At one point in this collection of her Guardian columns, Marina Hyde devises a little allegorical tableau in which Chris Grayling pummels “the pulped corpse of Satire” with a hammer. It was Grayling who as a minister bestowed a £13.8m ferry contract on a firm that had no ferries, then wangled £100,000 a year for himself as an occasional adviser to a ports company. True, the career of such a nincompoop defies parody, but have our incompetent rulers really become immune to ridicule? No, indeed they have not, for in the sulphur-tongued, sabre-toothed person of Hyde, satire bites back.
She is, quite simply, lethally funny. Over the six years covered in the book, she repeatedly annihilates Boris Johnson with epithets and aphorisms as her weapons, then kicks his cadaver back to life for further torment. She begins by pursuing him through a mythical underworld, reciting spells that cast him as a hapless figure from Narnia, Star Wars and Game of Thrones: by turns he is a “wildly miscast Aslan”, a “gelatinous Sith” and a “blobby Cersei Lannister”. She suspects him of trying to evade detection by metamorphosing into his dog, Dilyn, which starts to perform frottage on the lower legs of random passersby. Next, she slices Johnson down the middle and has him “play Henry V to his own Falstaff”, a patriotic leader who is a seedy libertine under the skin. Elsewhere, she sets him on a squishy plinth as “third prize in a competition to build Winston Churchill out of marshmallows”. At last she simply junks him, sneering that the affected disarray of his dress makes him look like “a fly-tipped sofa”.
Despite that dismissal, Johnson has electromagnetically tugged the entire country into his needy ego: Hyde, in one of her wildest conceits, defines him as a “blond black hole”. As “Britain’s id”, he is also the sump into which our worst instincts have drained. But this dank bog is the source of Hyde’s metaphors, which bubble up with effervescent bravura. Liz Truss, I fear, will prove less poetically fecund.
Hyde’s riffs crackle with the adrenaline rush of a live gig. They are also electrified, like a hot-wired car, by the sudden ignition that happens in her brain as apparently disparate ideas bump together and strike sparks. One column deals with the “involuntary celibacy” of unattractive men who turn to violence as a way of venting their frustration; citing Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, Hyde improvises a hilarious but entirely plausible theory about a market economy where sexual assault is a matter of supply and demand. In a commentary on Brexit, another head-on collision generates a gloriously smutty joke. Why did James Dyson, synonymous with hand-dryers and vacuum cleaners, support leave? Hyde’s answer to the riddle is succinct: it’s because Dyson “basically does things that blow or suck”.
A supremely artful and literally incisive writer, Hyde is aware of the damage words can do. Johnson is rebuked for instructing us to obey rules about social distancing “sedulously”: no one knew what the showy Latinate adverb meant, which licensed him to ignore his own advice. Hyde unearths indecent subtexts in official pronouncements. When Johnson scoffed that sending Trident to sea without nuclear missiles would mean that “the whole country’s firing blanks”, was he bragging that the virile UK was capable of impregnating the world?
In a different mood, she writes anguished elegies for Jo Cox and Sarah Everard, and indignantly commiserates with the Post Office employees who were prosecuted because of faults in a computer system imposed by their bosses. Despite its uproarious humour, this book is an inquest on a period when the country voluntarily diminished and degraded itself. Hyde makes no predictions about the future, but remains astonished by the speed of the recent decline. Her title asks a question and then, by adding an exclamation mark, refuses to give an answer. All she knows, she says at the end, is that things may get even worse. In response to that, I can only quote her column about the sleaze-tainted decision to hold this year’s World Cup in Qatar: there, in a wordless typographic outcry, Hyde transcribes a laugh that advances from sarcastic mockery to cynical despair – “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
• What Just Happened?!: Dispatches from Turbulent Times by Marina Hyde is published by Guardian Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
