The delicious humiliation of the centrist dads

There were plenty of moments in 2024 that one would pay good money to have permanently excised from one’s brain. Think of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. The UK government’s ‘paedos out / keyboard warriors in’ revolving-doors prison policy. Angela Rayner, in general.

But there are also a few which I cherish, and replay regularly in my head to make sure they remain fresh and readily available to brighten up train delays, slow moving queues and parents’ evenings.

Chief among these was the Bonfire Night of the Vanities on 5 November, as complacent prophets of joy and liberal opinion-havers on both sides of the Atlantic had a healthy hundredweight of sharp orange sand kicked in their gloriously nonplussed collective mush. For observers in the UK, the steady flow of seismic data coming from the US presidential election was so much more compelling than the traditional fireworks outside, with Donald Trump proving so much more successful than Guy Fawkes in their strikingly similar ambitions. (Was there some deliberate symmetry having the UK General Election on 4 July, the date when Americans traditionally light up their sky with pyrotechnics?)

As enjoyable as the results themselves were, the second-order effect on the ranks of the commentariat was to prove most entertaining. So many highlights of 2024 clump around that date that one has to be selective. There were red weddings on every liberal broadcast channel, from MSNBC to ABC to CNN, with so many gallons of copium spilled.

Even if we focus only on the British coverage, we still have to choose between Emily Maitlis on Channel 4 losing all her fabled command, stamping her feet like Violet Elizabeth Bott, and the abject display on the Rest is Politics livestream.

It’s not an easy choice. Maitlis was away from her regular podcast chums and that weakens her claim to be this year’s Queen of the Schadenfreude Float. The News Agents, which she co-hosts with other ex-BBCers Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall, is perhaps the most baffling success in the podosphere. It tries to recreate the relaxed and chummy atmosphere of a green room before a more stuffy and serious panel discussion. My sense is that one would get a more balanced view in, and indeed from, actual newsagents. But then I am among those who thought the whole point of podcasts was to get away from the smug gatekeeping tendency that was already so tiresome when we were paying for these people to host and produce shows like Newsnight. Why are they on our pod feeds, too?

Nevertheless, clearly there are plenty of people keen to enjoy the company of their smarmy superiors. À chacun son goût. Though, frankly, I’d rather have another attack of the gout sink its teeth into my big toe than endure The News Agents on a daily basis.

For election night, Maitlis co-hosted with Channel 4 News regular Krishnan Guru-Murthy, with guest pundits Boris Johnson and, bizarrely, Stormy Daniels. (Johnson had presumably calculated the value in book sales and was cheerfully awaiting humiliation as the price. Stormy was playing the role often assumed by a scarf-wearing bear on University Challenge.)

They surely felt the ‘joy’ was incoming. But as soon as it became apparent that, no, rather than being spiked by Kamala Harris’s stiletto, Trump was going to end the night with the presidency, the House, the Senate and the popular vote, Maitlis began to visibly glitch like a thwarted super-baddy – part Hans Gruber and part Wicked Witch of the West. ‘This is batshit. I can’t believe what he’s saying’, she crowed, before being told off for repeatedly swearing on air. Not since Dr Strangelove has there been such a loss of decorum in the war room. We can presumably look forward to the six-part dramatisation of it on Amazon Prime, with Ruth Wilson reprising her role as the feisty yet adorably klutzy everywoman, up against the entire British establishment of which she is in no way a meaningful part.

On this occasion, however, the News Agents cast must remain in their seats for the awards ceremony. They were certainly left with egg on their faces that night. But the full organic, Burford Brown facial-omelette first prize has to go to The Rest is Politics, and in particular to the eternally precocious Rory Stewart.

For those who missed the livestream on election night, or the clips shared on X, the tweet from 4 November that Rory has gamely left up gives you the context:

‘Kamala Harris will win comfortably, because: Biden’s [administration] has been solid. Trump’s lost ground since 2016. The young black male votes which Trump needs didn’t turn out in 2016, 2018, 2020 or 2022. Young women like Kamala and vote. Ignore [the] polls – they’re herding, after past misses.’

This was the hubris, but the nemesis when it arrived barely hours later was, if anything, more accomplished. When asked to explain during The Rest is Politics livestream how Trump won, Rory could only revert to his pre-prepared talking points on the inevitable Kamala victory:

‘It’s completely fascinating and, of course, when a result happens you rewrite history. If she was currently winning we’d have a very good answer for why she was winning. Abortion would be No1…’

And he was off, enumerating the reasons why, in a parallel universe in which he had not just gone arse over tit in the mud of events, everything had transpired as it in fact hadn’t.

This was the Gotterdämmerung of the centrist dads. And never mind Ruth Wilson. When Eddie Redmayne gets the inevitable call to play Stewart in the biopic, this will be the moment for which he has to remember Robert Downey Jr’s advice in Tropic Thunder: never go full retard.

As I wittily tweeted on the night, as I watched guest star Dominic Sandbrook gently explain to his stable co-hosts what they had failed to grasp: The Rest is Politics is History.

Except it isn’t, of course. Rory and co-host Alastair Campbell stank out the room that night, but they barely broke stride in podcasting terms, and were soon prognosticating again with every bit as much faux-humility as Justin Welby regretting the inconvenience the sadist John Smyth caused to his diary assistant. I listened recently to Stewart discussing Syria and, to be recklessly fair, this is the sort of territory on which he is sounder, not least because he knows enough to know that he really knows nothing.

There is a certain bitter irony for those of us on the libertarian end of the allowable spectrum, to see so much of the New World, from the United States to Argentina, and I strongly suspect Canada next year, shrugging off the burden of the endlessly metastasising state, just as we Brits have committed ourselves to another potentially lethal five years of the stuff.

Hey ho. At least I have those precious hours of TV heaven to warm my hands on, as over chestnuts on a brazier of contempt.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.