I miss them already. The factions, the vendettas, the Machiavellian jockeying for pathetic scraps of power as a dying Labour government wastes its last days in office. I'm talking, of course, about the assorted villains and hapless timeservers in Armando Iannucci's satirical TV show The Thick of It. New Labour may have earned its fall, but Malcolm Tucker deserved to go on forever.
In fact, his real-life counterpart Alastair Campbell also deserves to continue (and is doing so) as a national entertainer. I was in a book festival audience last autumn to see Campbell interviewed about his diaries. The third word he said was "dogshit", in describing the "dogshit-coloured seats" of Tony Blair's election tour bus. He also did an impersonation of Peter Mandelson throwing a punch.
Anyway ... back to fiction. The Thick of It portrayed New Labour in decline, and a Conservative Party obsessed with rebranding itself as nice and cuddly. The fourth series that was commissioned last year will presumably follow Cameron's cutiepies into office and the unexpected addition of Lib Dems in government.
But will it work? Satire feeds on winners, on antiheroes who succeed. New Labour was a tremendously successful political project for a long time. It won election after election, even after going to war. It was a force to be reckoned with – and over the years, anger brewed both left and right at what seemed a postmodern government of surface effects, divorced from truth. The Thick of It captured the last years when the glittering facade broke and became risible.
But there was a rich accumulation of material. Nick Clegg does not need to be mocked by comic writers – he has been mocked by reality, transformed in months from idol to student hate figure. Something similar is surely about to happen to his coalition partners. David Cameron's "big society" dream is disconcertingly similar to the ludicrous "fourth sector initiative" that a doomed DoSAC minister unveiled in The Thick of It – a bizarrely pretentious construct that seems utterly unrelated to any British social reality whatsoever.
But wait. The fictional fourth sector vision was a desperate measure in the last days of a tired government. The "big society" is Cameron's opening shot. Meanwhile Osborne blamed the December economic contraction on bad weather. These are not grand comic villains; they are too third-rate. Where is Alan B'stard when comedy needs him?
New Labour fuelled satire with its apparent victory of style over substance, spin over reality. Malcolm Tucker turned reality upside down with hilariously dark brilliance. But the British political scene is not funny any more.
