Definitely don't make them PM. (Channel 4)
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The only person to have responded in a remotely sane way to being a contestant on The Apprentice was Rupert Everett. Bullied into taking part in a Comic Relief spin-off of the show, and then faced with the prospect of spending hours, maybe days, with celebrity teammates Piers Morgan and Alastair Campbell, he excused himself to go to the loo, found a fire escape, and, taking the stairs three at a time, fled the building.
It is perhaps an anecdotal measure of cultural decline that Alastair Campbell, along with fellow “political heavyweight” Baroness Warsi, is now playing the role of scowling mentor in Channel 4’s new reality show, Make Me Prime Minister. Twelve “ordinary yet opinionated Brits” compete to see if any of them “has what it takes” to “do the top job better”. They are faced with wildly under-specified tasks — week one: “totally reform primary school education”; week two: solve “the obesity epidemic” — with rather uncertain standards as to what might count as success. Presumably, next week it will be “broker a multi-lateral peace treaty in the Middle East”, or “restructure the UK’s long-term government debt”. If that kind of geopolitical cosplay doesn’t send them hurtling for the fire escape, the candidates should perhaps ask themselves if anything would.
The candidates grandstand, argue, blame and bullshit one another — ungrammatically and at length — in a tour de force of charmless self-assertion. They stumble around boardrooms in a fake Downing Street, draw randomly on whiteboards, and loosely translate the vapid, self-affirming dialect of reality-TV cliché into the terms of the mad fantasy the show insists on: “As Prime Minister, I have to stay true to myself”; “I don’t want to be like the Prime Ministers that we’ve had previously”. Warsi and Campbell — one can only hope in return for a large fee — are made to debase themselves by pretending the exercise has some halfway credible purpose. “I hope what this competition will do is find a new generation of political leaders,” says Warsi flatly, like a hostage to camera. “It would be quite extraordinary”, Campbell agrees, “if one or more of the people who go through this process actually do end up as elected politicians.” True enough.
Why insist on this deranged understanding of the show’s purpose? There is, I take it, something more to it than the usual time-filling promotional bluster.
At the heart of the show is an oddly exceptionalist view of politics as a locus of human thought and action. It is the view that politics, unlike any other intellectually-demanding discipline you care to name, admits no refinement of judgement: that there is no such thing as political wisdom or expertise. This bedrock conviction provides a firm basis for various kinds of populist sentiment. If there are no standards of political judgement, any “ordinary Brit” with enough of a can-do attitude should be able to do it. The apparent existence of subtle, structural or technically-demanding political problems turns out to be an illusion, one no doubt sustained by a political class who gain by it. Actually, the view says, there are no persistent or recalcitrant political problems, no perennial challenges of conflict or co-ordination: politics is nothing but a realm of pseudo-problems. What is needed, as one of the contestants puts it, is to “just apply some common sense to what we were told was a very complex situation”.
The show ministers to a strand of common-sense supremacism that plays a recognisable role in more and less sophisticated styles of political cynicism. Make Me Prime Minister is the kind of show you can imagine appealing to someone who reckons Hugh Grant should definitely be made Prime Minister on the basis of the terribly amusing dance he does in Love Actually, or who tweets terrifying lists of the various celebrities who would appear in their “fantasy cabinets”. It is a position that operates in a purposefully unstable rhetorical ground — at once reflexively sanctimonious and deeply unserious. The show’s embrace of this kind of thought makes for a haywire tone. One moment Campbell and Warsi talk disapprovingly about politics “being in a mess” and the urgent search for “new talent and energy”; the next, parish-council tactical-Zoom-defenestrator Jackie Weaver is introduced as one of the contestants. One minute, we’re told “parliament ought to sit up and take notice” of the fine example the contestants are setting; the next, we have to watch as they stumble around, asserting themselves mindlessly like a round-the-clock tribute act to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
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SubscribeI’m not sure that people have no interest in politics. I suspect that they have simply lost all respect for those who practise it. Perhaps if they weren’t constantly in our faces.- A little remoteness can be beneficial.
As for Campbell. He is a prime candidate for a new reality show that I am devising. It will be called “Involuntary Euthanasia”. The main aim will be to end our suffering, rather than his.
The utter brass neck on Campbell. To see him pontificating about decency in government is bad enough, but to see his reputation being rehabilitated in this way is frankly nauseating. He should be in prison, to put it mildly.
There is no amount of money that you could pay me to watch anything that features Alastair Campbell.
I don’t know, a public flogging would be worth a visit
The flaw in most arguments that revolve round people having commonsense, is so many people do not have any commonsense. It is not a generic trait in the population of any country.
Common sense is very subjective, what it entails is different for every person
To develop a level of common sense worth the label “sense” one needs experience of the ups and downs and contradictions of life. That’s why paying too much heed to young people doesn’t solve difficult problems.
When we criticise politicians we should consider that millions of clever people have not yet managed to solve the perennial problems of poverty that affects generations of some families, drug addiction which contributes to it, delinquency, crime and the global effects of severe climate events. This suggests that not especially clever people and/or common sense alone won’t solve them either.
Can’t be any worse than letting anyone with an Oxford PPE degree do the job.
I have a nagging feeling that the pitch meeting went something like this:
That Mitchell and Webb Look – Apprentice – YouTube
Can’t wait for the ‘organise the invasion of a sovereign nation’ episode.
William F. Buckley, Jr., said “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” I dare say he’d have added PhD students at Oxford University if he’d been asked about British politics.
Didn’t the Blair government put out a TV advertising campaign to persuade people to be interested in politics? From what I remember it featured fake interviews where one person would say they weren’t interested in politics and then the conversation would turn to something like the NHS and then they’d say but that’s politics.
Yes. It went as far as people complaining about the price of a pint, to which the other would shake their head and say “you said you weren’t interested in politics.”
”Make Me A General?”
next season show – one can be Putin, One Zalenski, and the third Biden
1) Putin – corrupt to the core – and ruthless; but the military is corrupt, incompetent, and shirking. He is a trapped wild animal at this point.
2) Zalenski – corrupt to the core, soldiers patriotic, but him, and all the system, are pawns and controlled by character #3
3) Biden – corrupt to the core – has $Trillions to use for nefarious purposes – has the Pentagon to manage #2’s fighting, and no one knows what his motivation is but to distract voters from runaway inflation for Midterms.
Make for great hilarity…..
The great flaw in your argument is that Biden is senile.
Fantastic article.
As I was reading the article I was losing the will to live. I was astonished at the craziness of it all.
I would not welcome my suitability as PM being judged by people who might be considered to be liars or racists.
liars and racists, as well as being totally evil.
We only need look at the trouble that presenting a “mini” budget without publishing OBR forecasts has just caused for Truss/Kwarteng to realise how the exercise of government is far from being a matter of common sense. Despite the combined experience and intellect (yes, i’m being serious) of the two of them, they heralded a political storm through relative naivety.
Anyone dropped in a senior role from the general public wouldn’t last two minutes in front of media questioning. The programme (which i don’t watch, i’ve got much better things to do) is an embarrassment to Campbell and Warsi and an insult to viewers from the description of it, except those who watch it (like the author of this article, i suppose) for a particular purpose other than taking it seriously.
Surely the argument is that Truss and Kwarteng are too intellectual, so don’t have common sense?
Why would anyone want to watch a program hosted by these two who look positively comically glum in the photo. The fact that Jackie Weaver that tinpot mini- authoritarian dictator was one of the contestants would only be a further disincentive to watch.