God Save Hooky Street
Across the last month stories of what Britain is and could be confronted a cold reality, but has anyone stopped deluding themselves?
Rolling coverage of The Queue led some observers to imagine the British were preparing a national act of seppuku. Economically, we were. Economics is less of a science than we pretend. Measurements are always an act of story telling, of tailoring. The Queue was described in terms of how far it wound through the city and how long it took to fully digest its victims. Time and distance are not the usual units of measurement for crowds.
Apparently everyone in The Queue was given a wristband upon joining, so calculating the numbers forming the human millipede should be straightforward. However the only figure yet released is the vague “around” 250,000. That’s less than turned out for Sir Winston Churchill, who lay in state before a smaller population. The Queue was closer to the 1990 Poll Tax march and considerably smaller than either the 2003 march against the Iraq war or the 2002 Countryside Alliance march against the ban on hunting with hounds. Mildly dispiriting to find there are decent country folk who will come to town to demand the right to watch dogs rip a live fox to bits, yet won’t turn out to honour their late-Monarch. Was this funeral not visceral enough for them?
With any public demonstration of feeling the numbers in the street represent a fraction of the wider mood. The BBC estimate the audience for Her Majesty’s funeral peaking at 28 million, with 32.5 million watching the coverage “at some point”. This genuinely surprises me. The funeral of our Monarch of 70 years was watched “at some point” by only 48% of the population?
I am in the 32.5 million who watched “some point” and did so only from a guilty sense that I should at least idly witness what will rank amongst the key historical events I’ll live through. Did the majority of her nation, 52% of Elizabeth’s subjects, really find themselves unbothered to even slump unmoving on a sofa whilst some distant sense of an epoch ending washed past? Fair play to them. I salute their unromantic fixation on the troubles of the present. Lord knows there are plenty to choose from.
Still, 32.5 million is a big number for a TV audience, easily beating the 41% of the UK who watched the Only Fools and Horses Christmas Special in 1996. To be fair to Only Fools And Horses I’m comparing the peak viewing with the “at some point” viewing. Peak to peak, Only Fools and Her Majesty tie on 41% (Elizabeth noses in front in decimal places). We can only guess at the number of people who, by 1996, had viewed “some point” of Only Fools. Clearly it’s easy to over estimate engagement but in 1996 32.5 million would be 55% of the population, that sounds high but would mean the Christmas Special had only shed 14% of the series’ total viewers across the previous 15 years, and I think that sounds low.
But if the Queen looks smaller standing shoulder to shoulder with Del Boy, it’s worth remembering that 32.5 million is just a million shy of the total number of votes cast in the Brexit Referendum, on both sides.
Leave won with 17.4 million votes. This dwarfs the 14 million people voted for Boris Johnson, but his mandate was not just bigger than the 10 million who voted for Jeremy Corbyn, it’s more than 13.6 million who voted for Theresa May in 2017, more than 13.5 million who voted for Tony Blair in 1997, more even than the 13.8 million who voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1987. As ever though, numbers easily become a hall of mirrors. Votes only make sense as proportions of the electorate. In 1987 that was 36 million people, 12 million fewer than in 2019. So Thatcher won 38% of all possible votes, Johnson only 29%. Blair won 31% in ’97 though only 22% in 2005. Brown and Miliband both lost with 19% and 20% respectively, some context for Corbyn’s 2019 result of 21%.
Meanwhile Liz Truss owes her seat to 35.5 thousand people in South West Yorkshire and her Leadership to 81 thousand Conservative members. In another country we would call this a coup.
Politicians are divisive figures but should it be surprising that Del Trotter (my favourite Batman) is so vastly more popular? Selfish, often cruel (writer John Sullivan so regretted Derek’s behaviour in one Christmas Special he refused to let it be shown again) Trotter’s guile is just a reflexive need to secure his own misplaced sense of superiority. He charms but mainly through the transparent depths of his self delusion. Of course we love him. Derek Trotter is the post-war John Bull, the truest exemplar of the English soul. If you want to know what Britain, what England, is going to do next just imagine what Del Boy would do. Brexit? Of course he did (though Rodney voted remain). Johnson? Admire his chutzpah. Covid? Derek would have grabbed his slice of the £15 billion procurement fraud.
Together, Derek and his brother are the classic comedy double act, the fool and the fool who thinks he isn’t a fool. Truss and Kwarteng play these roles with aplomb yet somehow it’s yet to feel funny, even when the free market rebuked the Tories for a tax cut. However don’t be deluded, Kwarteng’s slap in face from the invisible hand was just for refusing to show his workings. Don’t be surprised if, when he finally admits that the cost will be born by the poorest, no one minds at all. No one that counts anyway.
It feels like it can’t last, yet Truss has already shown herself happy to bend and immune to humiliation, great political assets. The bar was low and, like Del Boy, she fell straight through it, but don’t assume people will hold this against her forever. The next election could be two years away, opinion polls now are not measurements of intention but only astonishment.
Like me, you might enjoy Radio 4’s statistical geek-cast More Or Less performing a kind but determined debunking of the entirely spurious figure of 5.1 billion quoted for the global audience watching the Queen’s funeral.
Last night I saw My Neighbour Totoro on stage at The Barbican and though you might go in wondering what the point is of such a faithful translation from animation to stage, I promise you’ll just leave lighter, inflated by its pure life affirming joy.