Politics "more cock-up than conspiracy" says Brighton-bound satirist

Matt Chorley has spent the past 17 years in Westminster seeing up close how politics works… or doesn’t.
Matt ChorleyMatt Chorley
Matt Chorley

After the sell-out success of his first tour This Is Not Normal, the award-winning Times columnist and Times Radio presenter is back with a new show exploring who really calls the shots. Is the Prime Minister actually in charge or at the mercy of the opposition, backbenchers, lobbyists, the media, spin doctors, his wife or the Queen?

Matt brings his tour to Brighton’s Komedia on Monday, March 21 – and yes, he’s fully conscious of the freedom that that entails.

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“Standing on stage and having the freedom to take the **** is a very important freedom, alongside the freedom to protest. Given the background of the president of Ukraine, the ability to say what you like about the people that run our country is really crucial. I’ve stood on stage and said that pretty well all our leaders are hopeless and that in itself is an important freedom.”

Of course the situation in Ukraine is an overarching context: “When you’ve got that situation then me making jokes about birthday cakes is missing the point a bit.”

Matt has been a Westminster-based political journalist since 2005 “when politics was boring”, and it has gradually got “madder” as he worked his way through the Press Association, Western Morning News, Independent on Sunday, MailOnline and The Times, where he the Red Box daily email and now writes a column on Saturdays.

Since June 2020, he has presented the mid-morning show on Times Radio, Monday to Friday 10am-1pm, including features like PMQs Unpacked, If I Ruled The World and the popular quiz, Can You Get To No10?

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Matt will draw on all his experience to show us the funny side of politics.

“The comedy all sort of happened by accident some extent. I was working at The Times as a reporter. I joined The Times in January 2016 and politics has been pretty insane since then. I was writing the Red Box political email which was analysis and commentary and jokes and jokey takes on things and someone said would I do an hour of political comedy at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. It was one of those things that had been in the back of my mind and I did it. That was in 2018 and then after that I did my first tour. It went very well. I just think that the conditions could not have been better. It was in the light of Brexit and it was at a time when people were taking a lot of interest in politics and it was just like a soap opera, me saying who the goodies were and who the baddies were, saying this person hates that person for this reason or whatever.

“The transition from doing news reports, straight news, to being a commentator and doing the analysis and the more satirical stuff was quite a big change. The big difference is that when you’re not being someone who is trying to get stories from politicians, you have more freedom to be rude about them and be honest about them without worrying about when you’re next having to going to phone them to get a story.

“When I was writing news as well as my political column on a Saturday which was basically taking the ****, there was a bit more tension. It varies how thick-skinned politicians are. Some of the politicians would just go very quiet and you get struck off the Christmas card list but there are others that just try to laugh along with you.”

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So are they all ghastly and in it for the money? Are they all rubbish?

“My personal view is that it is more cock-up than conspiracy, more incompetence than something malign going on. You have to think that if you ask someone in the street to name some politicians, they probably only come up with a handful and yet there are 650 MPs in the House of Commons and a lot of them are just quietly getting on with work, doing their job in the constituency, doing their government whatever and they don’t make the news and they don’t make for particularly good jokes either. But I would say that politics is very important and that people should take an interest in it.

“If people say it’s boring, then if I can make a joke about it and get them interested in it, then that has to be a good thing. I am not seeking to change anybody’s mind. I’m just using my experience to say that these people are running the country and that some of them are really quite funny!”

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