Status Anxiety | 18 April 2009

Armando Iannucci’s satirical movie about New Labour is a tribute to the Iron Lady

It is the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election victory on 4 May and, not surprisingly, the tributes have already begun to pour in. Most of these are from the usual suspects, but I was pleased to see that Armando Iannucci has joined the ranks of those paying their respects. Not that he meant to, of course. But his latest project — a satirical film about politics called In The Loop — turns out to be an unintentional paean to the Iron Lady.

As fans of The Thick of It will know, Iannucci is an astute observer of life in the New Labour bunker. The BBC4 sitcom has been hailed as the 21st century’s answer to Yes Minister, with Downing Street spin doctors taking over from Whitehall mandarins as the people pulling the strings behind the scenes. The star of the show is Malcolm Tucker, a thinly veiled caricature of Alastair Campbell, played with venomous relish by Peter Capaldi. Billed as the Prime Minister’s press co-ordinator, Tucker possesses the same magus-like powers as Sir Humphrey Appleby, except the velvet glove has been stripped away and all that remains is the iron fist. Whereas Sir Humphrey would bamboozle his victims with elegant obfuscations, Tucker eviscerates them with verbal abuse. His nickname is ‘the enforcer’.

The running gag in The Thick of It is that spin always trumps reality. Jim Hacker’s place is taken by Hugh Abbot, the hapless Secretary of State for Social Affairs, and he needs to be constantly reminded by Tucker that his sole responsibility as a member of the government is to make the Prime Minister look good. Abbot may labour under the illusion that it is his managerial skill and mastery of detail that qualifies him for a Cabinet position, but in Tucker’s eyes he’s nothing more than a glorified PR man — and an incompetent one at that.