STRICTLY NOT BOTHERED

There comes a moment in the life of every television institution when the sequins stop twinkling and start to look like the residual glitter from last year’s Christmas card, stubbornly clinging to the carpet long after the festive season has been packed away. Strictly Come Dancing has reached that moment. The glitterball, once a gleaming emblem of Saturday-night optimism, now hangs there like a disco ball in a working men's social club that has seen better decades, better carpets, and worse decisions. The show has become tired, stale, clichéd and so thoroughly trope-ridden that one half expects the professional dancers to arrive already locked in a predictable lift, spinning the same celebrity through the same sequence of emotional arcs that have been rehearsed since the early Blair years.

What began as a gloriously improbable collision of ballroom formality and celebrity incompetence has settled into a formula as rigid as Craig Revel-Horwood’s posture. Each series unfolds with the comforting inevitability of a provincial pantomime: the early weeks of endearing woodenness, the mid-season “journey” montages set to swelling strings, the tearful confessions about personal demons conquered through the medium of the foxtrot, and the final stretch in which someone who once starred in a soap or played a bit-part in a reality show discovers, to collective gasps, that they can actually point their toes. The judges deliver their verdicts with the solemnity of oracles who have forgotten they are reading from the same laminated card they used last year. “It was a bit safe,” says Shirley Ballas. “You lit up the floor,” insists Motsi Mabuse's cleavage. And somewhere in the middle, Anton Du Beke beams as if he has just invented the concept of enthusiasm itself.

The tropes pile up like discarded feather boas. There is the celebrity who 'never danced a step in their life' and yet, by week five, is executing a paso doble with the intensity of someone who has just remembered the rent is due. There is the professional partner whose motivational speeches could be spliced into any series without anyone noticing the join. There is the group number that exists primarily to fill the space between ad breaks and the moment when the audience is invited to vote as if the fate of Western civilisation depended on whether a former footballer can master the cha-cha. Even the wardrobe has lost its capacity to surprise. The dresses still shed sequins by the kilo, but one suspects the cleaning staff no longer bother to vacuum them up; they simply wait for the next series to begin and let the cycle continue.

Of course, there was one glorious exception. In 2020, that annus horribilis when the nation sat indoors measuring its days in sourdough loaves and government briefings, Bill Bailey arrived on Strictly like a genial uncle who had somehow wandered into the wrong party and decided to stay. His victory was a rare feel-good moment in the year of COVID, a reminder that joy could still be manufactured under laboratory conditions. Bailey, with his wild hair and the air of a man who might at any moment explain the finer points of ornithology while executing a perfect reverse turn, somehow made the whole enterprise feel less like a production line and more like a shared national hug. For a few weeks the glitterball seemed to spin with genuine purpose. Then the credits rolled, the pandemic ground on, and Strictly returned the following year to its usual business of recycling the same emotional beats with different faces attached.

That business is now looking distinctly threadbare. The current series features a line-up that, while perfectly pleasant, lacks the gravitational pull of earlier years. Soap stars, a hairstylist, a YouTuber, a former footballer – all perfectly respectable citizens, no doubt, but hardly the sort of names that once made the nation rearrange its Saturday evenings. Meanwhile, across the schedule, a far more glittering collection of celebrities has signed up for this year’s edition of The Celebrity Traitors. Michael Sheen, Richard E. Grant, Miranda Hart, Joe Lycett, Maya Jama, James Blunt, Bella Ramsey, Ross Kemp – the sort of roster that once would have been fought over by the Strictly producers with the desperation of a professional dancer eyeing the last free parking space at Television Centre. And the irony is, that the whole murderous enterprise is hosted by Claudia Winkleman, the woman who for years co-presided over Strictly’s sequinned court with a fringe that could double as a national security asset.

One can almost hear the conversation in some agent’s office: “Strictly? Lovely, of course, but the public has seen the lift, the cry, the redemption arc. How about a Scottish castle, some cloaks, and the chance to stab your fellow thespians in the metaphorical back while Claudia watches with that faintly amused expression she perfected wathcing Jill Halfpenny do the jive?” The simple truth is, that The Traitors offers genuine suspense rather than manufactured journey. It trades the predictability of the scoreboard for the delicious uncertainty of human treachery. Celebrities who once might have risked a sprained ankle in the name of a glitterball now prefer the psychological bruises of the round table. Strictly, by contrast, continues to offer the same reassuringly familiar product, as if the audience were a loyal customer who has never noticed that the packaging has grown slightly faded.

Television formats, like ageing ballroom dancers, eventually lose their spring. Strictly Come Dancing has given us two decades of sparkle, the occasional genuine triumph, and one unforgettable Bailey-shaped ray of light in the darkness of 2020. But the steps have become too well-known, the outcomes too telegraphed, the sequins too familiar. The nation, ever restless, has moved on to darker and more interesting games. The glitterball still turns, of course. It just no longer feels as if it is lighting up anything very new.

VIVE LA REVOLUTION? THE CLIPBOARD VS THE MOLOTOV

I have to be honest – a phrase that in political writing usually signals the imminent arrival of a carefully rehearsed falsehood – I do not think even Marine Le Pen can save France now. The statement has a certain melancholy ring to it, like a man announcing that the last bottle of decent claret in the cellar has turned to vinegar. France, after all, has spent the better part of two centuries perfecting the art of being saved, only to discover that the saviours keep mislaying the instructions. Le Pen is the latest candidate for the role of national redeemer, a woman whose supporters regard her as Joan of Arc with better hair and a more realistic grasp of border control. Yet the practical problem remains stubbornly unromantic: how, precisely, does one deport large numbers of people who have already demonstrated a lively talent for setting fire to the furniture?

The current disturbances – those charming outbreaks of civic enthusiasm in which high-school students, professional agitators, and the usual collection of opportunistic pyromaniacs convert educational grievances into urban theatre – offer a useful preview. The French have always treated a riot as a form of national conversation, rather like the British treat a queue. What begins as a complaint about overcrowded classrooms and underpaid teachers rapidly acquires Molotov cocktails, burning bins, and the sort of tear-gas fog that makes the streets of Paris look like a particularly unsuccessful Impressionist painting. The authorities respond with the usual mixture of stern communiqués and rubber bullets. Everyone feels better afterwards, or at least more exhausted. The point is not the specific cause of the present trouble; the point is the readiness with which large groups of people will take to the streets the moment they sense that the state is about to do something they dislike.

Now imagine translating that readiness into the more ambitious project of deportation. The official version, endlessly rehearsed by politicians of every stripe when the cameras are rolling, involves polite notices, civil servants with clipboards, and a series of orderly departures reminiscent of a well-run package holiday. One pictures the deportees being guided toward the airport with the gentle hand gestures one uses to hail a taxi. The reality, as anyone who has watched French urban unrest for more than five minutes will suspect, is unlikely to resemble a travel brochure. People who feel their presence is under threat do not, as a rule, form orderly queues. They form crowds. Crowds form barricades. Barricades attract the attention of the more theatrical elements of society, and before long one is back in the familiar territory of burning cars and broken glass.

Which brings us to the indelicate question of force. Will Le Pen, should she ever find herself in a position to issue orders, possess the necessary resolve – the “balls,” in the vernacular of the original observation – to authorise measures of genuine severity? Shoot-to-kill policies have a bracing clarity on paper. In practice they require a military and a police force prepared to implement them against people who may look, in the heat of the moment, rather like ordinary citizens, or at least like the cousins of ordinary citizens. The French military has historically shown itself capable of remarkable ruthlessness when the occasion demanded, from Algeria to various African adventures that polite society prefers not to discuss at dinner. Whether that capacity survives in an age of smartphones, continuous media scrutiny, and the permanent possibility of being prosecuted by the next government is another matter. Armies, like individuals, develop a sense of self-preservation. Following orders that might later be described as criminal is a career risk few officers are eager to take when the political wind can change with a single election.

The same problem applies, with only minor adjustments of accent and bureaucracy, to Britain. We flatter ourselves that our disorders are more restrained, that we riot with a certain native reserve. In truth we are simply slower to reach the matchbox stage. The underlying arithmetic remains identical: large-scale removal of people who do not wish to be removed will not be accomplished by stern letters from the Home Office and the occasional charter flight. It will require sustained, visible, and potentially violent coercion. The British public has shown itself capable of considerable toughness when it feels sufficiently provoked, but it has also shown a talent for collective amnesia once the television pictures become unpleasant. Politicians know this. They therefore prefer to speak of “robust enforcement” while privately hoping that the problem will somehow solve itself through demography, economics, or divine intervention.

There is a deeper absurdity at work here. Nations that have spent decades constructing elaborate systems of human rights, judicial review, and international obligations suddenly discover that those same systems make decisive action almost impossible. The result is a kind of political theatre in which leaders on the right promise firmness they cannot deliver, while leaders on the left promise compassion they cannot afford. The audience, meanwhile, grows steadily more cynical. France, with its genius for intellectualising its own crises, turns the whole spectacle into a seminar. Britain, with its genius for muddling through, pretends that another committee will eventually produce a solution. In both cases the essential difficulty is the same: the modern democratic state has become extremely good at describing problems and remarkably bad at solving the ones that require the actual use of power.

None of this is to suggest that the alternative – permanent paralysis – is attractive. Societies that lose the capacity to enforce their own borders eventually lose the capacity to enforce much else. The sardonic observer is left with the uncomfortable suspicion that the real choice is not between kindness and cruelty, but between controlled firmness now and uncontrolled chaos later. Whether any politician currently on offer possesses the combination of ruthlessness, legitimacy, and institutional support required to choose the former remains, at best, an open question. Le Pen may yet prove more formidable than her critics allow. Or she may discover, like many before her, that the machinery of the state has developed a quiet genius for refusing to turn when the operator most needs it.

In the end one is reminded of the old observation that the French invent a new political system every generation or so, while the British prefer to keep the old one and simply stop using the bits that no longer work. Both approaches have their charms. Neither, at present, looks equal to the task of persuading large numbers of unwilling people to leave the country without first turning the streets into a stage set for the next round of televised disorder. The taxi, it seems, will not be arriving any time soon. And the hand gestures, however elegant, are unlikely to be enough.

BURNHAM, SHAM DEALS AND THE SMELL OF MONEY

The spectacle of modern British politics has always had something of the music-hall about it, a slightly seedy provincial revue in which the leading man keeps changing his costume while the scenery collapses behind him. One watches, not so much for enlightenment, as for the pure comic timing of the next pratfall. And so, when the latest piece of Manchester City accounting news broke over the nation’s breakfast tables like a poorly aimed custard pie, a certain thought drifted unbidden across the mind: imagine if the same people who have so inventively managed the club’s books managed, by some symmetrical elegance of fate, to manage the government into a similar state of collapse. After the manner in which Andy Burnham ascended to the premiership, the ensuing laughter would be quite difficult to contain. One might even require medical assistance.

Burnham’s arrival at Number 10 possessed all the dignity of a man who has just discovered that the lift doors have closed on his coat-tails. The previous occupant having been ushered out by his own colleagues with the sort of brisk efficiency normally reserved for clearing a table after a particularly messy children’s party, the former Mayor of Greater Manchester stepped forward, northern vowels intact, to accept the keys. No general election, no tedious consultation with the electorate, just a rapid internal rearrangement of the furniture. It was democracy as practised by a committee that has already decided the result and merely requires someone to announce it in a suitably solemn voice. The phrase “disgraceful” feels almost too mild; it was more like watching a magician produce a rabbit from a hat that everyone in the audience knew had been pre-loaded.

And now, in the background, the City affair rumbles on: the independent panel’s findings about sham arrangements, inflated revenues, and the creative interpretation of what constitutes legitimate sponsorship. The club, majority-owned by interests closely associated with Abu Dhabi, faces the possibility of sanctions that could range from the merely embarrassing to the existentially awkward. Burnham, for his part, has expressed genuine concern that the owners might decide the whole enterprise is no longer worth the candle and sell up. One can understand the anxiety. The investment has been considerable; the skyline of east Manchester has been altered; a certain mutual appreciation has grown between the local political establishment and the distant sources of capital. In such circumstances, a man of sensitive disposition might naturally worry about the sudden withdrawal of so much goodwill.

It would be crude, of course, to suggest anything so vulgar as direct remuneration. The modern statesman does not accept brown envelopes; that belongs to a coarser age. Instead one imagines more refined channels: the quiet understanding, the shared interest in “regeneration,” the carefully worded expression of concern when the benefactors appear threatened. Secret backhanders, if they exist at all in this elevated sphere, would surely arrive not as cash but as the subtler currency of influence, access, and the warm glow of knowing that one’s local power base remains underwritten by parties who can write very large cheques indeed. Whether such arrangements have ever crossed Burnham’s path is a question best left to the imagination, and the imagination, once invited, can be an untrustworthy companion. It begins to notice how frequently the same names recur in conversations about Manchester’s future, how solicitous the language becomes when the subject of the owners arises, and how conveniently the national interest and the local interest appear to coincide.

Picture, then, the delicious symmetry: the same inventive financial architecture that sustained a football club through years of competitive dominance somehow transferring its talents to the national accounts. One day the books refuse to balance; the next, the government discovers that its own carefully constructed narrative of competence has developed an alarming series of unexplained transfers. The laughter would be uncontrollable. Not the crude guffaw of the partisan, but the dry, slightly despairing chuckle of the spectator who has seen this particular revue before and knows exactly how the second act ends. Burnham, who rose without the inconvenience of a popular mandate, would find himself explaining to an increasingly sceptical public why the very interests he once praised as partners in building modern Manchester had, in the end, proved rather more expensive than advertised.

Lorne Micheals, creator of Saturday Night Live, once observed that the secret of comedy is timing, and politics, when it is not careful, provides the timing free of charge. The disgraceful manner of the succession, the lingering questions about foreign capital and domestic influence, the faint but persistent aroma of arrangements that prefer to remain off-stage: all of it combines into a scene that almost writes itself. One does not need to allege the receipt of secret payments to notice that the proximity of large sums of money has a curious effect on the clarity of political vision. The eye begins to water slightly; the moral focus softens. And if, by some further comic twist, the club’s difficulties were ever to become the government’s difficulties, the resulting spectacle would be less tragedy than farce of the highest order.

In the meantime we are left with the image of a prime minister who arrived by internal arrangement, surveying a football club whose accounts have been the subject of independent scrutiny, and expressing concern that the money might leave. The rest is implication, and implication, like a good dry white, is best left to breathe. The laughter, should it ever come, will not need encouragement. It will arrive of its own accord, long, sardonic, and entirely deserved.