“I feel like Jeremy Corbyn at a rally,” says Ayesha Hazarika, to a sell-out crowd for her first Edinburgh fringe show in a decade. In the intervening period, she was a special adviser to Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband – which she is the first to admit doesn’t look like a great advert for her advice. Now, Hazarika has made a comedy show about her years at the Labour party’s top table, and it’s worth seeing. Yes, her comedic skills are a little rusty. But she is never less than entertaining, and her stories add up to a persuasive cri de coeur for more women – and fewer men named Bob, Tom or Simon – in frontline politics.
After a prologue explaining her “conscious uncoupling” from Corbyn-era Labour, she begins by asserting her right, as a Muslim, Glaswegian graduate of Hull uni to tell stories that are usually the preserve of Oxbridge-educated white men. From training Brown in diversity (he got LGBT confused with BLT, she says) to gate-crashing policy meetings with Harman, Hazarika shows us a party disconnected from large swaths of the population. Nothing wrong with all of these young, well-bred men in their Westminster bubble, of course, but “we need more views than just theirs”. That’s the show’s message, but alongside it there is plenty of straightforward Westminster gossip, often confirming our Thick of It-sponsored prejudices against those who work there.
One scene finds attendees at a Labour strategy meeting furiously texting one another with bitchy comments about who is and isn’t in the room. Another sees Miliband worrying that he looks like a badger. Later, the notorious Ed Stone makes an inevitable appearance.
Hazarika is a jaunty, self-deprecating host, even if – understandably, after 10 years away from comedy – she cleaves tightly to her script, racing from one gag to the next, not risking a pause for laughter. Sometimes, that’s a sensible strategy. Comparing Cameron and Harman’s double act on the remain campaign to Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston, say, or punning on Helmand and Hellman’s mayonnaise, is first-base stuff. You can see the potential of her joke about the tampon tax, Nigel Farage and his desire to make a “rivers of blood” speech, but her stab at it is a bit mangled.
Hazarika’s anecdotes are more successful than her jokes, such as the one about the driver of Harman’s much-criticised pink bus having a panic attack at its press launch. What’s really powerful about the show is the picture Hazarika paints of a political culture, and a Labour party in particular, that’s sexist through and through. A return to politics is likely for this committed Labour operator. In the meantime, Hazarika’s return to standup is also public service, as she shines a now amusing, now appalling light on closed-shop chauvinism in the corridors of British power.
• At the Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh, until 17 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
