Home Front Alice Pitman

ONE OF the most memorable features of the golden age of British television comedy in the 1960s and 70s was of the Great Political Feud conducted between members of the same family. In the East End, working-class Tory Alf Garnett was always rowing with his socialist son-inlaw Mike (‘You lazy Scouse git!’). Over in Shepherd’s Bush, socialist Harold and Conservative-voting Albert Steptoe – ‘I ain’t bleeding working class, I’m management’ – were at each other’s throats over whether Ted Heath should be allowed to come for afternoon tea at Oil Drum Lane. So it’s admittedly quite good fun that I now have my very own ideological sitcom featuring Mr Home Front and my brother-in-law George, largely conducted on social media.

When I first met Mr HF getting on for a quarter of a century ago now, he was your typical BBC liberal: a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking journalist investigating miscarriages of justice. Along with squashed packets of Camel cigarettes, cans of Stella Artois and bottles of Frascati stuffed in his tatty old brown canvas shoulder bag, you could always find a well-thumbed copy of one of Thomas Pynchon’s unreadable tomes and the inevitable copy of the Guardian (though I was never convinced he read either with much relish).

Over the years, the booze and fags have been replaced by empty packets of crisps and Marks & Spencer wine gums. The Guardian is long gone; now it’s the Spectator – and, somewhat disconcertingly for a man in his fifties, Viz magazine. The old Paul Foot world view has gradually evaporated (accelerated by the rise of Blair and New Labour) and instead of drifting more to the Left his world view now resembles that of a cross between Rigsby from Rising Damp and David Starkey.

At the moment we keep having political arguments, not because I’m stridently Left wing (politically, I’m a bit like The Fast Show’s Indecisive Dave) but because his unyielding Right-wing stance on everything is so irritating. I have never been very good at political arguments, partly because I end up seeing the merits of both sides, and partly because I can’t be bothered to do

all the homework (or if I do, I go into Stan Laurel mode and forget what I’m saying halfway through the sentence). Whereas Mr HF peppers his speech with impressive but intensely annoying-sounding phrases like ‘the vanity of paternalistic liberalism’ and ‘a quintessentially Marxist intellectual middle-class conceit’. ‘Oh shut up,’ I say, and crossly set about making myself a cup of tea without asking if he wants one too. He will then chortle condescendingly in the manner of an elder Tory statesman on

Question Time, as though to say, ‘Oh you politically naive creature, you have much to learn.’ It gets right on my pip. But scratch away at the surface of Mr HF’S eloquence – as I very often find myself doing on boring car journeys – and the real reason he votes Conservative is revealed when he finally loses his temper with me and shouts, ‘I’m buggered if I’m paying any more tax!’

My brother-in-law George, a proud Corbynite, is so upset by Mr HF’S move to the Right that he now greets us with the mournful demeanour of a man unable to come to terms with a death in the family, or the revelation that Mr HF has recently received a visit from officers working on Operation Yewtree. He sidles up to me and asks, ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know, George,’ I say, ‘you’ll have to take it up with him.’ For the past six months, the two men have been battling it out on Twitter, with brief periods of ceasefire when George gets taken up by his devotion to Fulham Football Club, or Mr HF by cricket. Yet when either one lays down the gauntlet once more, the other gleefully accepts the challenge.

‘And thus concludes the greatest upheaval in parliamentary democracy since the 1832 Reform Act,’ sneered Mr HF after Jeremy Corbyn’s first Commons speech, where he read out questions from members of the public. George fired back: ‘Isn’t it wonderful to find cynicism and sarcasm flourishing in our modern democracy?’ Then Mr HF: ‘I’m not sure reading out requests like

Steve Wright in the Afternoon constitutes the Great Leap Forward.’ And so it goes on. When the whole family get together on Christmas Day, I may have to erect a Steptoe and Son- style divide down the centre of the room. The Aged P will almost certainly be on the blue side, while everyone else will be on George’s. And I’ll be hedging my bets in my usual wishy-washy fashion by plonking myself somewhere between the two.