How did The Coalition, a political satire so preposterous it's beyond parody, ever get commissioned?
Season two starts next week and promises a new brazenness to take the breath away
Nick Clegg –'pompous and irrelevant' – and David Cameron – 'as sleek as a human aubergine'. Photograph: Getty
Parliament returns next week. Season Two of The Coalition, the best political satire currently on TV. Most of it is scripted. Yet it has a very "real", improvised feel. You almost believe these preposterous characters could theoretically exist.
A prime minister as sleek as a human aubergine, tetchily returning from holiday after holiday to rail against a "culture of entitlement". This is the bloke, remember, who promised an end to Punch and Judy politics.
Does Cameron ever watch playbacks of Prime Minister's Questions? The whole nation is subconsciously expecting a backbench question from a crocodile, or a string of sausages. Although a string of sausages actually has more spine than government backbenchers.
And Clegg. Clegg. A deputy prime minister so pompous and irrelevant he might as well be a Twitter account. Putting the word "sigh" in asterisks. Blaming his lack of followers on the haterz and the cynicz.
Has a cast of extras ever been so cruelly treated as the Lib Dems? Once-optimistic party members – students, psych-folk fans, chiropractors and so on – now hold the coats while their Bullingdon scuttler overlords kick the welfare state to death, steal all its money and glide away, cackling, on monogrammed Segways to play whiff-whaff. What's for supper, Gids? "Panda tartare and some very expensive Colombian dessert …"
Still, thank God for an effective leader of the opposition. Oh wait. Ed Miliband. OK, they wanted a clean break, understandable after 13 years of the lying shit Blair and the clanking bollock Brown.
But Ed Miliband? Maybe it's a reflection of how the character of Labour has changed in two generations. Their benches used to be stuffed with union guys. Hairy-arsed sons of toil. Look at the shower they've got now. PR chancers. Journalists. Lawyers.
Ed can bark on as much as he likes about "the power of a new generation" but nobody's mistaking him for Prince, are they? He's the president of the sixth form debating society who's been up all night playing World of Warcraft. And that thing with the mouth: is there some tacit agreement that all Labour leaders must have a shonky cakehole? Blair: smile like a pterodactyl. Brown: "oral" surprise at the end of every sentence. Miliband: upward swoop suggesting "balloon animal".
It's not only that the present occupants of the Commons look so comical.* Just as the news now feels like a weary retread of The Day Today, so parliamentary politics arrives pre-spoofed. There's the obvious stuff – oratory replaced with gurned soundbites. Collective bargaining elbowed out by lobbying.
But it's the new brazenness that takes the breath away. Now, when a minister insists the government "has no plans to do X", it means "will do X in six months, we're here for a five-year term, chill".
And the coalition works on the principle that the executive summary is the consultation brief: please discover, with workings-out, why privatising the NHS is a great idea. Even though during the general election campaign Cameron stood there with a face like the puckered end of a saveloy and gravely told us all there would be no large-scale reorganisation of the NHS.
There's also their new "sacrosanct" defence. This allows a shifty, panicky secretary of state – Andrew Lansley, for instance – to claim that private contractors will not be allowed to tear off bits of the NHS like the blood-caked vultures they are because parts of it are sacrosanct. A and E departments, for example. Like everyone's queueing up to run them.
And, oh, the "listening". Which genius of political grammar – Coulson? Hilton? Someone else with a name like a motorway services stop? – hit on the brilliant idea of "listening" as a synonym for "shutting you up"?
The government floats a policy. It's greeted with outrage and uproar. The government announces it will pause, reflect, listen. While it waits for better public opinion polls. While it marshals experts who are on its side, who might make a fortune from privatisation and who may in due course have non-executive directorships to offer.
Writing a satirical account of the coalition's first year was a weird experience. I had no problem turning real politicians into gruesome, vile caricatures. It's clearly fiction. Nobody believes the chancellor actually has a Thatcher sex doll in his study. Do they?
But I'd look at my comedy version of an Iain Duncan Smith speech to the House and wonder if it wasn't a bit far-fetched. Would the secretary of state really have the nerve to say with such sanctimonious piety that benefits dependency is a human rights issue? Would he really with a straight face characterise the unemployed as bloated fat cats swindling the taxpayers, while championing the entrepreneurial spirit of the private sector? The banks? I must have made it up.
Yes, the coalition government appear to us as clowns, as cartoon characters. But the unreality is not just about the way they look or the drivel they speak. A cabinet of millionaires shitting on the poor? How on earth did that script get commissioned in the first place?
*They do though, don't they? Michael Gove looks like a veal calf in a suit. Ed Balls looks like a hideously inflated cat, in a suit. Andrew Lansley looks like a surprised masturbator, in a suit, with hair done by Jehovah's Witnesses.
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