Section:GDN 1J PaGe:4 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 19:16 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Thursday 29 Aug ust 2019
4 Opinion
G
iven that Westminster has spent
weeks debating the possibility
of Boris Johnson proroguing
parliament, it was surprising how
surprised MPs were when he
actually did it. Even his own cabinet
ministers were rather taken aback,
having returned to Whitehall on
Tuesday expecting to spend the week in meetings with
the Treasury about their spending review settlement.
Now, they’re preparing for an election, which would
be the result of a successful vote of no confi dence in
the government, forced through by MPs determined to
thwart Johnson’s manoeuvring. Even if that scenario
does not unfold, he is likely to call one immediately
after Britain has left the EU on 31 October.
The MPs most unsettled by the announcement are
the ones who have spent the summer plotting tactics to
use against Johnson. These anti-no deal MPs, who exist
more as a diaspora than a coherent group, love plotting
among themselves, but have an amusing distaste
for anyone who plots against them in return. As one
Johnson ally puts it: “The anti-no deal alliance have
been so used to setting the weather recently. Instead,
they’ve had the weather reset, so it’s raining on their
parade, and they don’t like it.”
Not only do these remain-minded MPs now have
more pressure and less time to decide how they might
stop no deal, they are also facing an imminent election.
If that election happens before 31 October then the
“remain alliance” will need to ensure that parliament
returns with more MPs who can help them stop no deal,
as currently none of the diff erent factions trying to
prevent this outcome have the numbers. This will be
Isabel Hardman
is assistant
editor of the
Spectator and
presenter of
Radio 4’s Week
in Westminsterextremely diffi cult in a campaign which Johnson plans to
run as a battle between the people and parliament.
The Conservatives are also using prorogation
to prepare their domestic manifesto. That’s why
secretaries of state found their spending review
meetings had been sped up unexpectedly. Cabinet
ministers recognised this new timetable for what it was
as soon as they were told about it. “I am not surprised,”
one told me. “Everything Dominic Cummings
[ Johnson’s top adviser] seems to be doing is towards an
election.” The Treasury will now complete this one-year
allocation of money for departments next Wednesday,
rather than later in the autumn.
Preparations are well under way for what the
manifesto will be, with MPs working on detailed
proposals to be written into it. The Conservative plan to
restabilise their position on education and law and order,
making a particular eff ort to reverse what Johnson and
his allies feel is the damage done by Theresa May to the
latter. Fighting crime won’t just be about policing but
also about preventative measures, including a focus on
children from messy backgrounds who are on the cusp
of the criminal justice system. And the spending taps are
defi nitely on. “We’ve got the money, we’ve got the scope
to do that and so we’re going to spend it,” says one fi gure
involved in the preparations.
All of this makes the Tories sound as though they
are well prepared to win an election, whether it comes
before 31 October or not. But not all MPs are quite so
convinced. Some, in fact, fear that their party might be in
for a big and nasty surprise. “I don’t think this is a done
deal,” worries one senior Conservative. “Look, Churchill
won the war and then lost the election, and once Brexit
is done, the debate won’t be about what a wonderful job
Boris has done. It will move on and I’m not convinced
that our high spending message will really help us.”
The British public might well be ready to hear a
party proclaim that austerity is over. But, traditionally,
that isn’t the Tory party. The Conservatives will never
manage to match what the Labour party is off ering, not
least because Labour is likely to end up off ering far more
than the Tories think is aff ordable. In that scenario,
voters might wonder why they should back Labour-lite
if they can instead have the real thing.
Of course, the reason the Tories are in a rush to get
an election over and done with is that voters could be
persuaded to back Labour-lite if the alternative is a
Labour government not led by Jeremy Corbyn. With a
diff erent leader, the opposition might have a stronger
prospect of making this an even worse snap election call
by a Tory leader than Theresa May’s 2017 poll.
That currently seems unlikely. But then again,
everything that has seemed unlikely has ended up coming
to pass in British politics over the past few years. It
wasn’t long ago that a confi dent new leader, doing well in
the polls, and a bunch of apparently very competent and
forceful advisers, decided to make things more diffi cult for
MPs who were trying to frustrate Britain’s exit from the EU.
And we all know what sort of surprise lay in store for May.B
lockbuster Sunday night dramas,
like Poldark, have a habit of making
headlines with male nudity. Perhaps
there is something about seeing the
weekend out with a bang. The last
time viewers got fl ustered over a pair
of buttocks was for Richard Madden
in Bodyguard , and before him, Tom
Hiddleston in The Night Manager.
Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s
unfi nished novel Sanditon ruffl ed a few feathers
last weekend by featuring three bare male bottoms
streaking across a beach. “There are a lot of naked
males around, and I think it’s unnecessary. Look at
Poldark,” the inimitable Anne Reid , who also stars in
Sanditon, told the Radio Times. “But I’m old, and it’s
what people want nowadays.” Please, nobody tell her
about Naked Attraction, which has the eff ect of making
on-screen nudity entirely unerotic – a curious choice
for a show that is supposed to be about romance.
Reid laid the blame for all this man-fl esh at the door
of Casino Royale and Daniel Craig, which turned the
tables on the archetypal Bond girl emerging sexily
from the waves and made Bond do the work himself.
But her Sanditon director, Davies, is famous for raising
the blood pressure of period dramas , most notoriously
Pride & Prejudice. In 1995, he had Colin Firth fans
panting over Firth’s sodden emergence from a lake.
Despite Davies’s fi ne work, there may be an unfair
expectation of propriety placed on period dramas. I
suspect that some viewers believe stories set in the past
take on an instant sheen of respectability just because
they’re old. M ost streaming and cable television would
scoff at the Sanditon fuss. Euphoria , HBO’s excellent,
uproarious teen drama, features a literal lesson in dick
pics, which does not shy away from showing the topic
under consideration. It also features nude men and
women, cis and trans, all diff erent body types. For all
its otherwise bleak worldview, it has a warmly open
approach to many kinds of human bodies.
I wonder if Reid is right, and nudity is what we want
now. It is not necessarily more male nudity, but more
of an equal-opportunities approach. If we’re going to
have naked bodies then let’s see the lot. It may move
towards redressing an age-old imbalance; I’ve seen
enough women with no clothes on for it to be par for
the course , sometimes in scenes in which the female
character is called simply “ murder victim”.
However, watching the fi rst episode of Game
of Thrones’s fi nal season made me realise that
something had shifted. They threw in a moment of the
“ sexposition ” for which it had been known in the early
days – a scene in brothel, explaining a crucial part of the
plot – and it was jarring and suddenly old-fashioned.
I don’t think I have become more prudish , but perhaps
I have grown to expect that not only women will get
their kit off. If more bums on beaches means fewer tits
on slabs, then fi ne : get them all out.Isabel
Hardman
Rebecca
Nicholson
Johnson has
wrongfooted
his enemies: an
election looms
Screen nudity:
fi nally, we’ve
entered an era
of equal opps
Boris Johnson in Biarritz this month during the G7 summit PHOTOGRAPH: LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/GETTYRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws