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

9 August 2008

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

Despite always occupying the seat next to Paul Merton reserved for the programme’s stooges — Marshall-Andrews called it ‘the seat of death’ — he always gives as good as he gets. In other words, he always manages to avoid becoming a victim of satire by very clearly siding with the satirists.

So, despite his apparent born-again loyalty, here’s what he said when I asked him, in the interview proper, about Gordon Brown. ‘Gordon is a good man, and in some ways a great man, but a very flawed one. He has every single Shakespearean tragic flaw: there’s the years of angst-ridden jealousy, like Othello; fatal indecision, like Hamlet; futile rage, like Lear; and he surrounds himself with completely inappropriate people, like Brutus.’ Now that’s a good gag by anyone’s standards, even though Simon Hoggart later told me that Marshall-Andrews had left out the punch-line: ‘But at least we’ve finally got rid of Lady Macbeth!’ But better still, he told it on the record, loudly, in a crowded restaurant and with Brown’s capo regime Charlie Whelan sitting within easy earshot two tables away, barking loudly the alternative punch-line, ‘And I haven’t even mentioned Charlie Whelan!’

True, he then described Brown’s commitment to eradicating poverty, and tried to mitigate the inevitable damage the joke would cause by saying that great men have flaws, which is why Shakespeare wrote tragedies about them. Likewise, getting back to Miliband, when Marshall-Andrews and I had dinner a few months ago, he described the possible next leader of the Labour party with deadly and concise precision as ‘gap year’.