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.

The Thick of It is never less than entertaining, but what gives it real satirical bite is the implied critique of New Labour. Time and again, Iannucci shows us a government obsessed with managing public opinion to the exclusion of everything else. We never actually see the Prime Minister, but judging from his ‘enforcer’, the only thing that matters to him is his party’s standing in the polls. His raison d’être is to get re-elected. The government does not do any actual governing; it has no discernible ideology. It exists in order to remain in power.

For admirers of Baroness Thatcher, it is impossible to watch an episode of The Thick of It without being reminded of her virtues as a prime minister. She was a conviction politician. Unlike the opinion poll-obsessed characters in The Thick of It, she was not afraid to make unpopular decisions. She charted her course according to a rigid ideology — ‘the lady’s not for turning’ — and the purpose of her government was radically to transform British society. No doubt Iannucci thoroughly disapproves of everything Thatcher stood for, but he cannot deny that she possessed precisely those qualities that the New Labour politicians in The Thick of It lack.

In The Loop, which is released in cinemas this week, is essentially a feature-length episode of The Thick of It. Malcolm Tucker is back, only this time his job is to sex up a dodgy intelligence dossier to provide Britain and the US with the casus belli to declare war on a renegade Middle Eastern state. Much of the film is set in Washington and we see Malcolm Tucker meet his match in the form of a right-wing hawk who is a cross between Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield.

Not only does In The Loop reiterate the critique of New Labour made by The Thick of It, but it underlines just how craven Tony Blair was in his obeisance to George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war. Again, this only serves to remind viewers of Margaret Thatcher’s virtues in contrast to her Labour successors. In the first Gulf war, the relationship between Britain and America was more or less reversed, thanks to the Prime Minister’s force of personality. Under Thatcher, Britain punched above its weight — something that is no longer true, as In The Loop makes clear.

As I say, it cannot have been Armando Iannucci’s intention to make Baroness Thatcher look good. But of all the tributes that will be paid to her in the coming weeks, I doubt any will be as eloquent as his.