Marina Hyde and Jonathan Freedland, Guardian Live, 1st June 2023
A relief to have a laugh about modern politics. The two Guardian columnists entertained us royally by making fun of our esteemed leaders, surely the best way of cutting demons, gorgons and other assorted monsters down to size.
What just happened, asks Hyde?
‘She is the Spitting Image, the Dudley Moore of her age,’ says Freedland. Or, even better, the Jonathan Swift of our time.
Phoebe Waller Bridge rates her, and, let’s face it, it doesn’t get any better than Fleabag liking you. “Thank f**k for Marina Hyde,” she says, summing up, I suspect, how many of us feel.
Hyde has a way of disempowering the powerful. Of one politician, she says he looks like “the kind of guy who might own several lock-ups, with deep freezers in each of them, the contents of which you hardly dare guess at.”
Boris Johnston, she says, has the air of Chucky after borrowing a suit that doesn’t fit.
And behind this leadership malaise? We haven’t left the empire behind. We’re still running on the fumes, suggests Hyde.
She is self-deprecating and funny, saying: “How I understand things best is always through the prism of a Taylor Swift song,” What could be more sensible than that? A woman after my own heart.
Helen Fowler Writer 