On last Sunday’s BBC politics show, presenter Laura Kuenssberg spoke to the energy secretary, Grant Shapps. On this occasion Shapps manifested as himself, rather than as one of the many false identities he used to inhabit when promoting his internet business. I always find Shapps’s appearances as himself uncomfortable, a bit like when Mike Yarwood used to say “and this is me!” at the end of his impressionist shows and then sing an old jazz standard in a weird American accent while squinting and waving his hands. Like Yarwood, Shapps himself seems more improbable than the people he pretended to be.
Because to me Shapps will always be Michael Green. Or Sebastian Fox. Or, proving Shapps a pioneer of now-commonplace gender fluidity, Corinne Stockheath, a name so blandly insane that, I will never tire of pointing out, no one else ever had it. Ever. Come on everyone! Sing it!! “One Corinne Stockheath! There’s only one Corinne Stockheath! One Corinne Stockheath! There’s only one Corinne Stockheath!”
Bland Insanity. It sounds like the name of a cruise ship covers band staffed entirely by any Conservative MPs that survive the Mexican standoff of this currently collapsing Conservative government. And One Corinne Stockheath is the song they would play for the slow dance at the end of the evening. The environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, steps up to the mic to perform the spoken word section over Shapps’s gently undulating flamenco guitar and declares: “With the poor people of the Earth will I share my fate. The streams of the mountains are more pleasing to me than the sea.” Are they, Thérèse? Is it because they haven’t got all those huge chods of human faeces you’re responsible for floating in them, Thérèse? Bland insanity!
While Kuenssberg nodded like a toy bulldog bobblehead on the back shelf of an economic family car, Shapps cranked in mentions of all the usual decontextualised bullet points: “Stop the boats”, “Jeremy Corbyn”, “Just Stop Oil”. And then he lied, of course, this time justifying the naked cronyism of the liar Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list, a document so bent and slippery it is to be used as a bobsleigh track at the next Winter Olympics. Gordon Brown also had a resignation honours list, apparently, according to the man of a thousand faces and one ride-on lawnmower. It was yet another example of Tories using the standard Billy Bunter defence. “Boris Johnson didn’t steal your cake Jenkins, and anyway, Gordon Brown stole your cake as well.”
Kuenssberg sat quietly through Shapps’s lie, either through ignorance or compliance. But Gordon Brown didn’t have a resignation honours list. He had a dissolution honours list, which honoured people from all parties, rather than just honouring Tories who had eaten jelly and ice-cream in No 10 during lockdown, and then vomited it up the walls in front of the cleaners’ badly paid faces and tried to lie about it.
Luckily the great British public were on hand to help the BBC they cherish maintain its reputation for accuracy and unbiased political coverage, and many politics mavens rang in to correct the record. The surprise is that anyone interested in politics would still be watching any BBC news coverage anyway. If it’s shameless, right-leaning political bias you’re looking for, GB News does it much better, and if you’re interested in facts and analysis, there are dozens of liberal commentators on social media far better equipped for the job than anyone at the BBC. And some of them do cool swearing too. And if you’re interested in the exact point where political passion ferments into a kind of furious, blackly comic despair, there’s always James O’Brien on LBC. It can only be a form of cruelty, or masochism, that draws us back to Kuenssberg, like sick voyeurs, wondering what kind of contortions she will concertina herself into this week to avoid outright criticism of the Conservatives, a limbo dancer wriggling under a wooden clothes horse, each rung bedecked with transcripts of Johnson’s well-documented lies.
Kuenssberg reacted with patronising condescension to those who called in to help her out of the hole her unfamiliarity with the subject she was discussing had allowed her to fall into, stating live on air: “For all you political pub quiz champions out there, Grant Shapps said that Gordon Brown had a ‘resignation honours list’. In fact he had a ‘dissolution honours list’, which actually gave awards to members of all political parties. We like to make nerds happy on a Sunday morning, so that clarification is something you can entertain your friends and relatives with throughout the day.” Oooh! Someone needs to change their duvet to a lighter tog!
Frankly, the public deserve better than to be sneered at by Kuenssberg, whose inane Sunday morning show title sequence makes her look like an estate agent trying to sell a wealthy buyer a luxury home made out of scribbles. The BBC’s failure to hold the leave campaign to account for its lies in the run-up to Brexit was surely one of the factors that has now led the country into economic and environmental disaster, and a public broadcaster doing its job of questioning potential PMs properly would never have seen the self-serving liar Boris Johnson anywhere near the door of No 10, let alone attending an Abba party in a flat upstairs while hundreds of thousands died. Allegedly. If expecting the BBC to be fair and accurate makes me a nerd, then knit me a tank top, shine up my NHS specs, array my Dungeons & Dragons characters in order of hit points, pour me a foaming real ale, and number me nobly among those nerds!
Basic Lee is on tour, including six dates at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in June and July, and a fun-size ™ ® version of the show at the Stand’s New Town theatre, Edinburgh, 11-20 August
