Marmite Boris video: Clever communication drives his opponents mad

Armando Iannucci was so repelled on seeing Boris Johnson’s innovative new campaign video that he tweeted an expletive. In the video Boris wanders the floor of CCHQ, and heads into the office kitchen to make tea, answering rapid fire questions on the election. It cleverly blends the personal and the political – does he like Marmite and what is his favourite band? – with messages on Brexit and the election.

I’m not going to link to it here. It will only encourage the politicians. Go and look it up if you want to.

It is disappointing, however, although not surprising given how furious many middle class media people are about Brexit and the continued existence of the Tory party, that one of Britain’s finest satirists should be baffled by what Johnson is up to in the video. Iannucci was key to the success of the Day Today series spoofing TV news in the early 1990s that, it seems, is still used as an instruction manual by trainers at Sky News.

The anti-conservative groupthink is now so strong that he seems to have missed the ingenuity of what Johnson, a famously successful election campaigner, is up to. The directness, humour and faked informality, coupled with a contemporary digital aesthetic, sets a new standard in political communication in the race for Number 10. Corbyn tried similar stuff in 2017, but Johnson is much cleverer and he has a more winning style.

Anyone either well-disposed to Johnson (a lot of Conservatives and a lot of Leavers) or anyone persuadable that he might be just about okay, when compared to Jeremy Corbyn, will watch that video and like it or at least find it mildly amusing and humanising.

There is another reason the video works. Theresa May isn’t in it. Try imagining a two minute film in which Theresa is filmed wandering into the office kitchen:

T May, standing awkwardly next to the fridge: “I have made it very clear that I am not going to open the fridge.”

May continues to stand next to fridge, looking furious.

Advisor steps into shot, opens fridge.

T May: “Thank you. In the fridge we have milk. Milk is very important in any ordinary kitchen. Milk is especially useful if you like tea with milk in it. I like tea. Not always with milk, but very often yes. But what really matters here is that…”

Drones on for 30 seconds about burning injustices.

Look, the Tories are trying to say in the Boris video, May is gone and the nightmare is over. We’ll see about that. If they win the Tories could be extremely unpopular quite quickly, as John Major’s crew was after 1992. More on that possibility another time.

Back to the here and now, to the delight of the worried Tories, the cheap to produce Boris video has become a media sensation, helpfully amplified by his critics sharing it on social media and shouting about how terrible it is.

Several prominent Boris-haters even leapt on his claim that he likes listening to The Clash, which he does.

How on earth, they asked, could he claim to appreciate The Clash when they were left-wing and had written songs such as Something About England (from the ill-starred triple album Sandinista project). Mick Jones sings in that dystopian track of immigrants being traduced. One of the most compelling themes in the work of The Clash is their commitment to anti-racism. Their contemporaries the Specials were also pioneers.

But The Clash combined being great with being hilariously wrong about all sorts of stuff. (They were also inconsistent in their output, a third of it is rubbish). But you don’t need to share the politics of The Clash to enjoy the best of their music. Political alignment is a ridiculous test to set for enjoying and understanding any band.

The Clash were simply wrong about the Cold War, like most bands of that era, and their hate figure, “Fatcher”, was right that tyrannical Communism would go bust if sufficient pressure were applied. It did, thirty years ago. Lots of people before the Wall came down sang dreary protest songs about “freedom” while campaigning against strong Western defences and high spending on conventional and nuclear arms. Yet those politicians on the centre-right and the old Labour right who fought Communism actually did something about it and helped deliver freedom in Eastern Europe by allying with  genuine freedom fighters and the brave Poles and Czechs and Hungarians and many more battling for liberty.

Despite all this, and despite Joe Strummer being a public school leftie with poor taste in regimes, London Calling by The Clash is still a great album, even with the presence of a few atonal stinkers.

Johnson also said that he listens a lot to the Stones. No wonder Boris loves them. There his politics are aligned. The Stones were radicals when it came to mores in the 1960s. But they quickly abandoned street-fighting man agit-prop nonsense after the Altamont free concert disaster in December 1969, where the 1960s ” let it all hang out” hippy dream died. A fan was stabbed to death in sight of the stage. Little more than a year later the Stones were tax exiles and ruthlessly focussed on keeping the money they made from their early 1970s masterpieces and increasingly lucrative, if hollow, arena tours.

Boris will also like that Sir Mick Jagger is a big Eurosceptic and notoriously one of the most financially conservative men in Britain, and thus no fan of Corbyn.

His band are also proof there was life before the EU. In 1971 the Stones managed to move to France to record their double album Exile on Mainstreet, in Keith’s rented villa with a doomed Gram Parsons hanging out. Around the Stones encampment in the South of France that year, before Britain joined the EEC, there was a lot of free movement, but mainly of drug dealers.