Mike Leigh

So there I was in Soho Square on a cold and rainy morning, nibbling my complimentary almond croissant and eagerly looking forward to the advance preview of Mike Leigh’s new historical epic Peterloo. This People’s Uprising of 1819, and its brutal suppression by a wealthy, uncaring and out-of-touch metropolitan elite, took place precisely 200 years before we finally leave the EU next year. And thrilling if traumatic times they were too.

‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King… A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field…’ wrote Shelley in some of his most ferocious lines.

So Leigh surely saw Peterloo as a powerful metaphor for our own Brexit revolt —the vote that rang out around the world — and all the other thrilling nationalist, populist uprisings that have taken place since against the ‘old, mad, blind’ corrupt, self-serving and tottering international-liberal order — otherwise known as the Confraternity of St Bono. Bring it on!

But alas, Peterloo is a tedious 150-minute clunker of a movie, so smartly demolished by this magazine’s film critic, Deborah Ross, last week. It even includes that most dismal trope of so many a duff film: when people are particularly miserable, they stand around in the rain without hats on.

Mike Leigh’s man-of-the-people act is, of course, preposterous. He’s almost as much a trusted member of the establishment as the ‘radical’ playwright Sir David Hare. Leigh, OBE, FRSL, is hardly going to celebrate Brexit, is he? Besides, his more recent films generally combine all the sparkling wit and joie de vivre of Ken Loach, with all the incisive political insight of Waffle the Wonder Dog. The only time Leigh has made a good film was when he dropped the predictable politics and gave us his delightful take on Gilbert and Sullivan in Topsy-Turvy.