‘I’m not an ambassador for New Labour, I’m an MP’

06 August 2008

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In the latest of his occasional series, Martin Rowson talks to Bob Marshall-Andrews, serial Labour rebel who had the entertaining cheek to accuse Miliband of disloyalty

You can see her point. After all, we’ve all come to think of Marshall-Andrews and disloyalty in the same way that we think of horses and carriages or Keats and embarrassment. Like the Bishop of Southwark, it’s what he does, which means that anything else Marshall-Andrews might do is almost beyond analysis. And because the normal rules don’t apply in his case, I can’t tell if his intervention was a joke, or mischief-making, or an attempt to get Miliband on to the backbenches so he can deliver the coup de grace, or what. Still, it’s worth pausing for a moment and essaying a brief deconstruction of Toynbee’s use of punctuation. That defining exclamation mark (the kind you’d use after, say, Herod the Great in a discussion on nursery provision) is pure Marshall-Andrews. Despite his rather squat physiognomy — Simon Hoggart has described him as looking like a cross between Dennis the Menace and Dennis’s dog Gnasher — Marshall-Andrews is almost a walking exclamation mark, like the one at the end of Oklahoma!

This is a cheap way of pointing out that, like the previous subjects of this series, Ann Widdecombe and the Hamiltons, Marshall-Andrews straddles that blurred dividing line between politics and showbiz. All of them have either achieved or augmented fame or notoriety beyond the House of Commons by willingly embracing light entertainment, and all of them have appeared on Have I Got News For You, a programme which can bestow on its guests the mantle of either National Joke or National Treasure, depending on how they cut the mustard. But while Widdecombe freely admits that she plays the media in order to get the widest possible audience for her political programme, and the Hamiltons, more or less by accident, achieved a kind of redemption through comedy, Marshall-Andrews is different.