Now that all politicians are basically regarded as Die Hard villains firing bazookas at anyone without a Coutts account, it’s easy to forget that you – yes even you, there, with that face – can book an appointment with your MP. MPs’ surgeries, which sound both terrifying and stunningly dull at the same time, are weekly powwows between MPs and Joe and Jolene public. During them, constituents air grievances while sitting on distressingly cheap office furniture. It’s democracy in almost entirely actionless action.
Well-intentioned obs-doc MPs: Behind Closed Doors follows three at their respective surgeries. There’s Labour’s Naz Shah, MP for Bradford West, reinstated to the party following a suspension for antisemitic posts; there’s North East Somerset MP and plummy poster-boy for Toryism Jacob Rees-Mogg; and, presumably due to it being the only TV series he was offered that didn’t involve eating wallabies’ nipples in close proximity to Ant and Dec, Sheffield Hallam MP and former deputy PM Nick Clegg. I’d say “how the mighty have fallen” but only half of it would be true.
Constituents’ concerns range from the bizarre – one assures Rees-Mogg he’s discovered a weaponised computer virus – to the all-too-real: a mother tells Shah her son’s learning difficulties make schooling impossible. Shah’s straight on the blower to the local director of social services, who’s going to look into it. Sorted. It shows the system works, if you can convince a parliamentarian to yell at it for you.
You’d imagine Clegg would loathe facing a public whom he – through inaction, inability or inclination – is seen as having betrayed. In the coalition government, he often resembled someone trying to depict a limp handshake through the medium of interpretive dance. Yet he’s good at this local politics lark. People come, he listens, he helps, they thank him, they leave. As one constituent, Mitch, puts it: “I didn’t get no reptilian vibes off of Nick Clegg.”
The Mitch lizard test, however, would be flunked by Rees-Mogg, whose poshness can be neatly quantified by the oft-repeated anecdote that he once dropped his monocle in a trifle at a university party. His constituents regard him with fascination, and he them: two entirely discrete social strata on a mutual safari. At one point, he’s asked if people are surprised he’s human. “The gift of seeing one’s self as others see one is a very great one,” he muses, inexplicably, as if to prove beyond doubt he’s an alien from the planet Blarx. He seems nice enough, if clueless about life for anyone who can’t trace their lineage back to the Domesday Book. But, as with the others, he demonstrably only wants to do the best by his electorate. Even if that’s by simply listening to a woman deconstruct every one of his pro-Brexit arguments using fact and logic. Rees-Mogg politely rejects both.
This isn’t deft documentary film-making by any means, and John Prescott as narrator sounds as if he’s generally baffled by anything without gravy on it. But, by Channel 5’s standards, it’s restrained, borderline-BBC stuff, showing that much of an MP’s day-to-day is public service in a very literal sense. You end up warming to each of them, which is all well and good, but it’s… a bit boring, isn’t it? We need something to rail against. We need Die Hard villains. But don’t worry, there’s something you can do: book an appointment with your MP now, right now, and have a bloody good whinge about it.
MPs Behind Closed Doors is on Monday, 9pm, Channel 5
