There are so many ways to mangle brilliance. If you’re a present or former member of Take That, you’ll know what I mean when it comes to taking the sweet essence of the Bee Gees and turning their hits into something as bland and devoid of colour as an Ikea Billy bookcase. And if you’re James Cleverly, you may have learnt last week that members of parliament using comedy catchphrases invariably turns the gag from gold into something that floats at the top of a storm drain.
Referring to Housing Secretary Steve Reed, Cleverly asked in the Commons: ‘What was it about the Labour party’s collapse in the opinion polls that first attracted him to the cancellation of local elections?’ – paraphrasing the late Caroline Aherne’s immortal ‘What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’ question to the diminutive magician’s wife Debbie McGee in the 1990s on The Mrs Merton Show.
The point Cleverly was trying to make was a valid, and serious, one. But it was hard for me to take stock of the politics while also cringing so hard that my body began contorting as I listened to the debate on the radio. With politicians and pub bores alike, the lesson should have long been learnt that being able to repeat a comedy catchphrase from the telly doesn’t make your point any stronger, or mean you possess a sense of humour yourself.
Brilliant as the Mrs Merton line is, it’s about three decades old now. This makes Cleverly’s remark perhaps the most delayed use of a catchphrase since the Sun’s bizarre nod to Dick Emery when it declared ‘You are awful, but we don’t like you’ in reference to the Supreme Court ruling that Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament was unlawful. That was in 2019, close to four decades since Emery was last regularly seen on our screens. For anyone under 45 at the time, the assumption was that the Sun’s sub-editors were the journalistic equivalents to the Japanese soldier on Lubang Island in the Philippines who wasn’t made aware that the second world war had finished until 29 years after VE Day.
Such parliamentary dad-dancing has many previous examples. David Cameron’s ‘Calm down, dear’ quip at Angela Eagle was met with accusations of misogyny back in 2011. Eagle stated a ‘modern man’ would not have expressed himself that way, leaving both her and her opponent looking foolish – though no doubt Michael Winner was delighted to hear his insurance ad catchphrase make it into the Commons.
Being able to repeat a comedy catchphrase from the telly doesn’t make your point any stronger, or mean you possess a sense of humour yourself
Then there was Ed Miliband, who showed us all that watching political satire doesn’t necessarily provide an education in how not to do things in reality. His reference to the 2012 Budget as being an ‘omnishambles’ was a neologism lifted straight from The Thick Of It. Unfortunately, putting Malcolm Tucker’s linguistic savagery into the mouth of Red Ed rendered the phrase limper than damp tofu and made everyone wonder if Ed believed that the BBC comedy drama was actually a documentary.
But you have to go further back to find the most embarrassing example of an MP attempting to show the electorate that his definition of having his finger on the pulse is watching ITV ad breaks. Step forward Dennis Skinner who, in 1990, muttered ‘I bet he drinks Carling Black Label’ to Black Rod during the state opening of parliament. If you’re too young or too preoccupied by more important things to remember, the series of ads for the lager showed people (or, in one example, a squirrel) accomplishing various impressive things, from mind-reading to navigating a garden assault course to get at some nuts.
You can watch Skinner’s gag on YouTube, but you won’t be surprised to learn that it fell flatter than Wayne Rooney choosing sub-atomic particles as his specialist subject would on Mastermind. No doubt the Beast Of Bolsover would attribute this to his fellow parliamentarians’ sheer shock at his bravado. Actually, from a distance, it just looks like they all wished he had stayed in the Strangers’ Bar with his pork scratchings and his copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Who knows, he may have finished it back up in Derbyshire by the time you read this.
Be in no doubt that despite the tepid reaction to Cleverly’s Mrs Merton tribute, and all these other parliamentary comedic missteps, it won’t be long before another MP has a go at turning rich comedic meat into mechanically separated dogma. Who’s next? My money is on Rachel Reeves to mimic Baldrick with the phrase ‘I have a cunning plan’ at the next Budget dispatch. Why? Well, it’s decades out of date, is spoken by an idiot and won’t have any meaningful effect on anyone under 40. Perfick!
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