As MarinaHyde prepares to release ‘What Just Happened?!’, Liv_Marks meets the country’s foremost living satirist.
“It was a real sandbox,” she says. “I could do what I wanted with it – I definitely wouldn’t be writing about politics in the way I do if I hadn’t done that.” It is her ability to draw from popular culture and sport, alongside history and politics that make Hyde’s columns so appealing. “Most people don’t know all these obscure political references, but everyone likes [Taylor Swift’s] ‘Blank Space,’” she reasons.
“Anything good” she’s ever written has, she says, come after having kids , “because I became far more organised and efficient.” She likes to surround herself with people “from every decade” – one of her great friends is 80, they walk together once a week – but she will never “go to any social occasions with politicians”. She says, “I think it’s really difficult to write dispassionately about people with whom you share some form of social life.
Indeed. I’m not convinced she’d receive a particularly warm reception at, say, Chequers with descriptions of the former PM that include him looking like “Chucky if he’d borrowed a suit for a court appearance, or a Yewtree version of Worzel Gummidge”. Of Theresa May, she wrote that she mostly resembled “a Quentin Blake drawing of an unravelling postmistress”.
Surprisingly few ever complain though. But then, “it’s a terrible show of weakness to have read [the column]”, she says with a laugh. “Johnson always when I’ve seen him has gone –” she looks down and gruffly shakes her head. “I think that’s absolutely ridiculous. What he should really do is pretend that he’s never seen it at all.”
Besides, it is precisely not her job to paint flattering pictures of those in power. And they make it fabulously easy. Compared to New Labour, says Hyde, when “they were so scared that Alastair Campbell or Peter Mandelson would put a bullet in their head if they said one wrong thing, this is the Wild West. You’ve got Nadine Dorries saying mad things, Jacob Rees-Mogg on Twitter – all these people who will say anything for attention. So much of it is about attention.
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