The Buggles, those forgotten prophets of 1979, told us video killed the radio star. What they lacked was the courage to finish the sentence: it also disembowelled dignity, castrated seriousness, and left the body politic performing an endless, desperate lap-dance for the algorithm. Yesterday provided the definitive demonstration. While the Middle East teetered on the edge of a conflict that even the most optimistic Foreign Office mandarin is describing as “rather concerning,” more than forty Members of Parliament gathered in the sunlit atrium of Portcullis House. Their purpose was not to debate, legislate, or even pretend to understand the gathering storm. No. They had come to dance. Under the expert tutelage of Angela Rippon – that ageless doyenne who once delivered the news with the gravity of a hanging judge – and sundry other emissaries from the glittering demimonde of Strictly Come Dancing, the Speaker of the House of Commons himself, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, took to the floor like a man who had mistaken Armageddon for the Blackpool Tower Ballroom.
One pictures the scene with the sort of appalled fascination usually reserved for motorway pile-ups. Briefcases cast aside, red boxes momentarily abandoned, the faint squeak of patent leather on polished stone as grown adults – including the Shadow Culture Secretary, a Conservative backbencher or two, and a fresh-minted Green – practised their Latin walks and Cuban breaks. All this while emergency flights were being scrambled from Oman and the Prime Minister prepared for questions he would no doubt answer with the usual masterclass in constructive vagueness. The stated rationale? “Promoting health and wellbeing.”
One wonders what precise ailment afflicts our legislators that can only be cured by learning to spot their turns as the world learns to duck and cover. Perhaps it is the creeping suspicion that their actual jobs have become optional. This is not mere bad optics. This is a philosophical declaration, delivered in sequins and 4/4 time. It announces, with choreographed clarity, that in contemporary Britain the political class has given up any pretence of being serious people at serious moments. They have become content creators first and representatives second. The cha-cha is not an aberration; it is the logical endpoint of a system that rewards visibility over vigilance, performance over prudence. While history prepares to rhyme with something far nastier than 1939, our tribunes have decided the nation needs better core strength and improved posture.
One almost admires the audacity. It takes a special kind of tone-deafness to treat the brink of war as an opportunity for light entertainment – and then wrap the whole grotesque exercise in the sanctimonious gauze of public health. The comparison with Nero is now so obvious it feels almost vulgar to make it, yet make it we must. At least the original fiddler had the minimal decency to confine his performance to the palace and to accompany himself. Our version has outsourced the soundtrack to the BBC, invited the cameras in, recreated the famous Strictly goodbye flourish with a former newsreader, and then congratulated itself on its commitment to national resilience. Sir Lindsay twirling under the glass atrium is not charming; it is grotesque. It is the visual equivalent of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic while insisting the band play on – except the band has been replaced by a glitterball, a former EastEnders actress barking instructions about rhythm, and the quiet, lethal knowledge that the clip will trend before the first missile has even left its silo.
What makes the spectacle particularly poisonous is the timing. This is not some quiet Friday afternoon lark during a period of tedious normalcy. This is a nation facing genuine peril being treated to the sight of its supposed leaders perfecting their competitive foxtrot for the evening news. One can imagine the average citizen – the nurse on night shift, the small business owner staring at rising insurance premiums, the parent wondering what sort of world their children will inherit – watching this footage and experiencing something close to existential whiplash.
Is this really the best we can do? Is this the summit of our political imagination? Governance reduced to its purest modern form: not legislation, but likes. Not leadership, but content. The dispatch box has been replaced by the dance floor, and the nation is expected to applaud the transformation. The deeper cut is this: the dance is not harmless. It is symptomatic of a ruling class that has internalised the values of celebrity culture so completely that it can no longer distinguish between statesmanship and showmanship. They have learned the lesson of the age with impressive thoroughness: in the attention economy, being seen to do something – anything – is preferable to the quiet, unglamorous business of actually doing something. Seriousness does not trend. Gravitas gets no retweets. Far easier to master the rumba than to master a coherent foreign policy. Far safer to shake parliamentary hips than to risk an actual decision.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when British public life still retained a certain austere dignity. Crises were met with grim resolve, not jazz hands. The moving image, when it captured our leaders, showed them at work rather than at play. That Britain understood something our current crop of performers have forgotten: that some moments demand stillness, silence, and the saving grace of not making an exhibition of oneself. Instead we have this: a parliament that has become a branch of light entertainment, a Speaker who appears to believe the road to national resilience runs through the tango, and a political class so desperate for relevance that it will dance while the world burns if it thinks the clip might go viral.
The Buggles were wrong after all. Video did not merely kill the radio star. It killed the Republic, and taught the corpse to do the cha-cha first.