Previously: 'Boris' doesn't exist.
On Sunday, a man impersonating a Prime Minister appeared on GB News. The next day, another man pretending to be a Prime Minister stood up to deliver his latest apology in Parliament. Alike in their ridiculousness, the two appearances also illustrate the cursed performativity of British politics and media.
GB News is a ‘real’ TV channel in so far as it has a studio, hosts and reporters, broadcasts daily, and sits squat and ungainly in the lower realms of the EPG. But watching it is like eavesdropping on a gang of overgrown children playing ‘news channel’; 7 months after its disastrous explosion-at-takeoff launch, it still feels like a rickety set, Crossroads does current affairs.
Old hands, who could at least pantomime competence at their former channels, crumble in the harsh light of the GB News bunker. Two such veterans of daytime grinning and autocue wrangling — Anne Diamond and Stephen Dixon — were recently installed as hosts of the channel’s weekend breakfast show. They were required yesterday to stumble their way through a chat with… Winston Churchill.
As Churchill died in 1965 — the dubious hook for the interview was the 57th anniversary of his funeral — Diamond & Dixon1 talked to an impersonator. It might only have been marginally weird had the pair not spent the first half of the conversation pretending a man who looked more like he should be playing a butcher chasing a cheeky dog that stole a string of sausages than the wartime leader was really Churchill.
Diamond: We heard it from a Conservative MP today, didn’t we? People say, ‘Oh gosh, if Churchill did that…’ Why do you think there’s so much admiration for you nowadays?
Not Churchill: I think probably because I was the right man at the right moment. I don’t think I could probably survive in the current climate. Although, one would give it a go, of course.
Dixon: It’s interesting though, isn’t it when we talk about the current climate? It seems quite brutal. You, yourself, were pushed out after all your successes.
Not Churchill: Absolutely, that nice Mr Attlee managed to unseat me at the end of the war, but, of course, he was very great assistance during the war. The war cabinet was true cabinet government because it reflected all sorts of political opinions…
After breaking character, the impersonator Winstan (because his real name is Stan) explains, “I’m not a politician. I am an actor.” I suspect he was getting a little disconcerted by the GB News presenters’ questioning, especially as Diamond exclaims later in the clip, “Even from the back you look like him!” Little known fact: Anne Diamond is a Churchill’s ass connoisseur.
It doesn’t really matter to GB News that Winstan only looks like Winston if you’re squinting or have recently suffered a head injury, nor that he can’t do the voice and doesn’t have the mannerisms, regardless of how convincing Anne found his buttocks to be. That’s because the channel and its audience are interested in a picture postcard, Saturday matinee war movie version of Churchill.
Had Dixon and Diamond interviewed a British bulldog with a homburg hogtied to its head and a cigar shoved between its teeth, most of the viewers would’ve been equally satisfied. The message was: “Wasn’t Churchill brilliant? Remember the war you won even though you weren’t actually born yet?”
I’m told that for VE Day, GB News is booking Reginald Blarm, East Cheam’s foremost Adolf Hitler impersonator. It costs extra for the head wound but they think the budget can stretch to it.
Booking the impersonator is the natural conclusion of the right-wing’s desire to remember an avatar of Churchill over reality. It’s why columnists at The Times and The Telegraph explode whenever anyone mentions that Churchill was racist despite members of his own party and close friends saying as much when he was in his pomp2.
Their cartoon Churchill cannot contain sending the Black and Tans to Ireland, mooring gunboats on the Mersey, nor the Bengal famine. Even the most minor inconvenient details like the dockers only dipping their cranes for his funeral because they were paid to do so are sanded away.
Boris Johnson, the Wish.com Winston, explained the tendency in his partially-ghost written biography, The Churchill Factor:
Tories are jealous of their relation with Churchill. It is a question of badging, of political ownership. They think of him as the people of Parma think of the Formaggio Parmigiano.
The GB News spot is a particularly embarrassing example of that cheesy instinct but it’s not some wild outlier. Not a day goes past without Churchill being conjured up in the British newspapers to prove something or other. Just this weekend Jacob Rees Mogg — himself a meat caricature of a cartoon toff — used a profile in The Daily Telegraph to compare Johnson to Churchill:
Churchill always had new ideas. Johnson is good at thinking things others aren’t thinking and not just going along politely with conventional thought.
Britain is Weekend At Bernie’s: The Country, a corpse puppeted for fun and profit. A cheap Churchill on an even cheaper ‘news’ channel is simply more unusual than most of the performative goonery that is accepted as normal on this extremely normal island.
Look at the parliamentary pantomime that took place following the publication of the first edition of Sue Gray’s part-work3 on partygate. The pretence is that the parties and the cover-up are Boris Johnson’s equivalent of Al Capone being taken down for tax evasion. But as I’ve written before this scandal only exists thanks to tactical leaks; it is court politics disguised by exploiting the emotions of the bereaved.
Johnson’s apology, Keir Starmer’s ‘angry’ response — with carefully chosen Tory-baiting Thatcher quote — and Ian Blackford’s third-shepherd-improvising-a-bigger-role-in-the-nativity act of getting himself thrown out of the chamber were all performances as unconvincing as the worst Churchill impersonator.
It suits politicians and political reporters alike to pretend that Boris Johnson faces real jeopardy from the police investigation into the parties. But the worst-case scenario is that he’ll return to a Telegraph column and some well-paid after-dinner speeches earlier than he intended. Labour will keep nodding through the authoritarian measures on citizenship, surveillance, the right to protest, and immigration when he’s gone.
The next Tory leader will see the newspapers swing full square behind them again and the already evaporating Labour poll lead will disappear entirely. There is a whole class of British commentators, social media voices, and ‘influencers’ whose gig is to cry about how terrible this Prime Minister is and then move on to the next monster, never touching anything systematic.
Skip forward to 2079 and a future Dixon & Diamond duo will be interviewing a Boris Johnson impersonator about what ‘he’ would do if he were in charge, remembering “the good old days”. First as tragedy, then as farce, then as a total fucking embarrassment.
… which sounds like a ropey 70s detective show commissioned to compete with Sapphire & Steel.
Leo Amery said of Churchill: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane… [I do not] see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”
“For just £5.99 a month you can put together your own personal collection of Number 10 party recollections. The first issue comes with a binder and 300 pictures submitted to the Metropolitan Police.”