Tories at War review – Spud-U-Hate and the elite potato blight
A former potato farmer turned Brexit-backing Tory MP, Andrew Bridgen is nicknamed Spud-U-Hate by his foes. It fell to him to explain, in Tories at War (Channel 4), how he and his fellow uber tubers in the Conservative party elect their leader. First the candidates form a circle. Then they take up their weapons. The circular firing squad ends when the candidates are eliminated – leaving, Bridgen fancifully imagined, “a nun from the Outer Hebrides to become leader”. If only. The problem, in retrospect, was that only 11 Conservatives stood this summer to lead their party. If only all of them had stood, and been eliminated, we wouldn’t be in such a mess. Given that the Na h-Eileanan an Iar constituency that includes the Outer Hebrides elected a Scottish Nationalist last time round, most likely that nun would not have prorogued parliament but revoked article 50, thus wiping the insufferable smile I had to endure watching this show from the face of the par-boiled spudleiter of the Brexit party.
The point of this hour was to bear witness to how, since Theresa May’s election, the most successful democratic party in the world (or so ex-minister Alan Duncan called it) got blighted by potato politicians. The civil war would have been fun to watch were it not for the fact that the rest of us are in its crossfire. Tories at War showed that Britons in 2019 are not so much lions led by donkeys as couch potatoes ruled by red-skinned, elite potatoes bred in top vegetable academies in the Thames valley.
Duncan, who started the programme in January as minister for Europe, ended it wondering if the lettuce in his sandwich was the last greenery he would consume as a consequence of no-deal Brexit. A little over the top, Alan: just as there are academies for producing potato politicians, so there will be lettuce farms in Brexit Britain.
The problem of the programme is that the war isn’t over and the collateral damage has scarcely started. The pleasure of the programme was watching Tory grandees get it wrong in hindsight. Nicholas Soames began the year airily scotching the ludicrous possibility of Boris Johnson as leader; he ended here chucked out of the Conservative party by PM Johnson for defying the whip to prevent a no-deal Brexit. Even Bridgen thought removing the whip from rebel Tories was bonkers: Johnson, the “Midlands Machiavelli” reckoned, had left the “rats nowhere to run”.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/sep/22/tories-at-war-review-spud-u-hate-and-the-elite-potato-blight
I guess we should be grateful that it's covered at all, but unfortunately it reads like an everyday TV review, complete with the Marina Hyde-lite arch jokiness that seems to be de rigeur in political sketches nowadays (I enjoy them as light relief and a pressure valve, but they can reduce the current anti-democratic clusterfuck to just another trivialized spectacle).
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