Roll up, roll up for politics in Pantoland
GREAT news: pantomime is more popular then ever, with millennials joining their parents to visit Widow Twankey and ticket income grossing more than £60million, the highest figure on record. Is panto on the way out? Oh no it’s not!
Even the snowflake generation seems to be forgetting its wokeness and laughing at pantomime dames and principal boys. Mind you, given its obsession with transgender issues, maybe all that cross dressing and gender confusion is right up its street.
But should we be surprised? Sometimes it feels as if the whole of public life has turned into one giant panto. Just look at our Prime Minister, a bit of a Dick Whittington if ever there was one: opportunist, Mayor of London and the self-styled reincarnation ofWinston Churchill.
Boris has based his entire career on a persona that is not strictly accurate: bumbling and disorganised, whereas in reality he’s razor sharp and on the button.And like all great panto characters, he has the feel-good factor. Does he make us feel better? Oh yes he does!
Every panto needs a villain: step forward the Leader of the Opposition. He’s behind you! It’s tempting to cast him as Red Riding Hood’s Wolf, but the lupine one did actually display some semblance of sentient intelligence, which Corbyn never has done.
Better perhaps to see him as one of Snow White’s seven dwarfs, Dopey, with John McConnell as the Wicked Stepmother. He really does need to take another look in that magic mirror.
Labour’s handsome prince who saves the show is yet to be cast. John Bercow and Diane Abbott make a fine pair of
Ugly Sisters, while Theresa May is Mother Goose. Look at the booming state of the economy: someone, somewhere laid a golden egg.
On which note Sajid Javid is shaping up as a good Jack And The Beanstalk, with Len McCluskey as the evil giant, who would wish to undo the prosperity Jack and the Tories have wrought.
The PM’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds can be Goldilocks, with their dog Dilyn playing the triple role of the three bears. Not totally sure than Chicken Licken, that doommongering avian, is a pantomime character, but if it isn’t, it should be and no one is more suited to the part than Greta Thunberg.
Another not strictly panto role is John Major, as the Ghost of Christmas Past. Sadiq Khan is Peter Pan, a boy who lives in fairyland and has never grown up.
Nigel Farage, who never quite got the girl in the form of electoral success, is Buttons, while Cinderella herself is the whole of the British people, waiting to be rescued from the ashes of the past three years of stalemate, bringing us back to Boris, now promoted to handsome prince.
All the world’s a stage? You said it, mate, but a farcical one, although there’s not much in the theatre that could outdo the farce of our recent politics. And here we shall bow out with a truly excellent pantomime joke:
Lord Chamberlain: I hear eggs are going up again.
Dame: That’ll surprise a few chickens.
Oh please yourselves.