It wasn’t even funny! That’s the problem. There’s a lot you can get away with if you’re funny, but you’ve got to be aware of how thin the ice you’re skating on can get. Some of the best jokes are within kissing distance of being simply appalling, with no saving grace whatsoever, and that’s precisely what makes them so hysterical. They are, however, a small minority, and there’s a reason why only few professional comedians feel they can get away with them in public.
Shabana Mahmood is not a professional comedian. She’s a Labour MP, and the home secretary – not exactly a barrel of laughs even within the context of government jobs. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, she’s never been known as the class clown. Boris Johnson loved to tell gags in the chamber and Jess Phillips would always speak her mind in interviews and on television. But Mahmood just never appeared on that short, short list of parliamentarians who like treating the job as a bit of a stand-up gig.
James Cleverly, who got himself in trouble more than once for making daft gags in speeches, could also tell you about the fine, fine line between being seen as refreshingly human and becoming a liability. Still: Mahmood was never one of those Commons comedians – until this week.
At a live recording of Matt Forde’s Political Party podcast on Monday, the cabinet minister was asked which of the opposition leaders – Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, Zack Polanski or Ed Davey – she would either deport or taser. Now, to state the obvious: that premise is about as funny as smallpox. Does Forde really feel too good for an old fashioned game of Snog, Marry, Avoid? There’s a reason why “S.N.A.” is a classic, and “deport or taser” isn’t.
In any case, instead of politely demurring, or finding a way to elegantly dodge the question, Mahmood went in two-footed, replying: “You’re talking to me so I want to taser and then deport… all of them”.
Though the audience may have lapped it up on the night, it was hard to read about it after the fact and not find it shocking. Again, Mahmood is home secretary; in charge of the nation’s police and borders. Deportations are a serious topic, regardless of where you stand on the debate.
It’s about removing people from a country they’ve sometimes spent decades in, and sending them back to one they know little about. It’s about making a decision that will fundamentally alter the course of people’s lives. Do we really want the politician in charge of all of this to joke about deporting her political enemies while people chortle along?
It also seems worth adding that these things do not happen in a vacuum. Is there a world in which British politics is going so wonderfully that MPs and ministers can afford to be as silly and shocking as they want in the media? Perhaps! But it blatantly isn’t the world we live in now.
As America has shown over the past decade, making politics coarser is incredibly easy, but trying to put the genie back in the bottle and return to some level of politeness and decorum is incredibly tough. It may even be impossible. It’s also very clear who benefits when standards are abandoned: those who never had any shame in the first place.
Dedicating an entire column to a quick quip the Home Secretary made on a podcast recording may feel like overkill, but small incidents like this one can go a long way towards debasing our polity even further. Reform has now been riding high in the polls for months; open racism is often heard on national television thanks to GBNews and others; there are countless demented American billionaires conspiring to take Britain down with them.
If senior Labour politicians start joking about assaulting and deporting their opponents, doesn’t that then give the right to Farage and his ilk to do and say whatever they want and, if challenged, merely point to comments like Mahmood’s and argue that, well, if she can do it then why can’t they?
Britain is one of the many countries currently threatened by populists trying to tear down the gates. There ought to be an understanding among everyone else that, for the time being at least, it’s up to each and every one of us to try and hold the line. Is it really too much to ask the holder of one of the great offices of state to understand that?
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