This week in Brexitland, October 5, 2023

In the wake of this year’s disastrous Conservative Party conference, I ask the question: If the last five Tory prime ministers were Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, which ones would they be?

The Conservative party conference, which finished yesterday, was a total disaster. As badly as things had been going for Rishi Sunak up until this past week in Manchester, I felt like there was some veneer of respectability still there. Small, but identifiable. A very English sort of quiet desperation that lingered. No longer - Liz Truss and Nigel Farage were the “stars” of the conference, and you couldn’t have picked two worse people if you’re in Number 10. The mask is now off. The Tories have become a shoddy version of UKIP.

With the fact the the Conservative party has become totally ridiculous and lost all of its remaining marbles in mind, I wanted to have a little fun this week and ask the question: if each of the last five Tory MPs, including the incumbent, were an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which one would they be? I think I have come up with the definitive answers.

David Cameron would be Cats. You have to be a little in awe of the success generated but something about him/it always seemed a little off to most people. Like there was a lot more show biz than substance going on there. As if, when you scraped away the thin veneer of glamour and took away the two best songs, there wasn’t a whole lot going on.

This was eventually ruthlessly exposed - for Cats, by the diabolical film adaptation, for Cameron, the EU referendum.

Theresa May, Aspects of Love. Kind of turgid and workaday, often in the running for the worst Andrew Lloyd Webber musical/British prime minister ever but rarely gets called such, simply because there are other candidates that people hate with much more venom. Both the musical and the premiership lasted impressively long considering the poor reviews.

Boris Johnson is Phantom of the Opera. A big pile of puff with little substance that nonetheless still managed to be wildly popular, at least on the surface of things, for ages. Extremely inward looking and self-involved. Eventually started to feel dated.

Truss could only be Starlight Express. Something ridiculous about anthropomorphic trains/a pro-growth agenda that squashed growth. The kind of thing that made a lot of people wonder, “What were they thinking when they did that? Were there a lot of hard drugs involved?”

Finally, we come to Rishi Sunak. Our current prime minister is like Jesus Christ Superstar if you fed the basic elements of the musical into Chat GPI and then asked the AI application to do a complete re-write of it. What would come out the other end would be in that “corridor of creepy”, a place where something has the resemblance of an organic thing that is human enough to be recognisable as such, but with several key elements missing, making you feel a little queasy upon contact. This isn’t hard to imagine. Just picture Sunak doing his robotic media rounds thing using the lyrics to “What’s the Buzz?” as the basis. You’re doing it right now, I know you are. Even if you don’t know the song, you can picture something exactly like it if you’ve ever watched Sunak give an interview.

This week, it’s Labour conference. Even if Starmer gets steaming drunk before his conference speech and then starts telling rambling stories about horses for forty minutes, laced with profanity and incoherent pop cultural references (“Starin’ at that fuckin’ Clydesdale was like dreamin’ about Shakin’ Stevens pukin’ on a VHS copy of On Golden Pond”), his conference will still end up being more of a success than the Conservative one just gone. Perhaps there’s an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in it all.

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