Today’s FT has an interview with wannabe Chancellor George Osborne, where he once again fails to give any real details of the Conservatives’ economic plans, should they win the next election. Osborne talks about his admiration for Sweden, although he is unable to put his finger on exactly why, saying:
“I’m no expert on Swedish society but I am a regular viewer now of Wallander”.
What next: Chris Grayling telling the Daily Mail that he is changing the Conservatives’ policies on drugs after catching up with a few episodes of Van der Valk?
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7 Comments
Chris Grayling seems more influenced by The Wire
I understand that William Hague regularly watches Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Home and Away.
Given Chris Grayling’s comments I suspect he hadn’t actually seen very much of the Wire.
It was quite obvious that Chris Grayling hadn’t watched much of The Wire. If he had, I doubt he would have endorsed it. The creator of the programme, David Simon, described the second season as “a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class … it is a deliberate argument that unencumbered capitalism is not a substitute for social policy; that on its own, without a social compact, raw capitalism is destined to serve the few at the expense of the many.” The Wire also clearly takes the view that the ‘war on drugs’ does not work and is counter-productive.
At the time he made the comparison, Grayling was widely ridiculed for it. But separate to the comparison itself, I don’t think Grayling was at all endorsing The Wire as exemplifying the rightness of his thinking. Apologies if it was my feeble comment above that gave that impression.
Indeed I believe one strength of The Wire is the way it paints a picture that doesn’t offer unqualified support for any of the usual simple political fixes. The War on Drugs is shown as failing, but the tolerance experiment is shown to have problems too.
Returning to Sara’s original post though, what other TV detective series might influence Conservative policy-making?
policing – Sherlock Holmes
care for the elderly – Miss Marple
science policy – Paradox
heritage & culture – Morse
foreign policy – Poirot
youth policy – Scooby Doo
health – Diagnosis Murder
marriage – Hart to Hart
@Lonely Wonderer – I’ve heard that Conservative policies in general are influenced by Upstairs, Downstairs.