July 11, 2024

“Lloyd George Knew My Father”

Back in the early noughties, Britain was a different place. It was governed by a Labour Party led by a barrister with asymmetric hair, whose attempts to appeal to the centre ground of British politics had recently garnered a parliamentary majority of around 170, albeit from a near record low turnout. Meanwhile on the newspaper’s back pages, rather than its front, expectations and discontent were both high as the England men’s national football team played in the knock out stages of a competition under someone who, while statistically their most successful manager, had not quite managed to win anything yet. Many of those same newspapers also devoted column inches to Russell T Davies’ newly rebooted version of Doctor Who, with many critical of its overt diversity, including an episode in which Doctor Who himself kissed a roguish male anti-hero in an episode set in British history.

It was a whole other world. No, hang on, let me rethink that.

A while ago I wrote an article about what the relationship, if any, was between UK Prime Ministers and the Doctor Who made and transmitted during their administrations. It’s out of date now, of course, but you can find it in the archive, although several bits of anecdote from it are likely to recur in the following post, even if deployed for different purposes. (Regular readers will be aware of the drill, I suspect.) Twentieth century Doctor Who rarely engaged in party politics, except through analogy and metaphor. Multiple villains in 1980s stories are clear analogues of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher¹ but no one speaks her name out loud at any point in the series until 2006. The monster in The Sun Makers (1977) is openly inspired by author Robert Holmes’ ire at then Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey² but he’s never actually come up in conversation in the show at all.

Three historical Prime Ministers are mentioned by name or title in old money Doctor Who, Lord Salisbury³, Andrew Bonar-Law⁴ and the Duke of Wellington⁵. The latter of those three is only referred to by the nickname “The Iron Duke” and by the toy soldier Sergeant Rugg in The Dancing Floor episode of The Celestial Toymaker (1966). There the context is his prowess as a military commander, and I’m not sure he should even count at all for the purposes of what comes in a few paragraphs time. The first two are mentioned in the same episode, Part Three of Horror of Fang Rock (1977) and in the same sentence, by the MP Colonel James Skinsale.⁶

Twentieth century Doctor Who also features between one and two fictional Prime Ministers. A PM called “Jeremy” appears briefly as an almost off-screen presence in The Green Death (1973), and speaks to regular character Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) by phone. This is universally acknowledged, not least by Barry Letts, who co-wrote and produced the serial, to be a reference to then Liberal Party Leader, and future RTD mini-series subject, Jeremy Thorpe. The suburban Buddhist Letts was a Liberal voter, and this was a bit of wish fulfilment on his part, in a story intended by his production team to be set an unspecified number of years in the near future.

Slightly over two years later, in Terror of the Zygons Part Four (1975) Lethbridge-Stewart would receive another Prime Ministerial phone call, this time from someone he addressed simply as “Madam”. In the script, the Prime Minister is a man (although not necessarily “Jeremy”) and the story was made when the UK had not yet had a single female Prime Minister.

In later years Courtney would suggest that either he or director Douglas Camfield had meant to imply that Shirley Williams, then “Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection”⁷ in Harold Wilson’s fourth Labour ministry, would one day be Prime Minister. But this is rather dubious. She had been suggested as a possible future Prime Minister in the press⁸ but by the time this scene was recorded on Wednesday 24th April, Margaret Thatcher had been Leader of the Opposition for two months. Wilson’s administration had a parliamentary majority of three, and was tipped to lose the next general election even though it was not due for another four years. (Which, under James Callaghan, not Shirley Williams, it eventually did.)

“Madam” in that scene is a topical joke predicated on the adult section of the audience understanding of the weak position of the then current government. It’s the equivalent of the moment in The Giggle when Lethbridge-Stewart’s daughter Kate says that “Even the Prime Minister can’t walk into UNIT” only to be told “Especially the Prime Minister” by her scientific advisor Morris, in a scene written during a period where UK Prime Ministers turned over at an unprecedented and frankly embarrassing rate.

In which context, it seems fair to point out that Camfield, whom almost everyone seems to agree prompted the change, was firmly on the political right; and that Courtney himself was, by the time he’d turned that change into convention anecdotage was, like Williams herself, a Liberal Democrat with an open disdain for Margaret Thatcher; both things that doubtless had an impact on how he chose to tell the story.

So the Prime Minister of Terror of the Zygons is either (and like that of The Green Death) a real person who never became Prime Minister, or just a real life Prime Minister who is never named. You pays your money and you takes your choice, although as we know from Tooth and Claw (2006) that Thatcher was Prime Minister in Doctor Who continuity as well as the real world, I know where my money’s going.⁹

Twenty first century Doctor Who has featured far more Prime Ministerial mentions and far more overtly fictional Prime Ministers as characters than that shown in the twentieth century. Aliens of London / World War Three part of the first block of the series shot this century, is partially set in 10 Downing Street, and it goes for broke. It features the corpse of an assassinated fictional Prime Minister, Christopher Ecceleston’s Doctor merrily reminiscing about boozing with David Lloyd-George ¹⁰ and the alien Jorcassa Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen masquerading as Acting Prime Minister ¹¹ Joseph Green.

The story also features the first appearance of Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North, a backbencher who has, by the time of the 2005 Christmas Special, become television Doctor Who’s first speaking fictional Prime Minister. Despite knowing that Jones is destined by history to win two more elections, and be remembered as “the architect of Britain’s golden age”, the Doctor removes her from office after being appalled by her actions during The Christmas Invasion.

Her specific act, vaporising the retreating Sycorax ship, has echoes of the Belgrano scandal which occurred during Thatcher’s first Conservative ministry, while the collapse of the promise of a golden age promised by three consecutive victories for a self-described progressive party can easily be read as expressing disillusionment with Tony Blair’s New Labour government following the 2003 invasion of Iraq (which is satirically alluded to in Aliens of London).

The death of a Prime Minister during Blair’s ministry could even be seen as a kind of displaced revenge for that disappointment, a revenge of a kind many in Britain might have sympathised with, but for the fact that the corpse of the dead PM of Aliens of London looks about as little like Tony Blair as someone could while also being a middle aged white man in a suit and tie.

Blair “getting elected” is later mentioned by companion Mickey Smith in Rise of the Cybermen (2006) and Rose doesn’t reply that she found him dead in a cupboard, seemingly confirming both that Blair was Prime Minister in Doctor Who and that he wasn’t assassinated during the previous season. Later in the same run Winston Churchill is mentioned as being Prime Minister in The Idiot’s Lantern set in 1953, and he subsequently appears several times beginning with Victory of the Daleks (2010) in stories set partially in the 1940s. Towards the end of Peter Capaldi’s time as Doctor Who Knock Knock (2017) has Harriet Jones invoked as a previous Prime Minister, along with Thatcher (again), Harold Wilson (1964-1970, 1974-76) and Anthony Eden (1955-56).

All of which means that at roughly this point, the political history of the Doctor Who universe became inarguably both very different to, and also explicitly more intertwined with, that of real life. It was only going to get more so, with more fictional Prime Ministers, more mentions of real life Prime Ministers and deliberate attempts to make sure that the fictional Prime Ministers who did appear were later referred to as historical figures.

Interestingly, this is also a point in television history when fans of popular United States electoral college fan fiction and then E4 staple The West Wing were prone to construct elaborate theories as to why the electoral cycle in the programme was out of sync with that in real life, when that in real life was (is) mandated by the constitution.

They’d worry over whether Lyndon Johnson ¹² (mentioned in dialogue once) or Ronald Reagan¹³ was the last real life US President to exist, or at least be President, in “The West Wing timeline” and if so, whether they were President for the same years as they were in real life. They’d then post detailed theories on the internet before, in later life, going into political punditry or politics itself, and go on television and do stupid things like warning against electing a Labour “Supermajority” a term which, in the context of United Kingdom parliamentary elections, has no meaning at all.

In terms of what those many The West Wing blogs called “the timeline" split”, i.e. the point where its history diverges from ours, the first difference between Doctor Who politics and real life has to happen before Thorpe’s premiership, but how? (This is also a question that’s not helped by the contradictions over when the UNIT era stories are actually set.) Perhaps Wilson’s Labour Party won the general election held in 1970, which in real life it was widely expected to, but didn’t. Returned to office, Wilson had to deal with the OPEC crash and his party splitting over Europe in government, rather than opposition. There was not a Heath government, and Wilson’s period in office was continuous, but ended earlier.

Perhaps something the SDP split of the 1980s happened a decade earlier, with the pro European wings of both the Conservative and Labour parties eventually rowing in behind the charismatic Thorpe, maybe even leading to a change of party or parties of government between elections, as was common in the 19th century? Thorpe’s coalition governs during the late 1970s, and is perhaps brought down by the revelations about Thorpe’s private life that ended his career in real life. A more right wing Conservative Party then wins power roughly when it did in reality in the aftermath. Or maybe even Thatcher, who was on the pro-European wing of her party in the 1970s, succeeded Thorpe without an election, before moving to a single party government after one held roughly as the new decade began.

Either way she become Prime Minister between the TARDIS leaving in Robot (1974/5) and its return in Terror of the Zygons (1975). (In The Ark in Space (1975) Harry Sullivan is surprised at “one of the fair sex being the top of the totem pole”, a remark he’s unlikely to make if he lives in a country with a female head of government.) After that, perhaps political history flows more as we remember it for the rest of the decade? There is, after all, a real life “No third term for Thatcher” poster visible in Father’s Day (2005) set in 1987.

Tony Blair comes to power at some point and is out of office before 2005. Blair joined the Labour Party in 1975, and stood as a parliamentary candidate before his eventually becoming an MP in 1983. Perhaps he becomes a national figure earlier, is PM for less time, and retires even younger than he did in real life. It’s his successor (who is also visibly not Gordon Brown) who is killed by the Slitheen, and he is followed in quick succession by the Slitheen Joseph Green impersonator and Harriet Jones, who reluctantly identifies herself with “the babes”, the media name for the unprecedented influx of female MPS after the New Labour landslide of 1997. Which maybe happened five years earlier in (what it seems the iplayer wants us to call) “the Whoniverse”.

Aliens of London and The Christmas Invasion are both set in 2006, a year after their transmission, following the “one year later” gap created by the Doctor returning Rose home twelve months, not twelve hours, after she left in Rose. This is something that, it seems, remains broadly true of all “contemporary” stories for the rest of the first Russell T Davies era. Thus Jones rises and falls during 2006 and the general election depicted in the 2007 series takes place in the summer of 2008.

What’s interesting is that, whereas Letts had certainly invoked Thorpe, and Camfield seemingly invoked Thatcher, as a kind of wish fulfilment, Davies’ generally despairing view of human nature instead makes his Prime Ministers nightmarish. While Jones redeems herself against the Daleks in Journey’s End (2008), Davies has made repeatedly clear that he regards her actions in The Christmas Invasion as morally wrong and the Doctor’s actions in bringing her down understandable, even if they open the way for someone even worse.

Because at that 2008 election, Harold Saxon becomes Prime Minister at the head of an unnamed insurgent new party, one in part made up of parliamentary defectors from traditional parties across the Commons. Perhaps the Master is inspired by the tactics of the Thorpe coalition of the 1970s. (He does after all kill a dog onscreen in The Mark of the Rani (1985).)

Interestingly, while Saxon had been a minister in the previous government, he only becomes Prime Minister at the election, which only seems a plausible series of events if his defectors follow him out of the government, they join with some opposition parties, and force a general election. It’s not hard to imagine a weak (Labour?) Prime Minister who followed Jones going on to lose a 2008 election, prompted by a parliamentary vote of no confidence. Perhaps this is the Prime Minister whom Captain Jack speaks disparagingly of in Torchwood: Greeks Bearing Gifts, with Saxon the Leader of the Opposition mentioned in the same sentence.

(This would have to be after Saxon has walked out of the party still in government, and become Leader of the Opposition by drawing enough members from across the House to his banner to form a new second largest party mid-parliament. An unlikely but not procedurally impossible manoeuvre under the standing orders of the House of Commons and the Ministerial Salaries Act 1975, which gives the decision as to who is LOTO in the case of any ambiguity to the Speaker of the House of Commons, and makes said decision unappealable.)

Harold Saxon is, of course, the Master, and he’s assassinated live on television by his wife within days of his election. Memories of him would linger. A year or so later he was still so well known that a homeless man known as “Ginger” would remember not just that a Prime Minister had “gone mad” but also his name, while the Doctor’s companion Bill Potts, who would have been a teenager during his brief ministry, would have recognised the Master had he not disguised himself when confronting her in World Enough and Time (2017). Saxon would be regarded as an important historical figure at least as late as 2119, when Alice O’Donnell described the 1980s as a “pre-Harold Saxon’ era (in Before The Flood [2015]).

The post Harold Saxon era begins, probably, with Brian Green, the Prime Minister seen in Torchwood: Children of Earth set around a year later. Given that Saxon gassed his cabinet before his own assassination, there’s probably another election at some point in that year, and given that Jones was almost certainly Labour, and Saxon initially a Labour MP, it’s likely that the single party government seen in this series is a Conservative or at a push a Liberal Democrat one and not just because Green is vain and vapid, a man concerned only with how he comes across, not with saving lives or even basic governance.

After the disaster of Children of Earth, it’s implied Green will be pushed out of office by his Home Secretary Denise Riley, who in some ways seems based on Theresa May, who was Home Secretary in the year in which Children of Earth is implicitly set (2010) but not in the year in which it was made, and who would eventually become Prime Minister in 2016. As is so often the case with May, there are echoes of Thatcher here.

The next time we see a fictional Prime Minister, it’s in Revolution of the Daleks, and Jo Patterson (Harriet Walter) is another, distinct, Theresa May analogue. But rather than predictive, she’s retrospective. Because while May was Prime Minister when the story was written, by the time it was transmitted she’d been out of power for more than a year. But what year? While May was Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019, we can’t be entirely sure of when Revolution of the Daleks, made during Chris Chibnall’s time as Doctor Who’s “show runner” is set. The events of Resolution, shown on New Year’s Day 2019 are explicitly said to be a year before some events of Revolution of the Daleks, which was shown two years later on New Year’s Day 2021, but it’s unclear exactly how much time passes between certain sections of the story.

It does seem that Patterson is another person to become PM between elections, the “ballots” she and Trump analogue Jack Robertson, refer to the internal party election he implied he will contrive through his media assets during their previous meeting. The gender of the Prime Minister she’s replacing is not specified, so we’re not forced to hypothesis another male Prime Minister between her and Riley, whom she can comfortably follow.

Well, I say comfortably, Patterson is exterminated live on television not that long after becoming Prime Minister, and by the autumn of 2023 the UK Prime Minister is Edward Lawn Bridge, a Boris analogue to a greater extent even than Patterson had been a May one. Whether there’s a PM or two between them, it’s hard to know. Because, while it might seem implausible that the Doctor Who UK has at least five Prime Ministers from the same party, three male and two female, who preside over crisis after crisis and leave office in increasingly bizarre ways between 2010 and 2023, well, erm. Yes. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, isn’t it?

At least the Doctor Who universe has an excuse. As Harriet Jones was meant to serve three terms, and she was instead deposed by the Doctor early in her first in late 2006, it’s only around 2020 or so that the period in which she should have been running the country comes to an end. Intentionally or not, almost all of Doctor Who’s fictional Prime Ministers and their antics fit within that period, meaning that all these Prime Ministers are ultimately a result of the Doctor’s toppling of Jones. Which would mean that whoever emerges as Prime Minister in Doctor Who about, well, now is perhaps the person who should have followed Jones the first place. Perhaps a period of stability is about to reassert itself.

If so, it’s only going to last twenty two years. 73 Yards (2024) introduces us to “the most dangerous Prime Minister in history”, insurgent Albion Party leader and nuclear holocaust enthusiast Roger ap Gwilliam, who is elected in 2046 following a scandal in which the previous administration of an unspecified party “..collapsed in shame… in absolute shame”, at least according to ap Gwilliam himself, although interviewer Amol Rajan (Amol Rajan) does not dispute the point. He is deposed the same year, but not before establishing a national DNA database of every one living in Britain in that year, and is succeeded by Iris Cabriola, who promised a “more lenient and listening government” despite being from ap Gwilliam’s own nationalist party.

Still, it is, as I say, nearly twenty five years away. The UK of the Whoniverse can sit back and relax. For a bit. I wonder who won the most recent general election there? ¹⁴