When Blair had more front than Wonderbra
QUENTIN LETTS
SIMON HOGGART published this collection of parliamentary sketches not long before his death in January, aged 67. They thus acquire a melancholy tint which somehow sits well with their rueful humour.
Simon wrote sketches for The Guardian. As such, he was my counterpart and companion for many years.
He was less ruthlessly Left-wing than his newspaper and had a fondness for some of the more gamey Tories. It was Simon who turned Lichfield’s wig-wearing Michael Fabricant into a national monument. Had he known how much satisfaction this would eventually give the maddening Fabricant, I’m not sure he would have done it.
It was also Simon, this book suggests, who invented the celebrated joke about sex-mad Steve Norris MP. Mr Norris, who had something like five girlfriends on the go, was a Transport Minister. In a classic fantasy, Simon imagined that the minister had simply taken his departmental duties to their logical conclusion and declared, like a cockney bus conductor: ‘Room for one more on top, dearie.’
Although he sketched occasionally in the Thatcher years, Simon really got going (no jokes about Edwina Currie, please) under John Major. This book’s strongest passages come from that time. He catches the seedy decay of the Conservative Party of that era and you sense it offended him, not on grounds of sexual morality (he was no monk), but on account of the political ineptness and posturing.
Hypocrisy irked him. When Michael Portillo made that ‘SAS’ speech to a foot-stamping 1995 Tory conference about how no one should be allowed to change their mind about defence, Simon’s next sentence ran: ‘This diatribe from someone who was such a pacifist in his youth that he refused to join the school cadet corps.’ Target destroyed.
Reporting a nasty antigay speech by Lord Ashbourne, who had noted approvingly that the Book of Leviticus called homosexuality ‘an abomination’, Simon calmly murmured: ‘The trouble with quoting Leviticus is that it does cast its net rather wide — the same text forbids us from eating lamb and recommends that we sacrifice turtle doves as a means of expiating our sins.’
Simon was brilliant on John Prescott, and this collection has a couple of peerless sketches on Prescott shredding the English language.
Absent, surprisingly, are the sketches in which he so often described the frog in Iain Duncan Smith’s throat (he even gave it a name). Nor, disappointingly, do we find much evidence of Simon’s long feud with Tony Benn.
Sketchwriters must tread a line between indignation and glibness, and Simon was never in danger of being indignant — hard though we were all pushed in that direction by Tony Blair. He saw through Blair’s falseness, and in 1998 compared a Blair speech to a Wonderbra — ‘creating a marvellous appearance with the minimum of raw material’.
Yet he never really went for the Old Fettesian fraud’s throat. Non-Lefties will, nonetheless, find plenty to amuse and enlighten them in this splendid book. The value of re-reading old sketches is made clear when, in a 1994 sketch, we see the young Mr Blair saying: ‘I would expect ministers in a government I lead to resign if they lied to Parliament.’ Ha!
‘The Lib Dems resemble the pigs in Animal Farm’