Best Seat in the House: The Wit and Parliamentary Chronicles of Frank Johnson
Frank Johnson
JR Books
272pp
£18.99
The oxpecker, sometimes known as the tickbird, has a relationship so entwined with the hippopotamus on whose back it lives, that it courts its mates and copulates without leaving its host. It picks the hairs from the hippo’s back to feather its nest. It is commonly assumed that by eating the ticks and larvae that burrow into the hippo’s skin, the oxpecker is doing his host a favour. In fact, the bird uses its thick, fat beak to peck at scabs and keep wounds fresh, to ensure a ready of supply of parasites. It drives the hippo nuts.
The oxpecker’s relationship to the hippopotamus is very similar to that of the parliamentary sketch-writer and the parliamentarians he or she writes about. The sketch-writer sits high in the press gallery above the politicians wallowing in the sludge down below, feathering his or her nest with titbits from the democratic process, picking at open wounds.
Matthew Parris once said that there was a special place in hell reserved for diary columnists. MPs think the same about sketch-writers. When an MP appears in a cartoon, they consider it a badge of honour, that they have ‘arrived’. They buy copies to hang in the downstairs toilet in one of their homes. The same cannot be said when they appear in a sketch by Anne Treneman, Simon Hoggart, or Quentin Letts. Letts particularly belongs to a cruel school of sketch-writing. He looks and sounds like a creation of Frank Richards. But he writes with a measure of mockery and ad hominem vitriol usually only dished out by 14-year old schoolgirls. As Roy Hattersley says ‘the art of sketch-writing has descended into vulgar abuse or dull description.’
Frank Johnson belonged a different class of sketch-writer. His was a cleverer, subtler form of caricature: a Spy, rather than a Gilray. A new collection of his writing Best Seat in the House has been published which reminds us of the fact. Dennis Skinner says he was ‘fair and could be trusted’, which is more than can be said of today’s crop of sketch-writers. Johnson could lampoon his victims, and at the same time delight them. The only thing worse for a politician in the 80s than being at the centre of a Johnson sketch, was not being. He covered parliament and politics from the last days of the Callaghan government (for example saying of Tony Crosland ‘drawing on his lifelong lack of interest in foreign affairs, Mr Crosland made a successful debut as Foreign Secretary’) to the heyday of New Labour.
But the 18 years in between gave him his richest material. He belonged to a collection of right-wing writers, thinkers, academics and politicians who orbited around Margaret Thatcher. They drank the finer Palmers with Alan Clark, debated Hitler’s tactics with Andrew Roberts, hung out at Jonathan Aitken’s place, worshipped Reagan from afar, and never got over the defenestration of their Leaderene. He covered the rise and fall of the SDP, the Falklands War, the Brighton Bomb (he focussed on the absurdity of the Tories’ appearing from the rubble in their paisley pyjamas and silk dressing gowns), and the comings and goings within the Tory party.
He perpetuated the anti-Labour myths which helped to keep the Tories in office. Foot was a geriatric, the Labour party stuffed with feminists, Sinn Feiners and peaceniks, and Kinnock was a ‘Welsh windbag’: his speech to the 1983 Labour conference ‘was rewarded with a sort of genuine standing ovation that the conference had only ever given to Mr Lansbury (in prehistoric times) and Mr Michael Foot. These were the only two previous leaders who have had what it takes to win over a Labour conference: complete inability to win over the electorate.’
There’s a cracking essay on TV detective Columbo. He links the shabby mac-wearing LAPD tec who always outsmarts the rich, vain murderers with the rise of democracy, whereby the ‘common man’ has the whip hand over the rich and powerful. I also laughed out loud (embarrassing on the train from Eastbourne to Victoria) at his description of Joan Collins: ‘I regard Miss Joan Collins in the way that other Londoners regard the Albert Memorial. I realise that, as a construct, she is rather over-done. But the style in which she was designed reflects the taste of the age in which she was built.’
The right-wing political bias of Johnson’s writing makes it hard for anyone who doesn’t agree with the Telegraph and the Spectator to really enjoy it. You can appreciate the quality of the writing, but the political slant gets in the way. He may have had ‘the best seat in the House’, but it was firmly on the right.