The Thick Of It (3)

The political satire The Thick Of It finished last night (only three episodes were made). Once again the television comedy-drama captured cogently an insider’s view of how power is exercised and controlled at the highest levels of the government machine. Laughter is supposed to be based on fear (laughter being a mild hysterical reaction to the things that we are secretly afraid of), and in showing us the incompetence, the bullying, and the interpersonal terror that characterises the office of an average government Minister, the authors have, with great skill, created images that are both funny and frightening.

Last night’s episode related to the controversial ownership of a flat by the Minister (echoing the controversies over Peter Mandelson’s purchase of a flat in Notting Hill Gate and Cherie Blair’s speculative purchase of flats in Bristol). The overweight Bunty-type female civil servant character (expertly played by Joanna Scanlan) came to the fore, undermining her boss in a variety of subtle ways - sweetly enquiring whether a journalist from the Daily Mail would like coffee and biscuits (while at the same time deliberately holding the door to the office open so that the journalist can hear the government “enforcer” shouting and swearing at the Minister); demoralising the Minister’s team by wittily suggesting the tabloid headline “flat-gate” should be renamed “Notting-Hill-Gate-gate”; making secret calls to her pals in the rest of Whitehall to spread the news of the Minister’s expected demise and chortling with glee as she told them how sad it was.

There was a correlation to the fictional in-fighting of The Thick Of It when on the Today Programme this morning John Humphreys interviewed the improbably named Lord Adonis. This unelected friend of Tony Blair’s has been elevated to the House of Lords (by Prime Ministerial directive) and from there eased into a government post as a junior Minister at the Department of Education (where he acts as Tony Blair’s “enforcer”, breathing down the neck of his boss Education Secretary Ruth Kelly). John Humphreys questioned him very carefully about his relations with Ruth Kelly, but was unable to make much headway.