Once Upon a Time in . . . Westminster

This week the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, compared Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit strategy to the catchphrase of Little Britain character Vicky Pollard: ‘yeah but, no but’. Mark

Spencer, the Conservative Chief Whip, released a picture of himself dressed as a Peaky Blinder. A Twitter account called ‘UKAssembleNow’ is promoting opponents of no-deal Brexit as Avengers,

Guardians of the Galaxy and Jedi Knights. And last week’s Sunday Times featured a graphic in which the main characters of the Brexit drama are depicted as Star Wars characters. Indeed,

referring to opponents of no-deal Brexit as the ‘Rebel Alliance’ – in reference to Star Wars – is now mainstream. Is Brexit a Hollywood movie, a period drama, a satirical comedy – or all

three?

Perhaps a more fitting comparison for British politics today is a Quentin Tarantino movie. After all, they both have zeitgeist quality, are surprisingly violent and don’t seem to end. And

the latest Tarantino flick, Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, is set in a time and place quite similar to our own: late 1960s America. A time haunted by political assassinations? Check.

Generational and culture wars? Check. A population glued to their screens? Check. A political leader seen by many of his own people as a dictator? Check.

Of course, the backdrop today, as back then, is the spectre of a costly political war which, even in the event of a seemingly impossible victory, comes at great national cost. For the US in

the 1960s, this was the Vietnam War. For the UK today, it is Brexit. Public figures including the historian Richard Davenport-Hines and journalist Matthew d’Ancona have already made this

comparison. Like the American war effort in Vietnam, a Brexit solution which respects the Referendum and satisfies a majority of the population seems next to impossible.

As prime minister, Boris Johnson has invoked the ‘can do’ spirit of 1960s America and Dominic Cummings’s blog reveals his great admiration for that decade’s NASA space programme. Yet,

despite the moon landing – and largely thanks to Vietnam – America in the late 1960s was a time of assassinations, campus riots, mass protests, rebellious hippies and murderous cults. One

can’t help but feel that Britain under Boris Johnson is more akin to the end of that decade than the optimism of the JFK era.

An event which Tarantino’s film toys with is the brutal murder of the pregnant Hollywood actress Sharon Tate in 1969 by the Manson Family, a cult group of mostly young, middle-class women

who gave up their lives to live on a commune and follow the teachings of Charles Manson. To be sure, in Brexit we are yet to see such insanity or brutality (though lest we forget the murder

of Jo Cox in 2016), but the hysteria and anger are certainly there. As we keep seeing on the news, knife crime in London is at an all-time high, and Home Office figures show that hate crimes

have risen exponentially since 2016 across the country, while spending on MPs’ security more than doubled in 2017-18. The screams from protestors by College Green, the picnicking Brexit

protestors and the endless Twitter spats all demonstrate that we have plenty of rebels without a cause today too.

And what about how violent and deranged political language has become? Talk of ‘traitors’ and ‘backstabbing’ now seems meagre compared to the so-called ‘jihad on SpAds’, Rachel Johnson’s

criticism of her ‘Isis-like’ family, and Boris Johnson’s proclamation that he would rather ‘die in a ditch’ than delay Brexit. Just watch the ex-Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq on The Jeremy

Vine Show, in which she asked a fellow guest whether they would still want Brexit ‘if the new term [of the deal] was that everyone’s head gets chopped off?’.

British politics really has come to resemble a Tarantino movie. The media revels in drama (don’t forget that Brexit sells papers and generates clicks), and our political class are more than

happy to be the stars. The Sunday Times’s political editor, who called the paper’s account of the 2016 Referendum All Out War, recently polled Twitter for potential titles for his next

instalment, to which several people responded (including an MP) with ‘Armageddon’. The Sun’s political editor referred to the impasse in parliament this week as ‘trench warfare’. Even Jeremy

Paxman has resorted to profanities – his latest documentary is called ‘Why Are Our Politicians So Crap?’.

The anger, the hysteria, the sense of impending doom – it really does feel like we’re living at the end of a helter-skelter decade. In Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, Hollywood actors fritter

away their time while the Manson Family plot their murder. As film critic Robbie Collin put it: ‘we know that these people are hurtling towards a reckoning, the whole town is hurtling

towards a reckoning, but they don’t, they’re not aware of it’. As the clock ticks towards our ‘do or die’ moment, the same could be said of Brexit Britain.

Of course, America did get back on its feet after the chaos of the 1960s, but only once it had finally withdrawn from Vietnam and its president had resigned.

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