Spooky

It must be a difficult life being an MP. Over the last week alone MFI has collapsed meaning they’ll have to go to Ikea this year to get their new kitchen on expenses. I probably spend approximately 60 seconds a day panicking whilst I try to find a pen, but the average MP spends thousands of pounds a year of our money buying stationary, so think of all of those minutes they waste agonising over whether to use the Waterman or the Parker to sign the letter some underling has written on their behalf.

No wonder then that ‘the people’ have become a little disinterested in them. In  a 2002 survey published by John Denham, then secretary for Children and Young People, teenagers tried to illustrate ways of making MPism more appealing. Cringingly top of the list was using easier to understand words, presumably ‘gr8’ and ‘minger’, but there were some truths. 60% admitted having little or no interest, suggesting that MPs try to reach them through music events. A third suggested parliamentary and electoral story lines in soap operas – presumably there’d be an MP on Eastenders in the Queen Vic whilst Peggy Mitchell shouts ‘Tory foreign policy? Get out of my pub’, and for balance a Labour MP will be killed by a ferry disaster in the Emerdale Omnibus.

It’s hard to deny MPism is boring though, which might be why everyone’s making such a hoo-hah about Damian Green’s arrest. Newspapers are making claims about Tory offices being routinely swept for bugs. MP’s are talking about a Stalinesque state. Suddenly politics is exciting. It’s George Orwell. It’s cool.

In reality it’s about information which would ultimately have ended up in the public domain getting into the public domain before those supposedly serving the public in a public office want the public to know the publicly available information. Yes, Sir Humphrey is alive and well.

There are lots of emotive words being thrown around all in the Venn diagram with Cold War cliches and Andy McNab novels, and it can be no coincidence we’re in the middle of a series of Spooks. They want us to believe there are men in black suits sneaking around after dark, secret codewords, surveillance ops and men in long dark anoraks.

In reality, no one cares. And I think they know it.

In reality it’s Golf clubs not fisty cuffs. Jack Bauer would die of boredom doing the cryptic crossword in the members bar whilst his contact talked about the latest onyx table outlet to open and the latest Joanna Trollope. It’s M&S not MI5.