Transcriber: Eunice Tan Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
I am Al Murray.
If you've seen me do stand-up in my capacity as The Pub Landlord,
a know-all, no-nothing blowhard
who has the answer to every question
even though he's not been asked any of them -
I'm not him right now.
So the people at the front, you have nothing to fear.
You're not going to get caught up as collateral in this talk, okay?
What's your name?
(Laughter)
What's your name, mate?
Steve, brilliant.
Right, so. And what do you do, Steve?
Really interesting.
Okay. Now. So.
About a year ago, the country was reeling from a shock general-election result.
All the polls, all the experts, told us that the Conservatives wouldn't win.
The country was also reeling
from a shock election result in South Thanet -
here we are.
Leads me to this moment
on the morning after the general election
when I'd polled a full 318 votes in the general election in South Thanet.
Thank you, thank you.
(Applause)
Now, that may not sound like many,
but it's 18 more people
than the Spartans had at Thermopylae when they saved civilisation.
So, good enough for me.
Now, why did I run?
That's probably the question worth asking.
Why did I run?
Normally you'd pay people to compliment me and figure something out for themselves,
but we're pressed for time, so I'll explain.
Dead simple.
There had been a lot of loose talk before the election
about democracy and its effectiveness.
Democracy, of course, involves participation and engagement;
it's an exemplar of participation.
That's what I want to talk about: ingenuity and participation.
You have to participate.
You've got to be in it to win it in a democracy.
There'd been a lot of loose talk before the election
about how voting delivers lousy political outcomes,
so you might as well not vote.
Now, the truth is that voting does deliver lousy political outcomes -
you can't argue with that.
But not voting, the alternative,
definitely will only ever deliver bad political outcomes.
So don't not vote.
The thing is, as a comic, you don't really want to piously go,
'Hey kids, you should vote.'
I don't like that sort of thing or saying 'Hey kids, vote X or vote Y.'
So how could I get involved?
What could I do to try and put this idea across?
Well, dead simple -
run for parliament.
Now, why South Thanet?
Well -
(Sighs)
well, it's simple, really.
The world's media was looking, watching,
as Nigel Farage made his seventh attempt to get elected into the House of Commons.
I thought the attention that would be focused there
would get the jokes across, because that's what we were doing.
I was 'comedian runs as joke candidate', which is a simple explanation.
But crikey, it took some explaining to some people.
(Laughter)
Now -
initial polling was pretty strong.
[Who would get your vote in Thanet South?]
(Laughter)
Sadly, it didn't work out that way.
Now -
So, where does ingenuity come into this?
Well, ingenuity - we're in the mothership of ingenuity, the Science Museum here -
ingenuity is building space rockets,
is making buckyballs,
is making bendable phones - whatever the point of that is.
Ingenuity is all those things,
but ingenuity could also be doing the same old thing
but just in a new environment.
Old wine in new bottles.
So rather than do what comics normally do -
stand to one side of an election
and fire snarky particles at it that usually just ping off -
what we thought we'd do is actually join in,
form a political party, take part in the election,
wear its clothes
and see where that got us.
Well, so obviously what we had to do is form a political party.
Now, it's really easy to do that.
You go to the Electoral Commission's website,
you get the documents, fill it in, wait for them to approve it.
And it came back, and we formed the Free United Kingdom Party,
with its hilarious acronym.
Now -
[FUKP]
now, obviously, what we didn't want to do is actually be open to proper membership
because we didn't think there were many laughs in doing admin.
So -
(Laughter)
we restricted it to three members.
If someone was going to discredit the party, it was going to be me
rather than some member we didn't know about,
hadn't done due diligence on.
So there were three members:
me as leader, obviously;
Tris from IT - he was treasurer;
and Chris from marketing was secretary.
Right? Simple. Three-man team.
None of us know anything about politics:
we don't do politics, never been involved in it.
So we had to approach it fresh.
Now this,
well, this was ingenuity delivered to us because -
here's an interesting thing -
working in showbiz, dealing with people in a media company,
one of the things when you go on tour
is you have to book media space and poster space.
Now the thing is, in South Thanet, no one had booked any poster space.
None of the political parties
had penciled any - any - poster space to advertise their campaign
even though the general election was fixed in 2011
with the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, right?
Unbelievable.
These people wanting to run the country hadn't looked in their diaries
and book poster space.
So as a result, we got the best spot.
Boom!
'Vote common sense, vote Guv for guv'norment'.
Right?
And that was on the main road between Ramsgate and Margate;
everyone had to drive past it.
Fantastic.
(Laughs)
Dear, oh dear - right, so.
Now, the thing is we were very serious about doing this -
in terms of it being a satirical project,
we were trying to do the best we could with this as a satirical project.
The trouble is some people took it actually serious-serious.
They thought we were being serious.
You know, 'You're a comedian, stay out of politics.
Get your nose out - you know nothing about politics.'
People took it very seriously.
They got very angry with me
and let me know via social media:
in Twitter in short, gnarly bursts
and on Facebook -
the endless, long, amazing paragraphs written at two in the morning.
Right?
I'm a traitor, I'm a shill, I'm a stooge.
I'm a Goldman Sachs court jester, right?
All for being a comedian running-as-a-joke candidate.
It's quite interesting, really - they were pretty furious.
Some of these people would also -
someone had found out that my name isn't Al; it's short for Alastair.
And they would present that information
like some sort of incredible smoking gun as to my true intentions.
(Laughter)
They were normally called Steve and Jeff.
Now -
(Laughs)
So -
But who wouldn't take a party seriously with policies like this?
First of all, the pound will be revalued at £1.10
so it will now be worth 10 pence more.
Common sense.
(Laughter)
That's actually quantitative easing - it's the same thing.
Two, if you come to A&E and it's not an accident nor an emergency,
then you'll be sent to a random hospital department to be practised on.
(Laughter)
One for the doctors in the house.
Three, foreign policy.
Germany has been too quiet for too long.
Just saying.
(Laughter)
Four, immigration.
This is the greatest country, and people want to move here.
We need an MP to make things worse.
Look no further.
Topical.
Five, education.
Instead of a postcode lottery,
a new, improved street raffle
will determine which schools your kids get into.
Alex Salmond to be made First Minister of Norwich
so he knows what being ignored by the rest of the country is really like.
Europe - I pledge that the UK will leave Europe by 2025
and the edge of the solar system by 2050.
The environment -
Boris Johnson to be put on an island; he keeps saying that's what he wants.
Corporations and globalisation.
Blah blah blah paradigm, blah blah blah blah blah dialectic,
blah blah blah blah blah game changer.
Homes for hardworking families.
Build some homes without bringing down house prices - how hard can it be?
Actually, that's a bit sensible - I don't know how that got through.
Defence - National Service,
but only for people who don't want to do it.
Law and order - unemployment causes crime.
I propose to lock up the unemployed.
(Laughter)
I defy you to argue with that logic.
And finally, local issues.
South Thanet to be made the new capital of the UK.
Demilitarised zone to be set up between North and South Thanet.
(Laughter)
So as you can see, we were deadly serious -
deadly serious in our intent.
I mean, what we were doing was making a mockery of democracy,
and we were accused exactly of that:
'You're making a mockery of democracy. How dare you!'
Well, one thing about democracies is we're allowed to do that.
We're really lucky we're able to do that.
People are jailed in other countries for mocking political systems, right?
So why not fill your boots, laugh at the thing, yeah?
The alternative could be to wait, right?
So people would say we're making a mockery of it.
Well, I don't really see
how we were undermining democracy by me running for parliament.
I don't see running for parliament undermines running for parliament.
But people would try and figure this out to me over and over again.
These charges kept coming at us, yeah?
'You're making a mockery of democracy.'
They'd say, 'You're not taking it seriously.'
Well, don't vote for me then.
Simple enough, isn't it?
No one has to vote for me if they don't want to.
'You're doing it for the publicity.'
Well, that really isn't -
if you're in show business, it's not really a silver bullet, that one.
'Yeah, I am, haha!
Look at me!'
So don't vote for me then.
Simple, right?
'You're doing it because you're David Cameron's cousin.'
Don't vote - wait, what?
(Laughter)
Now, here's some proper ingenuity, right?
There's a genealogy website out there who every year, they do a press release.
And it's not very effective PR, this,
because I never remember the name of the website.
They do a thing where they link two people in the public eye by genealogy.
They'd find two famous people, or not even particularly famous people,
and link them by their family trees.
The year before last,
they found a link between my family and David Cameron's family.
My great-great-great grandfather is William Makepeace Thackeray,
who wrote 'Vanity Fair'.
So there's kind of a red flag on my genealogy.
So they found this connection.
200 years ago, someone in Cameron's family married someone in my family.
Neither of us are a product of that union, right?
But you leave that to simmer on the message boards for long enough,
and it becomes David Cameron is my first cousin, right?
He's put me up to doing it, and the Conservative Party are paying me,
because that is a more likely explanation than 'comedian runs as joke candidate'.
(Laughter)
So we had to go campaigning.
Now, obviously, in modern political campaigning,
you try and capture people's imagination
and then handcuff their imagination to a radiator.
Now, the way you do that these days is with stunts and gimmicks.
So we decided to do an actual literal stunt,
and I would take the current political language literally
and parachute into the constituency.
Now, I've done parachuting before - it's really frightening -
but I thought anything for the joke.
So we found an airfield in Kent, and we made the arrangements.
I'd do a tandem jump,
and we invited some press.
And the one condition - I remember the phone call -
was I had to weigh less than 90 kilos.
So I got on the scales.
Don't worry, in my kids' scales - lovely, pink, heart-shaped scales -
don't worry, I'm less than 90 kilos.
I get to the aerodrome, the press are there,
we do the health and safety briefing.
I get on the scales - I'm overweight.
We have to cancel the jump, right?
Thank God, right?
Ingenuity has to kick in - we had to reinvent ourselves as spin doctors.
We had to spin this calamity, our whole plan falling apart,
turn it into something new.
In fact, I think we did better out of having to readapt the thing
and think of some jokes to go with it.
Also, I was working with a PR man
who's spent most of his professional career lying about comedians' ages,
so he was really good at this stuff.
And so we came up with this:
'It seems I am too heavy to jump.
Yet another tragic victim of this country's obesity epidemic.'
(Laughter)
And that for me is politics:
standing in a field,
admitting to the media
that I'm obese and a health and safety hazard, right?
Now, of course, satire is an interesting thing, right?
Satire often gets outflanked by reality.
Here is our manifesto -
back-of-a-fag-packet manifesto that we did.
Make more stuff, sell it for profit - point one.
Point two - build new houses for people who make stuff to live in.
Three - teach more stuff in school.
Four - something about nurses; people like nurses.
Five - free dogs for all.
Truly, truly radical, that one.
We were going to pay for that with a cat tax, CAT.
Now -
(Laughter)
here's the thing, right?
That looked pretty funny to us.
But the problem with doing satire
is you get outflanked by reality pretty regularly.
In America, the whole satire industry has been outflanked by this election -
in quite a worrying way, actually.
No one saw it coming, and here it is.
I think we put this up;
two days later, we were outflanked by reality,
by the Labour Party with, well, the EdStone.
Remember the EdStone?
Yeah, where the Labour Party proved
that their pledges were definitely carved in stone
by definitely carving them in stone, right?
Now, those pledges aren't that far off mine, are they?
'Make more stuff, sell it for profit'?
'A strong economic foundation.'
'Higher living standards for working families'?
'Build new homes for people who make stuff to live in.'
'Teach more stuff in school' - that's the nurses.
Anyway, you get the point, right?
We tried to go in as inane as we could, and the Labour Party beat us.
One of the perils of satire, there we are.
Now -
polling day came.
The good people of South Thanet, they cast their vote.
Craig McKinney, Conservative - he won.
I didn't lose; I didn't come last.
I polled my full 318 votes.
And here's the thing:
if democracy is about participation and engagement,
I said in my concession speech -
because you get to make a speech at the end, say your piece, basically -
democracy is like sport in a way.
It's about the taking part as much as it is about the winning.
It's a chance for us,
and we're really, really lucky to have it.
It's a chance for us to shape our fate, to mould our destiny.
That's why I got involved.
Maybe one day, there will be free dogs for all, who knows?
But unless we participate in something, unless we engage with something,
we'll never ever get to express our ingenuity.
There we go - thanks very much, thanks for listening.
(Applause)