Over the past few months, a whole series of “events, dear boy, events” – as Harold Macmillan would have put it – have unfolded which no one could have predicted at the start of the year. The MPs’ expenses scandal has already destroyed a number of parliamentary careers, claimed the scalp of Michael Martin as Speaker of the House of Commons and quite possibly contributed to the election of two British National Party MEPs. The same period has also given us a new popular icon: Susan Boyle.
I was abroad for the final of Britain’s Got Talent, but learned the result on my return via a cartoon in a discarded Sunday newspaper on a train. This depicted Simon Cowell clutching a photo of Gordon Brown and telling Susan Boyle: “One weirdo from a Scottish village is enough”. Ouch.
In the United States, satirist Jon Stewart on the Daily Show subsequently expanded on the parallel, underlining how Brown and Boyle command respect abroad, even as the value of their stock plummeted at home. Certainly, their twin fates tell us something about society and politics in modern Britain.
In 2007, Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed that Britain had fallen out of love with celebrity culture, which was interpreted as a dig at his predecessor’s penchant for hanging around with the rich and famous – especially the rich. Brown’s initial popularity as PM stemmed in part from his anti-glamorous image. When he appeared on television with his face obscured by an autocue, it seemed as if no spin was the new spin. It wasn’t, of course. “Not flash, just Gordon” was the slogan devised by Saatchi and Saatchi, the advertising agency perhaps still best known for its work with the Conservative Party.
When she first came to public attention, Susan Boyle also had an unvarnished quality that initially endeared her to many. And her story was almost too good to be true: a plump, middle-aged church volunteer from an obscure backwater with a bad haircut who claimed she’d never been married or kissed who possessed the voice of an angel. The video clip of her debut performance was watched by millions all over the world. Barack Obama was numbered among her fans.
What happened next was a classic example of the tabloid press reverting to type – building them up to knock them down. A four-letter outburst in a hotel after provocation from a journalist saw the angel’s halo slip. Boyle was beaten in the Britain’s Got Talent final by a teenage dance troupe and checked into the Priory the next day suffering from “stress”.
We live in an age when you can be an overnight success via YouTube or the victim of death by Hotmail. These mechanisms can be a boon or bane, as the Prime Minister discovered with his own YouTube experiment. The ridicule heaped on Brown focussed on his rictus grin trying to pass as an unconvincing smile, but his main YouTube proposals on MPs’ expenses have since been junked. The medium has crowded out the message. The actual policies Brown is pursuing on the economy have actually been pretty successful. Productivity is up, house prices are recovering and there have been fewer repossessions than were initially feared. Some economists are even predicting that Britain may come out of recession as early as the third quarter of this year.
Yet the media prefer to search for Brown’s softer side and this was on display in last Saturday’s much-reported Guardian Weekend interview, which was perhaps the idea of the PM’s new spin-doctor, Simon Lewis, the brother of the Daily Telegraph editor. At one point, proceedings were interrupted by Brown’s two-year-old son Fraser launching into a discussion on Power Rangers.
Politics has come increasingly to resemble a reality TV show – witness the week’s election for a Commons Speaker to replace Martin. Meanwhile, in the more real world of reality TV, we know far more than we need to about the supposedly erratic Susan Boyle and nothing about Diversity, the actual talent show winners. We are fixated by the mindset of Britain’s Got Talent without acknowledging that “Britain’s Got Problems”. The rollercoaster of expenses revelations has hogged the limelight, yet there have been virtually no politics in the entire debate.
Tony Blair had a point with his parting pot-shot at the “feral media”. Yes, the Daily Telegraph has done a public service by publishing the unexpurgated expenses before the whitewash of the blacked-out, official version. However, the relentlessness has resulted in the unedifying spectacle of reporters camped out on disgraced parliamentarians’ doorsteps, looking for any twitch of their net curtains. Surely more important things are going on – such as the global economic crisis and the continued environmental threat to the planet?
If we are still looking for parallels between those two famous Scots, there may be some good news for Gordon Brown. Susan Boyle is on the comeback trail. And, when she has been able to perform, she has been getting some rave reviews. So perhaps we should not close the book on the next general election just yet.
