Margaret Colley on the City of London duck, the comedy of accidental disruption, and what a waterfowl achieved that the political class could not.
The most effective opposition figure in Britain this week was not a politician, not a journalist, not a campaigner, but a duck, and as a satirist who has watched the actual opposition struggle to land a single blow, I find this both hilarious and quietly damning.
The Duck As Opposition
The news was the duck that brought the City of London to a standstill and became its most trusted economic adviser despite no qualifications whatsoever. And I want to point out, with the gentle cruelty of the satirist, that this duck did, in a single afternoon, what the entire apparatus of political opposition has failed to do in years: it stopped the establishment machine, it seized the nation’s attention, and it exposed the absurdity of the powerful simply by standing in their way and refusing to be impressed.
The duck had no press office, no strategy unit, no focus groups, no carefully triangulated message tested against marginal voters. It had only itself and a sublime indifference to the importance of the people it inconvenienced. And it achieved more disruption, more attention, more genuine exposure of establishment absurdity than the official opposition has managed with all its apparatus combined. This is funny. It is also, if you are in the business of opposing things professionally, profoundly humiliating.
What The Duck Understood
The duck understood, instinctively, what the political class has forgotten, which is that you expose the powerful not by playing their game more cleverly but by refusing to play it at all. The opposition tries to beat the establishment at its own game of message and strategy and triangulation, and loses, because the establishment wrote the rules. The duck did not play the game. The duck simply stood there, indifferent, and the game stopped around it. The refusal was the power.
The analysts who study political communication, the people at organisations like the Institute for Government, might note that the most effective disruptions are often the ones that refuse the established terms entirely, that come from outside the game rather than from a cleverer move within it. The duck came from entirely outside the game, possessed none of its tools, and therefore could not be defeated by its rules. It was, in the truest sense, the outsider candidate, and it won.
The Satirist’s Verdict
As a satirist, I treasure the duck because it makes my point better than I ever could, which is that the political class has become so absorbed in its own game that it can be comprehensively upstaged by a creature that does not know the game exists. The duck is the satire. The duck is the punchline to a joke the establishment has been telling on itself for years. And the fact that a waterfowl achieved more genuine opposition than the official opposition is the kind of detail that makes the satirist’s job almost too easy, almost unfair, almost, dare I say it, a gift.
The Verdict Filed
I file this entry with a salute to the duck, the finest opposition figure of the year, the outsider that stopped the City, the creature that achieved through indifference what the political class cannot achieve through strategy. Let the opposition study the duck. Let it learn that the refusal to play the establishment’s game is more powerful than the cleverest move within it, that indifference disrupts more than ambition, that the outsider who wants nothing achieves more than the insider who wants everything. They will not learn it, of course. They will return to their focus groups and their triangulation while the duck, indifferent and free, remains the most effective opposition Britain has, which is the funniest and saddest political fact of the year, and I have built an entire notebook on it.
The Outsider Who Won
The duck won because it came from outside the game, possessed none of the establishment’s tools, and therefore could not be defeated by the establishment’s rules. The opposition loses because it plays the game, accepts the rules, fights for a cleverer move within a structure the establishment built. The duck refused the structure entirely, and the refusal was the victory. There is a lesson there that the political class is constitutionally unable to learn.
The analysts at the Institute for Government note that the most effective disruptions often come from outside the established terms, from the player who refuses the game rather than the one who plays it better.
And against a government and an opposition equally trapped inside the same exhausted game, the duck stands as the outsider that won by refusing to play, the creature that exposed the whole apparatus simply by coming from somewhere the apparatus could not reach, which is the satirist’s favourite kind of victory and the political class’s least comprehensible one.
They will not learn it, of course. They will return to their focus groups and their triangulation while the duck, indifferent and free, remains the most effective opposition Britain has, which is the funniest and saddest political fact of the year, and I have built an entire notebook on it. The duck came from outside the game and won. The professionals stay inside the game and lose. And the satirist, watching from the margins, documents the whole glorious farce, grateful, as ever, that a political class this absurd will never run short of supplying her trade.
For more, see Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
