For years, British politics has echoed the ludicrous and sometimes concerning storylines of Armando Iannucci’s TV show The Thick of It. Now, with the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, campaigning to become the commander-in-chief, Americans are using the show Veep as proof of the satirist’s gift for prophecy.
So what does Iannucci think about being dubbed the Nostradamus of western politics?
“Well, I knew that was going to happen,” he joked.
Viewership of Veep, which tells the story of Selina Meyer’s never-ending struggle to move up from the vice-presidency, rose by more than 350% this week – with audiences drawing countless parallels between Harris and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character. “Was the HBO show Veep just a documentary filmed in the past about the future?” one X user asked.
Iannucci, who has worked in television satire for decades, points to the cyclical nature of news as a way of predicting what is around the corner.
“If you look at early episodes of [the 80s British sitcom] Yes Minister, it’s all about Europe, cuts, the NHS. These themes don’t go away. Ministerial cockups take the same form again and again and again,” he said.
“Even with fiction, if you’ve got the research right, reality will always shine through,” he added. “When we made Veep we spent a lot of time talking to the vice-president’s office, the west wing, state departments, senators. The actors met their counterparts in Washington. So you get a rough idea of what the terrain is going to be like.”
For the writer, it was just a case of taking real-life occurrences and “pushing it in as stupid a direction as it could go”.
Among the clips and gifs going viral from the series is a scene in which Meyer enters a room and breathlessly informs her closest advisers that the president has decided not to run for a second term. “I’m gonna run for president!” she shrieks to cheers and applause.
Though Iannucci likens Meyer’s vanity and vindictiveness to Donald Trump’s, fans are enjoying comparing Harris’s awkward speeches and delivery style with her fictional counterpart – from her now infamous coconut speech to her slogan: “What can be, unburdened by what has been”.
“I wouldn’t want people to think that Selina was in any way modelled on Harris,” Iannucci said. “But I suppose [the comparisons] are inevitable. They have the same kind of career. Selena was a senator like Harris, and is then plucked from a powerful job into a job that’s frustratingly powerless.”
He said the role of vice-president was determined by the president. “That’s why we chose it as a way into the comedy, because it has that ‘so near and yet so far’ tension.”
During its run on HBO from 2012 to 2019, Veep won 17 Emmys, including three for outstanding comedy series. Iannucci said part of the motivation was to show the “individual human beings inside these big, grand buildings”, who are good at some things and not so much at others.
“We were making the show when Joe Biden was vice-president. Somebody on his team told us: ‘The thing about being vice-president is, one, the vice-president always thinks they can do a better job than the president, and two, the vice-president knows that when they leave a room everyone’s making jokes about them.’
“Al Gore actually told us that he’d found out there was a big Hollywood premiere on at the White House and realised he wasn’t on the list. He couldn’t ask about the list because that might look desperate, so he just made other arrangements.”
Iannucci said he believed many people would now be energised into getting involved in Harris’s campaign and voting because they were “desperate for something different”.
“With social media, we fall into the trap of thinking the loudest person must be the most popular, whereas in fact they’re not,” he said. “Yes, there’s a huge part of America that worships Trump, but there’s also a far larger part that totally abhors him. Now, because a potential way through has emerged, it’s almost like a weight has come off a lot of people’s shoulders.”
He noted that the political landscape had completely shifted since he first began satirising it. Shows such as The Thick of It assumed there was a set of rules to be followed, but scandals such as Partygate had disproved that notion.
“There are no rules. Trump said: ‘I could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue and still get elected’. Trump is an entertainer, Boris Johnson was an entertainer,” he said. “The comedy is coming direct from them, and the best comedians become kind of inquisitors – like John Oliver or Jon Stewart, who just tell you the facts in a funny way.”
Of course, new governments present new opportunities, but Iannucci said it takes time to figure out a new administration’s methodology and tone. As patron of the Child Poverty Action Group, he watched closely this week’s vote on the two-child benefit cap in parliament.
“It’s so frustrating, because everyone knows scrapping the cap is the most effective way to bring the largest number of children out of poverty,” he said.
“The other frustrating thing is you kind of know [Labour] want to scrap it at some stage. It’s great that the issue’s being raised in parliament, but it’s important it doesn’t become a ‘who’s going to blink first’ competition. I don’t want it to become Keir Starmer’s Rwanda, where he sticks with it because he’s been given little room for manoeuvre.”
In US politics, Iannucci hopes Harris – who has previously said she is a fan of Veep – can triumph over Trump in what he calls a “mighty important election”.
While he hasn’t observed Harris up close, he said “we’re about to find out what she’s like, because there’s really nowhere for her to hide”.
