The resistible centrism of Mark Gatiss

The New Statesman recently had a viral moment on X when a clip from its New Society podcast, featuring Mark Gatiss, did the rounds. Gatiss claimed to not “understand the antipathy” towards Keir Starmer, prompting a predictable wave of mockery and denunciation from those who do. That reaction was itself unremarkable; what matters is what Gatiss’s remark reveals about him, and about the left-centrist worldview with which he identifies.

This lack of an ability to empathise with those who see differently has become a mark of Gatiss’s public pronouncements

The polls show that Keir Starmer is unpopular. Mark Gatiss reduces this to absurdity, suggesting that from the reaction “you’d think he was Vlad the Impaler.” The irony is that if Starmer were Vlad, he might be more warmly received by some, given the popularity of memes in which the Impaler leans forward with lines like “I have a solution” or “wait, hear me out.” Gatiss cannot imagine why anyone might make such a joke. Actors work in the imagination, and yet Mark Gatiss — a very fine actor — seems unable to imagine why Starmer’s litany of disappointments, betrayals and balls-ups might irk most of the people most of the time. 

This lack of an ability to empathise with those who see differently has become a mark of Gatiss’s public pronouncements. In a 2021 Guardian interview, he lamented Brexit with the words, “this simple thing, freedom of movement, is being torn away from the next generation by jealous old people.” There is no attempt to get into the motivations of people who might be concerned with little matters like sovereignty or the way that the EU’s austerity drive impacted countries like Italy and Greece. Rather, for Gatiss, Brexit was “the revenge of the dead.” This might go well with the affection for old British horror anthologies that he professes in the interview, but doesn’t really engage with the other, as an actor must do when playing people that think or do things differently to themselves. Does Gatiss agree with every sentence his characters utter? He must at least try to understand why they say what they say.

Instead of empathy with his fellow citizens, Mark Gatiss says in the same interview, “I’m currently very, very ashamed of being English.” He goes on to lament that England is losing its “hard-won and very fair reputation for being amateurish, but basically decent. (…) It’s like a mask has dropped, exposing this horrible snarling, sneering, angry, jealous face.” Again, the imagery is one of horror. Gatiss seems to share Jean-Paul Sartre’s sense that other people are hell — at least those who think and feel differently. 

Rather than simply reel off criticisms of Mark Gatiss and invite the same charge of incuriosity, it is worth attempting a diagnosis. Why can’t he empathise with the millions who despise Keir Starmer or voted for Brexit? In the New Statesman interview, he avows himself a left-centrist, a stance that furnishes him with an interpretive framework too narrow to recognise opposing views as meaningful. He relies on familiar, reassuring categories — decency, stability, and, against them, “fascism” — and anything outside them tends to become an unintelligible horror rather than a set of intelligible motives and judgements; he experiences them as confusion, aberration, or moral failure. As he plaintively puts it, he is worried that “the rules aren’t there anymore.”

This is why, when discussing his favourite albums, Gatiss can say of Morrissey that he “wish[es] the Morrissey of then would look at himself now and think, how did that happen?” If Gatiss himself could step outside his own frame, he might recognise that Morrissey — who has always stuck his fingers up at sacred cows and maintained a strong sense of British identity — might react against the demographic and social changes that have overtaken Britain since the release of The Queen is Dead in 1986. To anyone prepared to make even a modest imaginative leap, it is not hard to see how the singer of those The Smiths songs might arrive at support for Brexit and a scepticism towards multicultural orthodoxies. “But maybe the clues were always there?” Gatiss wistfully muses. Indeed they were.

Given the New Society interview is to promote Gatiss’s current starring role in an RSC revival of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, we might expect the subject of fascism to arise. It does, with Mark Gatiss suggesting parallels between the dictators of the 1930s — Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — and the current US President. This tells us nothing about then or now. Donald Trump’s Republican party stops somewhat short of paramilitary violence or the systematic murder of opponents. Arturo Ui is perfectly clear about the trajectory it depicts, and contemporary analogies only work if one is determined to see them even where they don’t exist. The problem revealed is that fascist analogies have become the left’s only way of seeing.

Therefore Gatiss fears that we will have a Reform government at the next election, and warns darkly that people are mistaken if they think it would be much like having a Conservative government. This almost comically misses the point of Reform’s appeal: that it is not simply another version of the Conservatives. He describes Reform initially as “what they appear to be” and soon drops the hesitation, defining them as “anglo-fascism.” By this point, the accusation of fascism has become an unconscious and perfectly useless reflex.

It is apt that Gatiss speaks as he does while promoting a revival of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Bertolt Brecht’s work emerges from the age of dictators, yet directs its fire almost exclusively at those of the right. One can search his plays in vain for allegories of Stalin or Mao. Brecht’s ideological commitment to communism prevented him from criticising it, or even from understanding why others might not share his enthusiasm.

Gatiss does not simply reject these views; he cannot begin to see how they might be held in good faith

Likewise, Gatiss’s left-centrism. His politics depend on utilising abstractions such as stability, continuity and managerial competence in the service of a progressive agenda. In this way, he believes society can be gently bent towards such ill-defined goals as social justice and equity. When large numbers of people reject this project and complain of its failure to protect their communities or improve their lives, it does not register with Gatiss as a meaningful response to changing conditions. The result is not disagreement, but utter incomprehension. Gatiss does not simply reject these views; he cannot begin to see how they might be held in good faith.

Such a centrist is left consulting a map printed decades ago, before the landscape was radically altered. The roads have changed, but he insists on the old routes. Centrism is not a guide but an artefact, with Gatiss its keeper, warning that those following the terrain as it now exists must surely be horribly mistaken.