Whatever cinephiles might think, 2003’s Love Actually is a half-decent film. Films that know what they want to be, and unapologetically see their intention through, generally have my respect. There’s valiance in sincerity, even when earnestly embarrassing.
From Hugh Grant’s opening monologue about people calling home to their loved ones from the planes that hit the Twin Towers, Love Actually knew exactly what it wanted to be: a big chocolatey snog to cheer folk up from 9/11 and the Iraq War. Saccharine romcoms aren’t everyone’s favoured antidote to the blues, and the film’s sexual politics are now seen as problematic or ridiculous, but the fact it grossed around a quarter of a billion against a forty million budget and remains a beloved staple of Christmas time telly indicates that somebody liked it.
I find this kind of schmaltz palatable in small, discerning doses — in entertainment, that is. When it seeps into politics, that’s a different matter. Hence why in June 2024, when leader of the Liberal Democrats Sir Ed Davey launched a political campaign that resembled Total Wipeout if Richard Curtis became the showrunner, I was in what felt like a sulky minority of people not smiling.
I’m not so obtuse that I couldn’t see the appeal. Amidst a non-stop news cycle about the cost of living, economic recession, rising unemployment, crime, the threat of war in Europe and an NHS in utter crisis, who would frown at Brits getting a shot of serotonin from watching an affable Nottingham dad bungee jump off a crane? It wasn’t just Richard Curtis-esque laughs his campaign delivered, though, but tears. A month before the vote, the Lib Dems released an almost uncomfortably candid video focused on Davey’s role as a carer for his severely disabled son and his late mother, who died after a long struggle with cancer when he was fifteen (his father, who died when he was four, also got a mention). If remaining purse-lipped at his parkour hijinks made me a miserable sod, expressing cynicism towards this felt like painting myself a sociopath in polite company. Even Love Actually haters dare not mock the scene where Emma Thompson weeps to Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now over her husband’s infidelity.
Somebody liked it. The Lib Dems won seventy-two seats in the 2024 election, up from eleven, and the critics ate it up with the audiences. “Behind Davey’s comedic persona appears to be a person of integrity, compassion, principles and intellect” gushed Nels Abbey at The Guardian, “His attention-grabbing, humanising and brand-detoxifying silliness was buttressed by serious substance.”
Sir Ed has adopted a decidedly more serious persona of late. He is currently one of the most vocal apologists for the BBC in light of the impartiality scandal. The indefensible bias the leaked memo has outlined has only fuelled defensiveness and denial. No, it’s not that Aunty has lost her faculties and needs her medication seriously reviewed, it’s that — as Davey put it to Starmer in the Houses of Commons — “A great British institution is under attack from a foreign government. President Trump is trying to destroy our BBC. Not because he cares about the truth, but because he doesn’t want to get away with his lies!”. With oratory like that, it would have scarcely been noticed if he’d just segued into Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister speech to George Bush Billy Bob Thornton in Love Actually. (Aside: if Richard Curtis is considering making a film or mini-series out of this debacle, can I suggest Hugh Bonneville for the lead?)
Here’s the kicker though. I agree with Davey. President Trump is using the scandal — specifically Panorama’s tampering with a speech he made in January 2020, making it seem as though he was directly instructing his followers to storm the Capitol after Biden’s victory — to try and take down one of his most powerful enemies in the media. The problem is the BBC’s given him a perfect excuse, in the same way that if I broke into a drug baron’s house to plant heroin so I could frame him, and then he catches me and calls the police, there’s no way around the fact that, I, too, am now a criminal.
Yet as much as the BBC has infuriated and downright disgusted me over the last years, I share Mary Harrington’s sentiment that there will be a great deal lost if it is brought down by Trump’s potential billion dollar lawsuit. Many of us don’t want to put Aunty down, we just want the doctors who doped her into thinking women could have penises fired, struck off the record, and replaced with competent medics.
From the outset, this should have been the progressives’ line of defence. “This memo shows we have disgraced the respectability of the BBC and apologise unreservedly to the tax-paying citizens who trust us to represent the truth in its most unvarnished form. The overdue necessary changes will be made.” Even if they didn’t mean it, they could have at least said it. That alone indicates the level of arrogance we are dealing with here.
Instead, Davey has chosen to target one Robbie Gibb — a Conservative crony (Davey’s words) appointed by Boris Johnson. It is the removal of this man alone that will salvage the BBC, allegedly, and put a stop to its real bias … giving Nigel Farage too much airtime. Deriding progressive elitist out-of-touchness is like mocking neopronouns at this point — it stopped being funny a long time ago and became downright infuriating. If there is any substance to the claim the Farage-Trump Axis (the upper normie’s omnicause, if you will) are making a co-ordinated land grab for British institutions and by extension, democracy, then this sort of delusional guff shows that Davey is playing silly buggers even more than when he launched the Lib Dem manifesto from atop a rollercoaster.
I am glad I was not charmed by Davey’s campaign … because the alleged “integrity” behind it rang hollow
Without wanting to be smug, then, I am glad I was not charmed by Davey’s campaign — not because I am joyless or stony-hearted but because the alleged “integrity” behind it rang hollow. That has now been proven. He is not prepared to defend British institutions by improving them to ensure that they represent the values they were founded on — he is just stubbornly, uncritically defending them. This is not integrity. It is the tribalism of establishmentarians.
It’s a less popular Christmas pick than Love Actually, but this whole sorry state of affairs brings to mind a line from Pulp Fiction: “Just because you are a character, doesn’t mean you have character”. Nowhere is this more true than in politics. The right strongman (or strongwoman) will not be elected to defend Britain’s — our, if you insist — institutions, unless we as an electorate learn this lesson.
