Gag joker Johnson
Rashford on the ball as vacuous PM laughs off the nation’s crises
I GET told off for oblique/antiquated references in this column. This is a shame, because this time it’s about comedy and Manchester, and I wanted to start with a Ken Goodwin gag.
It’s a great joke – about a horse that collapses in Piccadilly – but I listen to feedback and jokes from the 70s are strictly off-limits from now on.
It is a shame. I don’t know if you remember Mr Goodwin, who died in 2012, but he was a staple on The Comedians back in the day. Famous for his nervous, stuttering style, but a really good, gentle comedian.
“It’s all in the character, the way I tell the jokes,” he once said, “I’m just Simple Simon. I come over all nervous and shy, and most of the audience is laughing at me before I’ve said a word.”
Which is ideal for a comedy turn – but not what you look for in a Prime Minister. I don’t know if you watched Mr Johnson last week as he took to the stage in Manchester to deliver his set-piece conference performance.
Probably you didn’t. I, once again, had to. There were, to be fair to whoever wrote it, some decent jokes. More than some, in fact. They kept coming.
At that point the horror of it dawned on me – this speech was all jokes.
No policy, no reference to social care, no mention of the brutal universal credit cut his Government had just enacted. Just a 45-minute act that could have been done at a golf club, or a corporate retreat, or the wedding of someone you don’t like. Meantime, a day later and a couple of miles across town, the current Leader of the Opposition, Marcus Rashford, gave a speech of his own as he proudly received an honorary degree from Manchester Uni.
He said: “Yesterday, millions of families across the UK lost a lifeline and a means of staying afloat – a move that could see child poverty rise to one in three children. For that reason, today is bittersweet.” There’s not really any competition any more, is there?
The nature of this PM is beginning to come to the fore. He was never built for crisis. He is a good-time type of guy, and this has not been a good time.
It’s going to get tougher, too. It’s not one of those things you can laugh your way through.
Tired
Whether it dawns on the wider country or not, I’m not sure. He is still odds-on to win the next election but those odds are getting longer with every empty shelf, every Covid death, every cancelled rail project, every flash of Russian money. Christmas, let me tell you, had better be good.
Otherwise, Mr Johnson is going to have to rely on this increasingly tired act to get him through. The misconception is that he’s the type of guy you’d like to have a pint with. Let me tell you: he’s not. To be fair to him, very few politicians are the type of guy you would like to have a pint with.
Ken Goodwin, on the other hand, would have been a joy: “I got on the bus in Manchester the other day and I said to the conductor, ‘Do you stop at the Imperial?’ He said, ‘What – on my money?’” Beautiful.
Last mention of Ken, I promise. But they don’t write them like
that any more.