Nothing else in this world or the next could bring these two together, other perhaps than history’s most esoteric fancy dress party, but tonight Alastair Campbell and the late Mary Whitehouse will be united in a synchronised sigh of relief when the final episode of The Thick of It concludes on BBC2.
While one will be thrilled to see the back of his satirical alter ego Malcolm Tucker, the other will thank the Lord at whose right hand she surely sits for the demise of the sweariest show yet transmitted. The only programme ever to feature the title “Swearing Consultant” in its closing credits, Armando Iannucci’s brutal dissection of modern ministerial life will be fondly remembered for more than its inspired use of obscenity. It charted the fetid and fiascoid underbelly of government with as acute an ear and sharp an eye as its spiritual dam Yes Minister in the Eighties. What changed in the years between the elegantly cunning Sir Humphrey Appleby and the inventively profane Tucker, played with ineffable brilliance by Peter Capaldi, had nothing to do with the nature of politicians. In both, the ministers were barely distinguishable archetypes of spineless incompetence, dragged along like jellyfish by the undercurrents of Westminster life. What changed, after the advent of New Labour in 1997, was the power structure of Whitehall.
In Yes Minister, Jim Hacker’s special adviser was an irrelevant bit-part player, outwitted and sidelined with ease by the omnipotent Sir Humphrey. By the time The Thick of It arrived as an instant cult classic in 2005, the Rolls-Royce Civil Service in which he was the Phantom VI had been downgraded to a Ford Cortina by the rise of the Campbellian superpropagandist.
The distinction went deeper than any contrast in linguistic styles, plain enough though that was: where Sir Humphrey would answer a knock with a genteel “Enter, dear lady”, Tucker’s most memorable response of the kind was: “Come the f--- in, or f--- the f--- off.” But along with this progression from the mannered verbosity of the Oxbridge high table to the testosterone-fuelled diatribes of the Premier League dressing room, Iannucci noticed a more sinister development. It was hardly an opaque one, but he was the first to crystallise, for a satire-starved TV audience, that the true art of government was no longer governing, but appearing to govern. The medium had become the message, as Marshall McLuhan foresaw, and manipulating the media into parroting the party line the paramount concern.
The pen is not mightier than the sword, which is why insurgents so seldom prosecute revolutions with the Biro. But satire, which ever since the Aristophanic balloon-phallus has always tended toward the engagingly vulgar, can certainly wound. One of the many gratifying things about The Thick of It was Mr Campbell’s resentment, however hard he tried to disguise it in the transparent cloak of weary aloofness, at being unveiled as a comic grotesque – a psychotic tribal-loyalist clown trying to convince himself that he was driven by noble intentions rather than what he once knew (though not of himself) as psychological flaws.
In the usual way of those particularly adept at dishing it out, he did not like it up him. A few months ago, he couldn’t contain the rancour, and challenged Iannucci on the latter’s home pitch of wit when he accepted a birthday honour from the Queen. “So
@AIannucci OBE joins the Establishment he claims to deride,” he tweeted. “It’s probably more Establishment to order your army to march into other countries for no reason,” replied Iannucci. “Swings and roundabouts.” Magnificently, though the war was already lost, Ali ploughed on towards the valley of death with: “Three little letters can have more impact than you realise.” To which Iannuci’s reply was the lethally laconic: “WMD.”
The series ends with a nod to Campbell’s blackest hour, with a judge-led, Chilcot-style public inquiry (one the alarmingly thin-skinned Lord Leveson has mistaken for a personal affront) investigating the death of a man driven to suicide by a government leak. But as satire so often does (the first instalment of House of Cards, which began with Mrs Thatcher replaced by a weak and anodyne successor, went out a few days before she resigned), The Thick of It pre-empted more than it echoed. A few weeks before George Osborne’s misadventure of last Friday en route to London from Cheshire, for example, an episode featured Opposition leader Nicola Murray mired in a resignation-forcing debacle aboard a train.
If the show lost some of its bite with the arrival of the Coalition, a more omnishambolic but infinitely less malevolent administration than Blairite New Labour, it translated such internecine banalities as the turf war between Steve Hilton’s jargonistic utopianism and the earthier, tabloid-driven approach of Andy Coulson with real skill.
A show that might have been misrouted by the loss of its initial star, Chris Langham, to a conviction for paedophilia ends with the country obsessing about Jimmy Savile, and perhaps the symmetry hints that it is bowing out at the right time. But it never failed to perform the primary functions of political satire – to illuminate for comic effect why the public timelessly holds the political classes in contempt, and to prick the monstrous self-importance of such pustulent boils on the bum of the body politic as Alastair Campbell. It will be sorely missed by a small but loyal audience, and exceedingly hard to replace. Or as Malcolm Tucker, aka the Goebbels of the Gorbals, might prefer it, “If parting is such sweet sorrow… f--- off.”
