A Very Social Secretary

On Monday evening I watched A Very Social Secretary about the antics of former Home Secretary David Blunkett (who embarked upon an extra-marital affair with Kimberly Quinn, publisher of the Spectator magazine, then fell out with her in a public and acrimonious exchange so ferocious that it compelled his resignation and “disgrace” – except that no government minister is ever really disgraced since they have no concept of shame).

The drama was very well acted, and moved at a breathtaking pace, cramming so much into ninety minutes that you felt compelled to say Stop, this is incredible, you are straining credulity to its limits…

However, the sense of pantomime, the idea that this was all farce and comedy (helped along by a jolly musical score) was tempered by regular and sickening moments when you realised that yes, all these things did happen, this is the way in which government ministers behave.

It was a very lavish production, with a fine cast and multiple locations, the performance being more a series of linked tableau rather than a continuous narrative. Thus you had the government minister indulging his hanky-panky in a cottage borrowed from the grandest duchess in the land (with whom he is apparently on first name terms); you had the Prime Minister lolling around a luxurious villa borrowed from Italian royalty (what was the basis of this grace-and-favour transaction one wondered?); you had the foul-mouthed and bullying special advisor (little more than a vicious canine himself) compelled to take the minister’s guide-dog for a walk.

Some of the sketches were very lightly drawn (Carole Caplan, the Rasputin of the Blair administration, was seen in the gentlest of cameos, helping the Prime Minister’s wife on with a white cardigan). Some of the more intriguing aspects of the affair were hardly touched upon (the Bristol flats hypocrisy, the fast-track citizenship for personal nannies scandal etc). The drama seemed to entirely ignore the issue of motivation…

...until you realised, right at the end of the comedy, that the issue of motivation was beyond the remit of the play. How clever the author/producer/director have been! They were able to get away with such an outrageous portrayal of an eminent politician simply by paring down the succession of incidents to only those words and actions already verified by being in the public domain. The comedy and the tragedy was underlined by the horrible realisation that it was all true.

The show ended at 10.30 and I switched over to watch Newsnight, which marks the end of my day just as the Today Programme marks the beginning, these two news programmes acting as the alpha and omega of my weekday world.