Panto Politics

Frank Cottrell Boyce

THERE is a great moment in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves in which the Sheriff's men burst into Maid Marian's house and take her prisoner. They do it easily because she is on her own. Now I'm not an expert on medieval living conditions, but I do know that the Lady of the Manor did not stay in on her own. There would be pigs, cattle, serfs, the odd mendicant perhaps. The bourgeoisie, however, have a marvellous capacity to imagine that everyone is just like them (or ought to be, or would like to be). This is at the root of the attacks on the current royal family.

It must be baffling for Charles to find himself being reviled and hated for being exactly the sort of husband his father and his father's father had been all the way back to Odin (the House of Windsor claims descent from the Norse gods). But this is the age of John Major's 'invulnerable suburbs', and being descended from a one-eyed Viking deity with an eight-legged flying horse will not cut any ice with Peter Lilley.

The confrontation between a reactionary government and a blokeishly liberal single-parent monarch provides the setting for To Play The King, the BBC series which continues the story of Francis Urquhart, the wicked whip who murdered his way to Number 10 in House of Cards. Like anyone else, I love an evil genius. The trouble with this one is that compared to our present PM, Urquhart is Pollyanna.

Urquhart topped a Tory journalist - barely a crime at all to right-thinking people - and now he is haunted by the memory. Faced with a vote of confidence in the Commons, Major stitched up a deal with the Unionists that plunged Northern Ireland into an orgy of violence. He didn't do it for England, didn't do it for the Conservative Party. He did it just for himself, a little treat, to save moving his woollies out of Number 10. Somehow, I don't think he wakes up screaming 'Greysteel!'. I don't think he even wakes up screaming 'Shankill!'. I think he probably sleeps rather well. Where Urquhart skilfully covers the traces and hides the evidence, Major did all this in public, on TV. Real evil is shameless and banal.

Part of the fun of To Play The King is Urquhart's trick of making asides to the camera. It's cribbed from Olivier's Richard III but it plays more like panto, with Ian Richardson as a kind of George Sanders' Uncle Abenazar. Like all pantos it has a good king and a princess (Urquhart is the scheming grand vizier who wants to bring down the dim but decent king by using the selfish princess). It has the naughtiness of panto, too. Part of the pleasure of watching it is the cheeky way it plays with the fact that we all know who we are talking about. The 'fat princess' is a bit of a goer who happily sells her story to the papers. We all know who it is supposed to be, so when we see her inviting the editor of a national newspaper to soap her down in the bath we titter knowingly. I can't comment further as I might get sued.

The story also has a childish simplicity. Where the previous series showed Urquhart pulling the strings of the Old Boys' club like a virtuoso, here it's just a case of blackmail and counter-blackmail. Urquhart's victim called him 'daddy' and his arch references to 'putting the whip about' smack loudly of the nursery. The blackmail plots themselves have an 'Oooh - Ahh! Pee Po Belly Bum Drawers' quality. And this is the real source of the series' power. It has put its finger precisely on the raging infantilism of British political culture. If Thatcher was a nanny, then Major is a sneaky, ingratiating prefect, the first important political figure you could easily picture in a pair of grey shorts, a man who looks like he has just wet himself. And his great debating weapon? Shouting 'Oh yes, Oh yes, Oh yes' till the heckling stops. Just like panto. In fact panto is probably the only dramatic form in which you could talk about modern party politics.

Francis Urquhart has glamour and the aura of intelligence. My only complaint about the series is that I cannot imagine anyone so obviously impressive going into politics any more. I can see him as the head of a publishing conglomerate or the World Bank. But it seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to run Great Britain. The character was believable as an eminence grise fixing the Westminster Boys' Club, but once he is prime minister what does he do? What are his policies? The series is silent on the subject. It is taken up instead with a personality clash with the Prince.

This is exactly what happened at the last election of course. Given the opportunity to make a political decision, the Great British public lost its bottle. Then as soon as the election was over, it flung all its energy into bad-mouthing the royal family. It was a kind of displaced political discourse, a way of making angry noises without having to take the consequences, of booing the villain, safe in the knowledge that he was just a bloke in a daft costume.

What would it be like to have Urquhart as leader? I don't know. Mainstream politics has atrophied to such a degree that it has become impossible to imagine what a clever politician - even a wicked one - would do. Like John Major, we all know how to get power but do we really know what to do with it?

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