Let’s All Vote for a Political Animal!
Satire has the answer
Thinking about the past, and the present, and the fog outside. The weather app tells me it’s a clear day — at this time of the early morning, that symbol denotes a clear sky with stars — but nobody has told Nature.
It’s chilly out, but there are no stars. I woke up early, got up early, and in a circuitous way, came around to thinking about my late friend, colleague and mentor David Phillips, who wrote a novel back a long time ago called The Right Honourable Chimpanzee (Secker & Warburg, 1978).
David wrote the book in collaboration with his friend and colleague the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, and it was published under the pseudonym David St George. Paperback ISBN: 9780417049205.
That seems like a lifetime ago, actually. The Right Honourable Chimpanzee came before, for example, Michael Dobbs’ House of Cards (Collins, 1989) and, let’s see now, Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup (Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), and let’s also remember — or perhaps let’s not...
…lots of politicians, former spies, media types and allied trades have written novels, some more successfully than others. Lots of them have fictionalised politics, espionage, their own working lives, and some of them have succeeded in making that kind of work sound worthwhile and full of purpose.
The Right Honourable Chimpanzee takes a different tack.
As a breed, and as no doubt you’ll agree, politicians are fine, upstanding, intelligent people, full of good intentions, driven by a desire to better the world, stuffed to the gills with whatever President George H W Bush (the first Bush) was talking about when he referred to “the vision thing” (in the run-up to his successful 1988 campaign for the presidency).
But what if they weren’t? What if politics was a rough game in which just about anybody could achieve high office if they had the right backing and/or drive?
Just imagine.
The Right Honourable Chimpanzee tells the story of a successful conspiracy to get a chimpanzee elected as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It’s satire, obviously, and written in the time before Mrs Thatcher — so we can rest assured that no recent Prime Ministers are being satirised. Perish the thought.
Assume a liberal (small l) application of appearance-altering cosmetics and a lot of time spent on voice coaching, training, et cetera, and not too many chapters into the book, you have a new Prime Minister (and one deserving of capital letters, it seems to me).
From that point on, the issue is not that the Prime Minister is a chimpanzee, but that this chimpanzee happens to be Prime Minister.
What the chimp says, goes.
The Right Honourable Chimpanzee is a very funny book, but the satire, of course, is very much out of date. David Phillips went on to write one other novel, The Removal Men (Duckworth, 1990), which actually is quite topical (it’s a comedy about offshore tax avoidance), and there’s also Conversations in the Garden of Shizen (O Books, 2002), which is subtitled Jesus of the Gospels, Women, Sex and the Family.
I wonder what David would have made of politics today.
