Diana Wichtel: Fact and fiction increasingly blurred in modern Britain

Even Larry, Downing St's Chief Mouser, has better political instincts than the Conservative Party. Photo / AP

Opinion

OPINION

Dame Judi Dench for UK Prime Minister. Why not? She has the qualifications. Apart from that time she donned whiskers and a costume she later described, with terse alliteration, as looking like "five foxes f***ing on my back" for the movie Cats, she hasn't put a paw wrong. She has played powerful women from Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria to M in James Bond. She's not a lettuce.

She can deliver. Dench called for a disclaimer to be added to The Crown in case viewers thought Olivia Colman or Imelda Staunton were the Queen. Lest Dench summon her dragons, Netflix decided to bend the knee and confirmed on their media that The Crown, while "inspired by real events", is a "fictional dramatisation".

Reality. It's more than ever up for grabs. British drama This England charts very recent history — Britain's Covid reaction. It establishes that no wardrobe department can come up with a wig for an actor playing Boris Johnson — I think it's Kenneth Branagh under there this time — that fully conveys the attacked-by-a-rogue-weed-eater vibe of the original.

This England also establishes how traumatised we've been over the last three years by making unexpectedly uncomfortable viewing. There's debate about the accuracy of its impersonations but it is required viewing before anyone calls Aotearoa's Covid response a shambles. A Guardian review talks about England's "catastrophically delayed first lockdown", the "grim death toll (more than 112,260) by April 2021" and finds in the drama, "a sense of something beyond pressurised ineptitude: a hideous inbuilt flippancy towards other people's lives".

Shambles: a word drained of meaning by opposition parties in search of a whistle to toot. In the case of politics in the UK lately, even the normally useful "omnishambles" scarcely suffices. As Newshub's Lisette Reymer observed, "The UK Government has melted into a chunky mess on the floor." The Truss-tastrophe needs its own disclaimer: "This is not fiction. I know. I'm sorry. Such are the times in which we live."

It turns out even Larry, the famous Downing St mouser, had better political instincts than the Conservative Party. When newly elected Truss went to pat him outside Number 10, he stalked stiffly off down the road. There is footage of King Charles greeting Truss and her weird curtsey at the first audience of her historically brief Prime Ministership, during which her budget would tank the pound and generally frighten the fiscal horses, with, "Back again? Dear oh dear."

This England: as the headless chookery clucked on, the nation called upon in the spirit of the Blitz, or possibly Monty Python. An Economist writer declared that Truss would have "the shelf-life of a lettuce". A tabloid duly set up a lettuce in a blonde wig on livestream to test the prediction. At one point, noted The Daily Star's Andrew Gilpin, "There were 18,000 people watching a lettuce," a zeitgeist-defining moment if ever there was one.

Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak together in August. Photo / AP

Thus came an announcement on Three's AM show that no anchor, even one on breakfast television, could have imagined having to deliver: "It's official. The lettuce has outlived Liz Truss' time as PM." Cut to the livestream at Lettuce HQ as the triumphant vegetable declared victory with a glass of prosecco, a disco ball and a smile almost as unnerving as that of its fallen rival.

So ended Truss's historically brief and giddy turn on the carousel of power. Because politics in the UK has reached a state that can only be expressed in the language of the nursery, some are calling for a "genny leccy". An election. Chicken Little, Henny Penny, genny leccy — sometimes the sky actually is falling. At the time of writing, Rishi Sunak is latest heading to the revolving door to meet King Charles. Dear oh dear.

Meanwhile, fictionalised or whatever, the trailer for season five of The Crown chimes with the exhausted times, there and here. Princess Diana is getting a telling-off by the Duke of Edinburgh. "It's a system, for better or for worse. We're all stuck in it!" he thunders, demanding loyalty to something he knows is ossifying before his eyes. Something that urgently needs to change.