Poor Gordon Brown. Poor, poor Gordon Brown. During Tony Blair's ten years as
Prime Minister, Gordon had the perpetual, twitching impatience of someone
watching someone else struggling to take the lid off a jar of olives.
Someone dying to shout: “Let me do it! I know how - with a damp tea-towel!”
Since taking over, however - with a palpable flourish of “Now let's get a real
prime minister on the case” - Gordon looks like a man who very rapidly
realised that the lid really was quite tightly sealed, after all. Within a
year of getting the job, he appears to have lost the local elections,
alienated most of his party and taken the country into recession. It is, by
any definition, an EPIC FAIL, as young people say.
Of course, things are being done, even as we speak, to counteract Gordon's
recent run of EPIC FAIL. There was a bracing “chat” about the economy: “I
can get us through this.” Doubtless Nelson Mandela will be hugged quite
soon. Most intriguing of all, however, was a report in last week's papers
that at a meeting Hazel Blears apparently raised the idea of Gordon starring
in a political version of The Apprentice. Well, here's something I never
thought I'd write, but: Hazel Blears is a genius. A. Genius. She's bang on
trend. In the 21st century, we demand prime ministers who are a cross
between a neighbour with a good knowledge of wine and someone who has a
Sony-nominated show on Radio 2. Who knows what we will want when the
recession kicks in? I suspect that it might be a prime minister who drives
around the country on a flatbed truck, hurling fistfuls of fivers into the
crowd, screaming: “There's plenty more where that came from!” But still, for
now, we want a leader who's a bit, well, telly. Given this, then, for Gordon
Brown to star in a Westminster version of The Apprentice - perhaps we could
call it The Big Ben-tice. Or The No 10-tice - would be a move of political
dynamite.
For starters, it'll get him on the covers of Radio Times, Heat and We Love
Telly! magazines - key media outlets that Gordon needs to access if he is to
address the 20 million apolitical, listless, inexplicably selfsatisfied
(“Whoever you vote for, the Government gets in!”) non-voters in this
country, on whom our intermingled destinies unhappily rest. It'll get him
out of Parliament for a bit, too - which will surely be a relief to everyone
working with him. I can't imagine that he often kicks back with a packet of
Boasters and some chitty-chat about Doctor Who. I can imagine that a great
many apparatchiks will be squeezing their stress-relieving balls a great
deal less should Gordon spend one day a week in a recording studio.
From the point of view of the Labour Party, however, the single greatest
advantage is that, should Brown helm the show, the entire country will
immediately become complicit in maintaining a grand illusion: that Gordon
Brown is the simply greatest statesman this country has ever seen.
That is, after all, the equivalent of what happens with Sir Alan Sugar on The
Apprentice. Each show starts with portentous shots of Sir Alan hovering over
the City of London in his helicopter, as The Dance of the Knights from Romeo
and Juliet saws away, viscerally, on the soundtrack.
“Sir Alan Sugar controls a business empire worth £800 million,” the voiceover
intones, solemnly, as Sir Alan rustles through a briefcase full of papers.
It makes someone on their way to a business meeting about some answerphones
look like Bruce Willis flying off to martyr himself on an asteroid in
Armageddon. The truth doesn't matter. It is a nugatory concern that Sir Alan
looks like the small, priapic bear from Bo' Selecta. It is but a trifle
that, in the event of Sugar turning the show down, the BBC was so far down
its list that the voiceover would have gone “Sir Clive Sinclair controls a
business empire worth £400” instead.
Because television needs to deal in absolutes, every decision that Sir Alan
makes has to be correct and every opinion he utters has to be true.
Otherwise, the whole show just turns into some old buffer in a pretend
boardroom essentially dicking some eager young trainees around for six
months.
Imagine, then, a version of The Apprentice set in Westminster. Just as Sir
Alan is “Suralan”, Gordon Brown would become “Primester” - an undeniably
razzier moniker than his current one, “King Loser of Loserville”. Instead of
Suralan's sidekicks - the tombstone-faced Nick Hewer, the no-nonsense
Margaret Mountford - the Primester will have to find two right-hand
factotums of his own. Tony Benn would make a fabulous Nick, I think.
However, while Hazel Blears clearly suggested the idea so that she could be
the Primester's Margaret Mountford, it would undeniably more fun if, as a
special surprise for Gordon, they got in Cherie Blair, QC, instead. She
will, after all, probably be looking for a new job by then.
During Gordon's past few months of misery and failure it has been hard to
remember that, just a few short years ago, many women had a Heathcliff-esque
crush on him. They dreamt of making that rogue lock of hair hang across his
sweating forehead as he became their Chancellor of the Sexchequer. Should
Gordon get the Apprentice gig, however - spending ten weeks of prime-time
slamming his fist on a boardroom table and shouting “The people of Britain
DEMAND a better consultancy paper on parking restrictions outside primary
schools!” at 16 terrified-looking yet weaselly local councillors - we'd all
soon be back onside. Finish the whole thing off with him getting on to
government jets accompanied by some classical music - or maybe even the
soundtrack to Rocky - and David Cameron would be dead in the water. But you
know - you just know - that at that meeting last week, when Hazel Blears
suggested all this, they laughed at her. The FOOLS.
Who ever heard of a luminous bat-cave?
I've taken up running. Hahaha - I know, I know. I can totally confirm that I
look like a Womble being chased off someone's front garden, having
inadvertently wandered over looking for buns. But in the course of these
hilarious runnings I've noticed that Haringey council has erected a great
number of bat-boxes in the local parks, thither and yon, up the trees. All
well and good, of course: if we can't help out our old pal the bat from time
to time, really, what's the point? You've got to love those loveable, flying
black-leather rats related to Dracula.
However, yesterday - on sweatily collapsing past my fifteenth bat-box - I
began to wonder about the bat-box decor policy, such as it may be. After
all, bats are blind. What, then, is the point of painting their boxes a
luminous neon orange, the kind of colour Mr C from the Shamen would paint
his Ibizan retirement house, Dunravin'? It can't be of any use to the bats,
who quite notably don't, in nature, live in luminous orange caves or
fluorescent green attics. And indeed, for whatever petty survival reasons
they have, prefer to remain hidden from the world while they're asleep. On
the other hand, if anyone wants a bat, I can, for a cash-in-hand deal,
source a load quite quickly.
Mouse to moose
It's a long story but, in a nutshell, a very clever lady told me last week
that I don't know how to breathe. “You're doing tiny, shallow, panting
breaths, like a mouse,” she said. “You're hardly alive! Breathe from your
GUTS!” On the bus home - breathing deeply, like a moose doing yoga, despite
the stares - I realised that, in all these years of part-time smoking, I
haven't been after the nicotine at all. It makes me dizzy. I retch. My
enjoyment of smoking has centred almost wholly around the fact that it's the
only time I ever take in a big lungful. Since then I've been studiously
improving my breathing by pretending to smoke “invisible fags”. Currently,
I'm on 3,400 a day.
