Footage was shared widely yesterday of about 40 MPs enjoying a dance class in Westminster’s Portcullis House, overseen by Strictly Come Dancing hosts Angela Rippon and Alex Kingston. It is a measure of the impact that Adam Curtis’s haunting documentary style has had on our collective imagination, that almost everyone who saw this segment online felt they were watching one of his iconic, ironic newsreel juxtapositions unfold in real time.
Instead of using footage from, say, a Flappers’ Ball on the eve of the Great Depression – usually under a jarringly modern club anthem – to illustrate an American public drunk on hedonistic pursuits, we were watching a political class merrily hoofing away, apparently oblivious to the sheer hatred, the exasperation, the poisonous contempt in which they are held by the millions who fund their paper-shuffling and moral evasions. Surely, their vapid, hopeful expressions and tentative toe-pointing seemed to innocently plead, they must, as human beings, be able to shrug off the quotidian stresses of managed decline long enough to just shake a tail feather now and again? Life, after all, is not about waiting for the storm to pass – it is about dancing in the rain, ideally in one of the grandest atriums in Central London.
And so, just as we, as a people, prepare to go over yet another watershed and another step closer to oblivion, Adam Curtis at least will be saved some valuable hours rifling through the BBC archives. Just press play.
The harsh reaction to our waltzing MPs wasn’t confined to members of the public. Even some within their own ranks found the scenes bewildering. Reform UK MP Lee Anderson told the Daily Mail: ‘I walked into Portcullis House this morning and thought I’d walked straight into Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.’
This is funny, though in truth, the ‘Thriller’ video would have been more in keeping with the prevailing mood. As it becomes obvious that zombie ideas, buried deep in the texts of religious scriptures inked thousands of years ago, are animating the escalating threat in and around Iran as much as pragmatic geopolitical realism, it does feel increasingly close to midnight, on one famous clock in particular.
Meanwhile, if you are of a certain political bent, then seeing new Green Party MP Hannah Spencer – fresh from a campaign in Gorton and Denton that seemed to consist largely of dancing and Urdu – had joined Labour’s assisted-dying ghoul, Kim Leadbeater, on the floor will have shored up your suspicions no end.
The only shame was the lack of a be-toga’d figure contributing a few licks on the fiddle. Rejected, perhaps, not for being too on the nose (what, after this, could be?), but for demanding a familiarity with classical antiquity too learned and exclusionary to those afflicted as a result of the present education system – like many of our foxtrotting MPs seem to be. ‘Nero? Do you mean the café?’
There is, lest I be accused of unmitigated sourness, nothing wrong with dancing. Even – perhaps especially – when things are getting you down. Alone, slipping around on the kitchen lino in your socks, with a partner or friends. Or even, sure, in a class – a structured and tutored environment – getting to know your neighbours and breaking down the effects of ‘hunkering’ identified in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, a quarter century ago.
And who better to promote that ideal than Rippon – still sprightly at 81, and the perfect advertisement for remaining rhythmically limber? It might well lift the clouds of mental ill-health, and even end up saving the NHS money, or at least rerouting it from depression medications and CBT referrals into sprained wrists and twisted spines.
But much as I dislike the phrase when deployed against someone who has spoken an unpalatable but necessary truth, it is sometimes wise to ‘read the room’. There is a genuinely frightening kinetic war unfolding in the most volatile region on the planet, with Britain looking dangerously irresolute in asserting its position. There are all the unresolved problems that Keir Starmer inherited 19 months ago, and has only gone on to exacerbate. It should hardly need to be said that now is not the time for our elected representatives to give the faintest hint that they might be feeling exuberant, triumphalist or even vaguely satisfied with their performance.
It was cute when a fitness instructor accidentally caught the motorcade occasioned by a military coup in Myanmar on her dance video, five years ago. It is not so cute when Commons speaker – Lindsay Hoyle – can so easily be intercut with live footage of hell being rained down on the people of Iran.
Portcullis House is named for the symbol of the House of Commons, an ancient method of defence in a castle gatehouse – which, along with a moat and an elevated drawbridge, made the thing all but impregnable to unwarranted entry. It is a painfully ironic reminder of the degree to which recent parliaments have failed to defend our nation’s castle moat. And perhaps of another, sharper construction that has historically been lowered, at speed, when occasion demanded.
Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun, are on sale here.
