Month: March 2015

By Steven Fielding

James Graham is that precious thing: a dramatist who takes politics seriously. Unlike his peers he does not use politics as the excuse for cheap jokes that exploit Britons’ ill-informed cynicism about those we elect to govern in our name.

His 2012 play This House looked at how Labour and Conservative whips were forced to work together during the minority Wilson and Callaghan governments of the 1970s. It was a great success – at least with National Theatre audiences, an overwhelmingly middle class and mature group.

As in This House, so in his first television drama, Coalition, broadcast on Channel 4 on Saturday March 28. Here Graham shows how essentially decent men (and a woman) struggle with an almost impossible situation to make representative democracy work. In the case of Coalition he focuses on the five frenetic days between the 2010 election result and the formation of Britain’s first post-war coalition government, the beginning of what was sold as a new kind of politics.

By Matthew Bailey and Philip Cowley 

In the face of an instantaneous, 24-hour, multi-platform media it is possible to forget that once upon a time we had to wait for our news. Before Twitter and Facebook, before even television, there was the cinema newsreel.

One of the most famous of the companies producing these films was Pathé. Originally set up in France in 1896, Pathé were soon capturing on film slices of everyday Victorian life as well as very public occasions such as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations or the funeral of William Gladstone. By 1908 Pathé had developed the concept of the newsreel, with the first British one produced in 1909. Inevitably the rise of television eventually did for the cinema newsreel – Pathé put out its last edition of Pathé News in early-1970 – but in the intervening period they had captured many iconic moments and reported stories both big and small. Among these were the General Elections of the era, and in the lead up to this year’s election we look back at some of the Pathé footage connected to them.

By Sean Kemp

Coalition, Channel 4’s dramatisation of events during the post-election negotiations in 2010 was probably never going to satisfy me. As an adviser to Nick Clegg at the time I had a ringside seat for some of the programme’s key moments: watching Paddy Ashdown’s speech to a gathering of Lib Dem parliamentarians, or waiting anxiously during another agonising call to Gordon Brown. At other times, like the negotiation meetings themselves or the Rose Garden press conference, I was just an anxious spectator watching the TV and waiting for my colleagues to come back and tell me how it went.

The programme could never truly reveal what that time felt like for those who found themselves in some way caught up in it. The sensation of watching history unfold alongside the selfish, anxious thrill of knowing the future of you and your friends could be utterly transformed by the result is not something the show could, or was even trying to, capture.

By Philip Cowley

The news that the Government is to table a last minute amendment to the procedure for the re-election of the Speaker has enlivened the dog days of the parliament. The current procedure for the defenestration of an incumbent Speaker requires MPs to do so publicly; the proposed change will introduce a secret ballot.  There are good summaries of the issue from the BBC (here) and the Commons library (here).

When discussing today’s vote, it is worth distinguishing between the principle (should there be a secret ballot or not?), the method (why is it being done now, and in this way?), and the motivation (why do it?). Much of the discussion thus far has tended to mix these three up, depending on the outcome a particular individual desires (which tends to depend on whether they like the Speaker, John Bercow, or not).