Malcolm Tucker shows how f*****g ridiculous politics has become

Politics was better before them – more independent, creative and unpredictable – but spin doctors (tizzy quacks a better description, in my experience) seem here to stay, inspired by their patron saint, Malcom Tucker.

Played perfectly by Glaswegian actor Peter Capaldi, in Armando Iannucci’s BBC series The Thick of It and spin-off (no pun intended) film In The Loop, Tucker is a spider in Doc Martens, spinning wicked webs of sordid deceit. He’s a salty schemer, leering liar, unrepentant roaster, apoplectic anti-hero, and master of lavatorial allusion.

Dubbed “the Gorbals Goebbels”, his snarling sarcasm is conveyed through a fountain of four-letter verbal vulgarity spewed from the foam-flecked lips on Capaldi’s gaunt undertaker’s face.

To describe Tucker as a workplace bully would be laughably tame. He’s the office torturer, a sadist, the Marquis de Satire. 

His contempt for the ministers in his – I nearly said “purview” but see below – loveless care is only matched by the incandescent derision displayed towards special advisers.

I should warn readers, particularly in these painfully sensitive times,  that much swearing follows. So it’s up to you whether you want to continue reading. Or, as Tucker put it in response to a knock at his door: “Come the f*** in or f*** the f*** off.”

Where to begin? Little is known of Tucker’s background before he became director of communications for his party in both government and opposition. 

Rumour has it that he was a journalist, a far from fanciful assumption, at least in the popular imagination, which has never experienced the gushing love and innocent optimism of the average newsroom.

An angry spirit
In series four, he says he has neither children nor friends, and in series three is shown spending his 50th birthday alone in his office. One episode suggests a recovering alcoholic when he pours his minister a sympathetic drink from a bottle of whisky in his desk, but declines to have one himself, noting that it is so disused it still has “some of Anthony Eden’s lipstick on the bottle”.

There’s a suggestion of a man who rose from humble origins, thus his evident belief in meritocracy and his contempt for class privilege and cronyism. 

Admonishing junior adviser Ollie Reeder to respect government property, he tells him: “Feet off the furniture, you Oxbridge twat. You’re not on a punt now.”

Traditionally (if not in modern reality), this places him on the political Left, and we’re left to assume his party is Labour or at least New Labour. He made his televisual debut in 2005, continuing for four series (and two specials) until 2012. 

The character brought fame the way of Capaldi (who went on to play Doctor Who), though not perhaps as others experience it: “If you’re Richard Wilson and people see you in the street they shout, ‘I don’t believe it!’ But … people ask me to b*****k them.”

Tucker’s barrackings are legendary. Sometime Cabinet minister and Opposition leader Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front) bears the brunt. On one occasion, he vouchsafes: “I would like to make a hat out of your entrails.” Promising her a role at the Foreign Office, he advises helpfully: “They’re always looking for cleaners there.”

He even coined a neologism when telling her: “Not only have you got a f*****g bent husband and a f*****g daughter that gets taken to school in a f*****g sedan chair, you’re also f*****g mental. Jesus Christ, see you, you are a f*****g omnishambles …” In 2012, the Oxford English Dictionary named “omnishambles” word of the year.

Austen powers
WHEN, as trailed earlier, senior aide Judy Molloy (Gina McKee) talks about something being “in my purview”, he explodes: “Within your ‘purview’? Where do you think you are, some f*****g regency costume drama? This is a government department, not some f*****g Jane f*****g Austen novel! Allow me to pop a jaunty little bonnet on your purview and ram it …” 

And that’s quite enough for a family newspaper.

More wholesomely, he welcomed a pair of rival advisers: “Laurel and f*****g Hardy! Glad you could join us. Did you manage to get that piano up the stairs OK?”

He was also willing to deploy his diplomatic expertise internationally. To a 22-year-old intern at the White House he declared: “No offence, son, but you look like you should still be at school with your head down a f*****g toilet.” Talking about this meeting later, he recalled: “When I left, I nearly tripped up over his f*****g umbilical cord.”

That was in the spin-off film, In the Loop, where Tucker is dispatched to the USA in pursuit of efforts towards intervention in the Middle East. Here, he fabricates intelligence reminiscent of the “dodgy dossier” used by the British government to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

That document is often associated with legendary New Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, who has always denied having anything to do with it.

Alastair Campbell

As a famously foul-mouthed communications chief of Scottish heritage in an administration famed for spin, Campbell is also assumed to be the model for

Tucker, though Capaldi has always played this down, saying he drew more inspiration from notorious Hollywood producers.

Loopy opinion
THOUGH enjoying The Thick of It, Campbell said he was “too bored to be offended” by In The Loop and did not find it funny. He also derided “the BBC assumption that Tucker – the brutal, foul-mouthed, manipulative, psychopathic, warmongering prime ministerial press secretary – was loosely based on me”.

But he has also mentioned an “amusing” spoof newspaper column by Iannucci masquerading as Campbell, “which is perhaps what gave him the idea for Tucker in the first place”.

Ach, who gives a … Hang on, I’ve just had a memo from Herald stores: “Sorry, mate, we’re down to our last half-dozen asterisks.” 

Oh well, NMFP, as Malcolm was wont to say: “Not my f*****g problem.”

Meanwhile, we deploy our last three to let Mr Tucker sign off in his own inimitable way: “F***ity bye!”