of what was to come fictionally with Malcolm Tucker and the hapless ministers under his control.

So the Blair years didn’t change satire. But satire was there all along, hiding in plain sight, waiting to become real. In the dying light of 2009, with Tony now well into his new globalist afterlife, Thick scriptwriters and New Labour wonks were coming up with identically desperate policies, week after week in Broken Britain. Policies that had to sound impressive and cost nothing. The audience looked from satirists to policymakers, and from policymakers to satirists, but already it was impossible to say which was which.


Ian Martin is a writer and a producer known for The Thick of It, In The Loop, Veep and The Death of Stalin. 

IanMartin

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Malcolm Knott
Malcolm Knott
2 years ago

Alastair Campbell was not funny. He degraded and coarsened the level of political debate in this country and did so quite deliberately with Tony Blair’s tacit approval.

John Riordan
John Riordan
2 years ago
Reply to  Malcolm Knott

Agreed. One of the worst people ever to gain power and influence in this country.

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago
Reply to  John Riordan

I would disagree and say that the late Tony Crosland* should take the Victor’s Palm for that.
That is not say that the case for the wretched Campbell is without merit.

(* Whose most famous remark for other readers was:-
“If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f*****g grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.”)

Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
Reply to  Malcolm Knott

And continues to do so. Why?

Harry Child
Harry Child
2 years ago

This article does not go far enough – the Guardian reported that “over the course of the last Blair decade, each year has seen an average of 2,685 new laws – the equivalent of almost seven and a half a day or one every three-and-a-quarter hours – said legal information providers Sweet & Maxwell..
Len Sealy, Professor of Law, University of Cambridge at the time stated:-
““We have lived in recent years in a blame/compensation culture which demands that somebody does something about every accident or bit of misconduct, and politicians and their departments feel obliged to react. Whether this is an issue of health and safety, consumer protection, discrimination, putting a regulation on the books or increasing a penalty makes a political point, even if not always followed up by adequate funding or enforcement.”
No wonder the judicial system is staggering and the mantra that ignorance of the law is no excuse has new dark overtones.

John Riordan
John Riordan
2 years ago

“Nebulous politics were hip, fading seamlessly into the wider cultural vacuity of Cool Britannia.”

It might have been culturally vacuous, but it was also a brilliant time to live through. The first New Labour term, with Gordon Brown not daring to diverge seriously from Ken Clarke’s budget plans (Labour had committed to matching the sound economics of the Tory brand) meant that really we were all living through the first years in which the hard slog of Thatcherism was finally paying dividends.

Cool Britannia might have been a typically empty New Labour slogan, but the point is that people bought into it largely because they themselves felt a new confidence in life generally. It wasn’t that the slogan worked, it was WHY it worked that’s interesting. The D-Ream tune from the 1997 victory “Things can only get better” is another example of the iconic character of those times: Labour supporters will of course ascribe the sentiment to the fact that their own tribe had finally won an election, but in fact the feeling that things really were getting better had been in place already for some time. I recall in the mid-1990s, when I was first getting into the routine of hard work, starting to notice that everyone, all of sudden, seemed to be getting busier, and this accompanied not by stress and frustration, but a drive for more of the same. I noticed it with estate agents, who seemed to be amazed at the surge in demand for their services, and as for plumbers, some of them started thinking they were rock stars as far as I could work out. The internet and converged-service mobile networks first appeared at this time too, and the cultural shift in which people realised that they could get a hell of a lot done without an office to be in started to take hold.

Anyway, we know how it all turned out don’t we? What was really happening was that Tony and Gordon were about to squander the gains made possible by almost two decades of fiscal discipline, and this followed by a series of Tory governments too lazy and scared to change course as required explains why we’re where we are now.

Last edited 2 years ago by John Riordan
Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
2 years ago
Reply to  John Riordan

Labour had committed to matching the sound economics of the Tory brand

That’s why they were electable.
They stuck to their promise in the first term.
That’s why they were re-electable.
Then Blair handed over to Brown …

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago
Reply to  John Riordan

You didn’t need to read the runes to realise that the mawkish behaviour over the death of Diana was an all too obvious omen that disaster was at hand. QED.

Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
Reply to  John Riordan

It’s a funny old world. Major was pro-EU, pro-€, and in his attempt to promote them, pursued ERM. It failed, conspicuously unsupported by Germany. It was an economic crisis which seriously damaged the Conservative reputation for financial prudence. And yet, dramatically, the UK economy rebounded (the watershed was clear), so when B&B took power, they enjoyed a really healthy economy, and had the sense to persevere with Conservative policies, but only for so long. They couldn’t resist, so by the time the next financial crisis struck, we were already in familiar territory. Groundhog day.

Last edited 2 years ago by Colin Elliott
Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
2 years ago
Reply to  Colin Elliott

Well, they’d promised the electorate that they’d persevere with Prudence but the implied promise to Labour faithful was that they’d open the purse strings and let ‘er rip once they got settled in.

Later attempts to roll back the profligacy were hysterically denounced as “austerity”, add a pandemic lockdown, and here we are.

Adam Bartlett
Adam Bartlett
2 years ago
Reply to  Colin Elliott

Yup, the 2008 crisis caused by excessive free market policy was familiar territory for us in the Labour party; like most of the London financial elite we know our Keynes.
Sadly, the same couldnt be said of the Tories, with Osbourne making comical claims like “even a modest dose of Keynesian spending” could act as a “cruise missile aimed at the heart of recovery.”. Happily, the rest of the world ignored him and followed Gordon Brown’s lead. Most of the predicted dire consequences never materiliased thanks to the worldwide Keynesian response. It’s all in the historical record, with even conservative journalists like Peter Oborne praising Brown’s global leadership.
As Oborne said, it was Browns “finest hour”; he handled the global crisis almost as well as Tony would have.

MARTIN BRUMBY
MARTIN BRUMBY
2 years ago
Reply to  Adam Bartlett

Don’t forget the crowning achievement of 2008, Brown, Veggie Benn and Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act.

Totally uncosted, virtue oozing from every pore, unnecessary, unscientific, unachievable. Only 5 MPs (all Tory) voted against.

And thanks to Theresa May, doubled down as a parting shot for Boris, who accepted it gratefully as a present for Carrie. Not even a debate in Parliament. Soup to nuts in half an hour. After all, we (1% of World emissions) would lead the way – to the cliff edge.

You think the Covid response has been a total disaster?

Get ready…

Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
2 years ago

“Dolce et gabbana est pro patria mori” – that’s very good indeed.

Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

If you get the underlying quotation. After thirty years of massive university expansion with everybody down to the local road sweeper having a crappy degree from some tenth-rate redbrick (founded 2005), how many DO get it?

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago

Oxbridge is just a bad, a veritable cesspit of chippy, woke drivel and outrage.
Had Thomas Cromwell* avoided the axe, these two ‘Gorgons’ would have ceased to exist.

(*died 1540.)

Peter B
Peter B
2 years ago
Reply to  ARNAUD ALMARIC

121 Nobel Prize winners who’ve been at Cambridge. Not bad for a “cesspit”.
Cambridge is an international technology centre as a result.
If Thomas Cromwell had prevailed, that would be a big fat zero.

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago
Reply to  Peter B

I beg to disagree. Cromwell’s plan seems to been to rid Oxbridge of the pernicious influence of the Church, and produce a far more Secular environment.
As it was for most of the 16th, 17th, 18th & 19th centuries Oxbridge remained a priest factory for the Established Anglican Church.
Had it not been so,Cambridge might well have had some 250 plus Noble Prize winners under its belt.

Jean Nutley
Jean Nutley
2 years ago
Reply to  Peter B

Not brilliant either, given the sheer number of attendees.

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
2 years ago

I’m all in favour of elitism, but you do appear to be a bit of a snob!

Lucy Browne
Lucy Browne
2 years ago

Dear me, you haven’t even attempted to disguise your unalloyed snobbery there, have you Francis.

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
2 years ago

I enjoyed the Animal Farm riff at the end.

Jean Nutley
Jean Nutley
2 years ago

Exactly so. Attendance at university does not necessarily guarantee any education! One does not necessarily go in hand in hand with the other , I fear, and I am beginning to agree with Lady Bracknell.
“The whole theory of modern education is unsound. Fortunately, in England, in any case, education has no effect whatsoever”
Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest

Graeme Laws
Graeme Laws
2 years ago

Parties don’t win elections. Opponents lose them. Kneeler Stonewall Starmer, with his history of support for the momentum Corbynista faction, has probably already lost the next one.

Jeffrey Chongsathien
Jeffrey Chongsathien
2 years ago

Untrammelled corruption and unpunished crimes.

AC Harper
AC Harper
2 years ago

I thought it was noteworthy that ‘Spitting Image’ did not run during the Labour governments. I originally believed it was Lefty authors protecting their progressive narrative, but perhaps Tony Blair & Co were too obviously a caricature to be worthy of satire?

Al M
Al M
2 years ago
Reply to  AC Harper

I entertained that idea also. My conclusions were that, like the Major government, it had run its course.

Graeme Archer
Graeme Archer
2 years ago
Reply to  AC Harper

I always assumed it was because the puppets were busy serving in Blair’s cabinets.

Andy Martin
Andy Martin
2 years ago

“And a young, earnest, sexually-active prime minister was bound to provide a welcome target for satirists bored senseless by John Major and his dreary retinue at Castle Greyscale.”
According to Edwina Currie’s lurid confessions in her diary serialized in the Daily Mail,
John Major was a sexy beast. Trust me, I didn’t have to teach that man ANYTHING!”
so not as dreary as he seemed.

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago
Reply to  Andy Martin

Lucrezia Borgia eat your heart out!

Jean Nutley
Jean Nutley
2 years ago
Reply to  Andy Martin

Maybe that is why Major appeared so washed out and grey?!

Richard Heller
Richard Heller
2 years ago

Made my own effort to parody New Labour in my play “Waiting For Gordo” a bleak existential drama of backbench life in Blair’s party. Commissioned by Today programme, performed at Brighton during Labour Conference 2005. High point was this speech, confected from actual words of Tony Blair http://www.richardheller.co.uk/2020/01/belles-lettres/blair-speaks/

J A Thompson
J A Thompson
2 years ago
Reply to  Richard Heller

Very clever speech!
Always wondered why I, a lousy judge of people, was so easily able to penetrate Blair’s, sanctimonious, shallow, insincerity (or should that be, Deep insincerity?). Thought I must be wrong; turned out I was so right!

Last edited 2 years ago by J A Thompson
Peter B
Peter B
2 years ago
Reply to  J A Thompson

You’re not alone. I wouldn’t claim to be a great reader of people either. But I was never in any doubt that Blair was a wrong un. I struggle to understand how anyone bought into all the “Third Way” nonsense, but they did.
I eventually came to see New Labour as something like a permanent public relations campaign.

Peter B
Peter B
2 years ago
Reply to  Richard Heller

You absolutely nailed Blair’s vacuous drivel there !

Richard Heller
Richard Heller
2 years ago
Reply to  Peter B

Thank you. Speech was ominously easy to write. Tony Blair is now the Norma Desmond of British politics, an aging star living in a fantasy past, perpetually ready for a close-up.

Graeme Archer
Graeme Archer
2 years ago

It didn’t take Iraq to see that Blair and Campbell were a stain on public life.

Last edited 2 years ago by Graeme Archer
Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago

Just what I needed tonight… Tony and his bevy of English beauties.

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

Superb!!

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
2 years ago

My first awareness of satire prophesying reality came with this writer’s series “2012”, where over its course the catastrophic misfires of the Deliverance committee started to anticipate what was really happening. It was brilliant.

Dermot O'Sullivan
Dermot O'Sullivan
2 years ago

That picture should have the caption:

WHERE’S WALLY

Last edited 2 years ago by Dermot O'Sullivan
Dermot O'Sullivan
Dermot O'Sullivan
2 years ago

Well, he did get the Good Friday agreement…and before you start, things are better than before.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
2 years ago

What we need now, or Russia needs now, are similar shows set in the Kremlin.