Bring back satire: Tom Lehrer in Highgate

The most tedious tweets on X often include a line that names some political statement or decision the tweeter doesn’t like, followed by the proclamation “Satire is Dead”. It’s daft, of course. Satire has been alive and kicking at least since Juvenal wrote his Satires almost 2,000 years ago. Plays, articles and TV comedies mocking politics, people in power, and fashionable political ideas are thriving, just as they always have done.

The most common contemporary denunciation on the Right is to attach the adjective “woke” to whatever is disliked. Previously it was “politically correct”.  “Woke” will die in America if Trump wins in November and will be pointless if the dull, serious, earnest, latest iteration of the Labour Party takes office. “Woke” and “politically correct” are clichés which by now have lost all meaning, let alone bite.

A new political era should usher in a new political vocabulary and with it new political satire. Labour’s front bench are all bushy-tailed, managerial, middle-of-the-road voices. We shall see how this new lineup performs in power.

Equally interesting will be to see if the Tories in opposition double down on words and themes that lost them power. That was what they did with Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, after William Hague launched his party on the long road to leaving Europe after the defeat of 1997.

Or will the Tories, as after 1945, accept post-war Labour reforms? Once David Cameron became Leader, they recentred and started reoccupying Middle England where elections are lost and won.

Political journalism does not seem to have renewed itself much this century. Many of the writers who commented on Blair and Brown, or even Thatcher and Major, are still occupying key comment slots. There are no must-read voices in any paper or must-listen-to TV or radio political interviewers.

The last time politics was so boring, repetitious and conventional was the late 1950s, until Beyond the Fringe and That Was the Week That Was bust apart the political commentary establishment early in the following decade.

The new generation was inspired by one of the greatest post-war satirists in the USA, Tom Lehrer. His songs — mocking militarism, the arms race, the Catholic church, American racism — were hilarious. He robbed the high priests of the US establishment of their prestige and self-importance.

Now a wonderful new play has opened at the Gatehouse Theatre, Highgate: Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You. Its opening night (28 May) was attended by Neil Kinnock along with various Labour septuagenarian luminaries and has already sold out its fortnight’s run. It is doubtful if any of the current shadow cabinet have heard of Lehrer. Other than the now departing Michael Gove, it is equally unlikely that Lehrer’s songs are known to Team Sunak either, or even the present humourless generation of journalists.

The play is written and produced by Francis Beckett, who has written short, sharp political plays about Attlee and Stalin, amongst others. His plays are much more enjoyable than the National Theatre’s Nye, Tim Price’s recent play about Nye Bevan, canonised by Labour as the founder of the NHS. (I wrote about that ponderous production here.)

The title of Beckett’s new play comes from the decision of Tom Lehrer — born in 1928, and still alive today — in the early 1970s to give up satirical song appearances, from which he was making a fortune. He chose instead to retire to teaching mathematics on an obscure campus in California, and has refused all approaches by journalists for interviews over the subsequent 50 years.

His “Vatican Rag” or “Werner von Braun” homage are as sharp today as ever. Beckett spotted that Lehrer lifted the copyright on his material, so anyone can put the song on stage for free. The format is simple. Shahaf Ifhar, an Israeli actor, plays Lehrer, who came from a New York Jewish family. He got into Harvard aged 14 as a maths prodigy. The Malaysian actress Nabila Hamid is the young Harvard student journalist who gets Lehrer to open up, while Harry Style plays all the music live on stage con brio.

In a sense it was the easiest play ever written by Beckett, a lifelong Labour journalist close to trade unions. His father, John Beckett, was a Labour MP who joined the British Union of Fascists and became an aide to Sir Oswald Mosley in the 1930s.

The wonderful Lehrer songs carry the show along. But Beckett’s interrogation of Lehrer via the student journalist help make two hours go by in a flash.

Alas, you can’t see it, as it is already a sell-out. All those who bought a Lehrer LP (for younger readers that’s a disc of recorded music played on a turntable) some 60 years ago will want to go. With luck it will transfer to another theatre in London. It would be perfect for the Edinburgh Fringe.

Today there is no Lehrer in sight. Radio 4 does political comedy shows, mainly based on the idea that imitating Sunak’s or Starmer’s voice deserves a laugh. Yes, they can be funny. But it is not satire.

Some may argue politics is too serious – Gaza, Ukraine, Trump, the rise of neo-Nazis in Europe, the return of anti-semitism and its new variant hate of Muslims in Europe and Britain, climate change – to be mocked. On the contrary, using song above all to make us laugh at the follies of those who rule over us or want to dictate how we think and act is a glorious gift. Can someone please disinter satire and make us laugh at those we disagree with politically? Surely satire is preferable to the hate-speech of identity politics, eco-politics or populism.

Denis MacShane’s new book Labour Takes Power. The Denis MacShane Diaries 1997-2001 is published by Biteback.

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