Insider Dealing

It’s a commonplace these days for satirists and their fans to claim that they have an unnerving ability to know how politicians work behind the scenes. ‘Someone from No. 10 said, “How on earth do you get it spot-on, every time? It’s uncanny.”’ For instance, some years ago Rory Bremner was playing Tony Blair. There was a bowl of fruit on the set, so he picked up an apple and started munching. Apparently Blair (I’m sure you remember him; tall chap, rather unnerving smile) did the same thing in real life, and this convinced the ever paranoid team in Downing Street that there was a mole spying on them. Bremner insists that there wasn’t; eating an apple just seemed the logical thing to do.

Likewise, the people behind The Thick of It, which came back for a one-off special this week (BBC4, Tuesday) called Spinners and Losers. They like to say how awestruck the real apparatchiks are by their astoundingly accurate portrayal of behind-the-scenes politics — even if, they claim, the reality is even worse than the show.

Well, maybe so. And TTOI is very funny, as is pretty well everything Armando Iannucci does. And it has become the long-sought British West Wing, in that the politics is much smaller, much angrier, much less visionary. Nobody in TTOI was ever inspired by anything anyone said. They all hold each other in mutual contempt, and they’re all right. There never could be a British copy of West Wing because the characters in the White House keep striding and striding — and as they stride they talk. If you did any striding in Downing Street you’d hit the wall in two steps and that offensive zinger you’d been preparing for the last half-second would be delivered through broken teeth.