This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

“You must,” people say to me, “miss the Tories. They were so much easier to sketch.” Behind my back, they are blunter. “When is Hutton going to get a fix on Starmer?” someone asked the editor. It’s a fair enough question.

As a sketchwriter, charged with mocking the government, I used to wake each morning confident the Conservatives would have done something daft by lunchtime. Indeed there were moments when we wondered if we should move to two sketches a day, just to get it all in.

Since July, it has been harder work. It would be unfair to blame ministers for this. They are, as in so many areas, trying to deliver for us, but hampered by their inexperience: they just can’t yet do chaos like the Tories could.

To give credit where it’s due, the prime minister’s baffling decision to embroil himself in a low-stakes gift scandal and then explain it very badly and very slowly feels like it has the key ingredients of a set of long-running jokes.

A sketch is like a sitcom. It relies on everyone knowing who the characters are

Yet I must accept that I greeted Tory conference with a sigh of pleasure. Boris Johnson has a set of fantastical memoirs, you say? Tom Tugendhat is about to reveal that he was in the army? Kemi Badenoch is angry because people keep writing down what she says? Robert Jenrick thinks the country is in a mess and wants to know who’s been in charge? For a few happy days, life was straightforward again.

Why is it more difficult to sketch Labour? Am I part of the hated liberal media elite that I keep hearing about from columnists who live in expensive houses? Obviously the answer to that is yes, but in the past I’ve managed to mock Labour leaders from Tony Blair to Jeremy Corbyn.

Seeking help, I consulted the comedy writer Joel Morris, author of Be Funny Or Die, an attempt to understand how humour works. His answer was that a sketch is like a sitcom: it relies on everyone knowing who the characters are.

When Del Boy sees a money-making opportunity, the audience know how he’ll react, just as they do when Frasier Crane hears about an exclusive new restaurant or Sir Humphrey Appleby learns of a plan to cut the civil service budget.

“Your problem is that it’s week one, and we don’t know anybody,” said Morris. “Sitcoms are like the Asterix village: they’re full of recognisable characters. We’re a disparate community, but we all agree on the people in our village that we make jokes about. Until we’ve agreed on that village, it’s difficult to make jokes.”

Put it this way: if I say something is “typical Boris Johnson”, you have a mental picture. But what is “typical Keir Starmer”? Worse, what is “typical Jonathan Reynolds”? (He’s the Business Secretary, but you knew that.)

A key character in the first hundred days of the government has been Sue Gray, but how many people have a mental fix on her? How many of us would even recognise her voice? As for her character, political correspondents disagree about whether she’s a Machiavellian schemer or out of her depth.

It’s not just the joke-makers who are struggling. You guys are part of the problem, too, as the author and journalist Helen Lewis noticed when she appeared on Have I Got News For You recently. “The audience definitely had a moment of adjustment. With the Conservatives, we’ve got a shorthand for who these people are. I’m not sure people have strong feelings yet about Bridget Phillipson or Wes Streeting.”

She also feels that Labour has yet to deliver a really vivid scandal. “One of the problems with the gifts story is that it’s not weird enough. People took money for suits? Well, normal people like suits. People took Taylor Swift tickets? Taylor Swift tickets are a thing normal people like. Where is the gold wallpaper? Where are the duck houses?”

Nor have we agreed what the story of the government is. Is it a different kind of chaos? Venal corruption? Complacent triumphalism? Pious people blind to their flaws? Hubris?

The good news, according to Morris, is that we’ll get there. “It takes a while for everyone to get used to who everyone is.” He compares Parliament to The Simpsons. Some MPs are regular cast members, some are Troy McClure, popping up once in a while. “We need to have an agreed cast list.”

Whatever Starmer’s other failings, no one can accuse him of not doing his best to help. His first 100 days are perhaps most easily understood as state support for sketchwriters to get us through a difficult time. Like other such things, it’s been expensive, and not quite delivered, but we may yet find out that Labour has a Great British Satire Strategy, aimed at kick-starting topical humour the length of the country.