Why are so many politicians turning to the world of TV when power fails?
Michael Portillo is so good at what he does on TV it's easy to forget he was once an MP. The same isn't true for everyone...
If the late politician Enoch Powell genuinely believed what he said about all political lives ending in failure, he’d surely have been flummoxed to witness the second coming of Michael Portillo.
Nearly 30 years after the shock loss of his Enfield Southgate seat, the former Conservative MP stands beaming on the border of North and South Korea, with remarkable sang-froid for a man sporting cherry tomato chinos in one of the world’s most ferociously guarded military zones.
Portillo’s new BBC series Great Korean Railway Journeys finds him meeting monks in temples and trading blows with taekwondo masters. A generation of viewers could be forgiven for having no idea of his political hinterland, and knowing him only as TV’s resident train enthusiast, whose biggest daily decision is between the strawberry slacks and the cornflower blue blazer – or why not both?
Even for those with deeper memories, Portillo has long shaken off his Westminster years, a rollercoaster from his “Thatcher’s favourite” tag to the ignominy of 1997. In fact, he once told me of his abrupt political exit: “It was a very useful experience. It forced me to expand my horizons, which was obviously necessary.” No doubt, it’s helped that his rebirth – via an invitation to front 1998 Channel 4 series Portillo’s Progress – has heralded such a successful second act.
Portillo is by no means the only figure to swap the corridors of power for the shiny floors of TV studios. In 1979, long before any ex-cabinet member’s rite of passage included hosting a podcast, or MPs, some still-serving, opted to line their pockets, sorry, I mean reach out to their constituents, with a foray into the celebrity jungle, Harold Wilson hosted an episode of BBC chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning, when viewers were treated to the bizarre – some might say self-indulgent – spectacle of the former PM interviewing guests, including his own interlocutor Robin Day, his own impersonator Mike Yarwood, and his own wife, Mary.
Much longer in the presenter’s chair was former MP Robert Kilroy-Silk, who made the “people’s talk show” his own for nearly 20 years. Sadly, his ITV quiz show Shafted proved less enduring, cancelled after four episodes and named the worst British show of the 2000s by the Penguin TV Companion.
The move from Westminster to White City isn’t assured. Reality TV regular Edwina Currie’s early-2000s Currie Night was curtailed after a year, while Neil and Christine Hamilton’s Posh Nosh – in which the never-say-die pair descended on a stranger’s home in their Bentley to prepare a slap-up banquet – inexplicably failed to go beyond a pilot series.
And for those who successfully make the jump, it’s not without complication. The sight of former shadow chancellor Ed Balls swinging his Strictly stuff to Gangnam Style was a singular television delight. Having him interview his own wife, the then-home secretary Yvette Cooper, on breakfast television proved more challenging for viewers, 8,000 of whom complained to Ofcom.
If politics is "showbusiness for ugly people", is showbusiness politics for people whose heart was never really in it in the first place? I can’t imagine Dennis Skinner or Tony Benn trading the bench for the TV host’s chair, although I’d have paid good money to see Baroness Trumpington present The Weakest Link.
In our age of optics, where the world’s most powerful man perfected his schtick down a lens, you’d think a return to politics would be a seductive prospect for such camera lovers. However, it seems not. Portillo also told me: “There’s no itch. Politics hasn’t changed, but I’ve changed.” Besides, not even the finest of Westminster’s ermine-lined robes can compete with his world-conquering wardrobe.
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Great Japanese Railway Journeys airs Monday–Friday at 6:30pm on BBC Two.
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