An opening: if you’ve been following the UK news this last week you won’t have failed to notice the DWP scandal that saw the Government release leaflets about benefit sanctions that featured false testimonials. Said leaflets were awash with remorseful tales from chagrined claimants who’d been shown the error of their ways by a wise, thoughtful ‘work coach’ who is absolutely not disillusioned, incompetent or under desperate pressure to fulfill sanction targets. Unfortunately the testimonials were fake, and the photos of ‘Zac’ and ‘Sarah’ were stock. “They have now been removed,” the DWP assures us, “to avoid confusion”.
In recent days, and as a damage control exercise, events have taken a more bizarre turn.
This isn’t the place for debate about the DWP – suffice to say I spent a few years working for them and saw for myself how the organisation recruits from the bottom of the barrel and how it is dispirited, overly bureaucratic and afraid of its own shadow, and that was before we elected a Tory government. In any event the Left is loving this, if only because it gets to dump on Iain Duncan Smith, and also because it diverts attention away from the political in-fighting that’s going on during its election campaign. (The Labour party is hardly unique in this regard – Louise Mensch’s aborted smear campaign is proof enough – but it is amusing watching Andy Burnham threaten to challenge the result only to get smacked down by Harriet Harman.)
The last time they had a leadership campaign, of course, we wound up with Ed “Don’t call me Dave” Miliband, whom I’ve always contested looks rather like Richard David-Caine from Swashbuckle – sentiments only re-affirmed since he recently grew a beard.
Here’s the thing. Miliband is ideologically very different to Tony Blair, his most recent-but-one predecessor, but one thing that strikes you when you look at the body language and the rhetoric is how much he’s obviously been groomed in the same manner by the party’s spin doctors. In fact, you could say that spinning him in this manner was part of his political undoing: Labour under-performed in the last election, particularly considering the exit poll, the result costing Miliband his leadership of the party.
Bringing the conversation back to Doctor Who, we may thus infer from this that Ed Miliband is Anthony Ainley to Tony Blair’s Roger Delgado. However good Ainley was, he will always be remembered as “someone who was told to play it like Delgado”, and this is to his detriment as a performer. There are some great Master moments during the 1980s, but half the time Ainley comes across as a rather camp Delgado impersonator, rather than someone who was allowed to develop the character in his own right. (This also makes Geoffrey Beevers Gordon Brown, which sort of works if you see him without makeup.)
The one to watch in this campaign, of course, is Jeremy Corbyn, who is in favour of nationalisation and higher taxes for the one per cent. People wiser about these sorts of things than I am tell me that his election would potentially obliterate the Labour party, “because people don’t want a socialist government”. I really don’t have a clue how true this is, and it’s for this reason that I don’t usually talk about politics on this blog. I leave that for people with greater interest and less cynicism, such as the friend of a friend who wrote this:
“He is eccentric and beardy, with distinctive slightly retro dress sense. He has traveled alone for a long time though is now looking for a companion. They say he’s going to take us back to 1983 with him, but he’s actually more interested in taking us to the future. He’s stood alone as a fighter for his beliefs and dropped from view during the nineties but has had a massive resurgence in popularity in recent times. He’s been pictured with people the world sees as villains but would prefer to talk to them rather than fight them. He believes that speaking honestly can be effective even to those robotic types who want to take over the world. His position on jelly babies is unclear but apart from that, Jeremy Corbyn is basically the Doctor.”
It’s a good argument, although it stumbles at the first hurdle with the mention of beards, because (‘Leisure Hive’ / ‘Day of the Moon’ / ‘Wedding of River Song’ aside) the Doctor himself is not beardy, with the exception of John Hurt, who plays someone who does not refer to himself as the Doctor. So I’m still on my Master analogy, although Gareth – when pressed – said that he looked a bit like Rorvik from ‘Warrior’s Gate’.
He does, sort of, although Rorvik’s a slave-driving (in a quite literal sense) despot, hopeless to the last, so perhaps that’s why I’m still not sure about the analogy – the Master may be despicable, but at least he’s got a winning personality. “Actually,” said Emily, “Jeremy Corbyn looks like a whole bunch of middle-aged men with short beards”.
They’re both right.
Brian of Morbius 