Is Tower Block of Commons in danger of rehabilitating one of the most despised groups in society?
I am of course talking about MPs rather than council tenants, and even worse than that, MPs who agree to take part in reality TV shows like the Channel 4 documentary that’s a bit like Wife Swap without the swap.
Humiliation was always going to be on the agenda given the filming took place in the middle of the expenses scandal. Lib Dem Mark Oaten made the mistake of criticising his host for spending £60 on cigarettes only for her to google his expenses and throw back the £116 he claimed for irons.
The cringe factor was high in a first episode that saw Oaten reminded of his close encounters with the News of the World and Tory minister for Broken Britain Iain Duncan Smith being interrogated about when he lost his virginity while last night’s third episode featured some toe-curlingly embarrassing rapping from shadow children’s minister Tim Loughton.
But the real anti-star was Labour’s Austin Mitchell. The chair of the House of Commons council housing group insisted he would only take part if he did not have to do what his Westminster colleagues did and live on benefits according to rules set by their hosts. Instead he and his wife got their own flat and even sneaked off one night for a dinner party with friends.
It was all faintly reminiscent of the BBC’s Famous, Rich and Homeless and the way that James, Marquess of Blandford sneaked off to sleep in a 5-star hotel rather than on the streets. More than faintly, in fact, since the two programmes were made by the same production company. How fortunate to generate the same publicity all over again!
It’s hard to believe that Mitchell, a former TV journalist, was unaware of how this would play. To add to the coincidences, he once did a famous TV interview with football managers Brian Clough and Don Revie - the one that’s portrayed as a stitch-up in the film The Damned United in which Mitchell is played by….the same actor who does the voiceover on Tower Block of Commons.
‘You’re not making a film about Austin Mitchell, god help you if you were, you’re making a film about the Orchard Park estate,’ he tries telling the film team in episode two.
So far, so embarrassing. Except that last night’s third episode challenged the MPs to do something to help their communities. Oaten organised a petition to get tower blocks in Barking demolished, Loughton set out to find out more about the gangs around his Birmingham estate, Tory MP Nadine Dorries brought estate residents together with worshippers at a nearby mosque for a Barbie. And Mitchell used his political and media nous to campaign against the closure of the estate’s youth centre.
How any of that will turn out will have to wait for next week’s final episode. How much will really change remains to be seen but at least the MPS who seemed on a hiding to nothing are starting to emerge from their ritual humiliation with a little bit of credit. With the expenses supremo saying today that all MPS should have to repay all of the profits they’ve made on taxpayer-funded second homes, that’s something that could be badly needed around Westminster.
EDIT Wednesday Jan 17: In a blog on his website, Austin Mitchell says he 'naively' agreed to appear to 'put the case for council housing'.
'Big mistake,' he goes on. 'Love [the production company] didn’t want to plead for improved conditions for council tenants but to humiliate MPs. It’s easy to show us as greedy (although they didn’t pay us), out of touch (though we knew more about the people than them) and incompetent (almost as much as their production techniques). They duly did so.
'So five MPS – and particularly me – were allowed to make fools of ourselves and council tenants were mobilised to do that, being helped to put their own case. Iain Duncan Smith was the smartest. Sensibly he got out on day one.
'Their press releases briefed against us from the start. The poor TV girl at the Sun was told that “disgracefully” we’d gone out to dinner with friends. She reproduced their brief (with some deterioration in the style and grammar) but with the subs cut out “disgracefully”
'Result? A deluge of abuse about MPS but nothing said about the neglect of council estates, the betrayal of council housing, the need for new builds and innovations, the plight of tenants penalised by poor facilities or the betrayal of Bevan’s vision of mixed communities by turning them into dumping grounds.'
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