Politically homeless? You’re having a laugh
Review: comedian Matt Forde’s reheated Blairism has little humour or self-reflection
At one point in Matt Forde’s Politically Homeless (Quercus, 2020), the comedian and broadcaster laments how, “Nostalgia had been politicised.” He is referring to Brexit of course. However, if this book isn’t an exercise in political nostalgia I don’t know what is.
In fact in large chunks it’s more or less a love letter to Tony Blair and New Labour, to all who were part of it, and to those who admired and tried to emulate it. The ‘politically homeless’ of the title refers not to being literally politically homeless, but to the way that him and his fellow travellers (from Blair to David Miliband, David Cameron and George Osborne) no longer run the country and can get people to do what they tell them.
It is a lament about political success turning to failure rather than not having a political grouping to be part of. The book’s endorsements, faithfully informing us about how brilliant and funny it is, are enough to tell you that. Here we find such political outsiders as . . . Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, J.K. Rowling, Al Murray, Gyles Brandreth, Richard Osman and, bizarrely, Anthony Scaramucci, who denounced Donald Trump’s administration while serving a very brief stint as White House Director of Communications.