Laughter from the Gallery

This is an amiable book. The parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart, also the wine correspondent of this magazine, for which he drinks as selflessly as Zorba the Greek, has set out to record anecdotes that have amused and appalled him in the course of his long professional life. He also throws in some, mainly Jewish, jokes whenever the mood takes him, so at times this reads like one of those gag books that professional comedians lose, then loudly appeal in the press for the return of, but it is none the worse for that. This is a book you are meant to read, put down, read, and put down. It is very readable.

But one thing it isn’t is an autobiography. Hoggart, on whose own life these stories and personalities are threaded, is little more than a shadowy, often disapproving presence as he watches safely from behind rocks (in his case the Parliamentary Press Gallery) the public figures he has been obliged to write about. His reaction tends to be, ‘My dear, the noise, and the people.’

As he says, nothing quite like the British parliamentary sketchwriter exists, or has existed, anywhere else in the world, for this is a man who every day has to mock his legislature. I suppose the nearest equivalents would be the court jester or that strange being who stood in the triumphal chariot breathing ‘All life is grass, mush’ into the ear of a laurel-crowned Roman emperor, and God knows how far they dared go. There are just five sketchwriters left now, brooding on Michael Fabricant’s wig and John Prescott’s syntax (and brain), and — this I didn’t know — theirs has been such a little day. Irreverence came so late to the species that, when the old Guardian sketchwriter Harry Boardman published his selected columns after the war, the book, without a breath of irony, appeared under the title The Glory of Parliament.