“Dogs are more useful than women….well, most of the time”
Just one of a litany of eyebrow raising things uttered by four men in their early thirties on a fishing trawler in Scotland in 1985. Guy Cheyney, Henry Carew, Robert Hutchinson and John Buckland were posh, rich, entitled, opinionated, naïve, and the ‘stars’ of an infamous BBC documentary, “The Fishing Party”.
In October 1985 Paul Watson an unashamedly left wing film maker persuaded these four; two metal traders, an aristocrat in the drinks trade, and Hutchinson who didn’t work as ‘it didn’t suit him’, to allow him to film them on an expedition to catch a record halibut – “200lbs some of them” on a hired trawler in Scotland.
What Watson really wanted to do, in pioneering the fly-on-the-wall style documentary was nothing to do with fishing – he was phishing. He shot hours of footage and edited it together with news reports of race riots, unemployment figures and general societal upheaval. To create what the New York Times later described as
“is a fine example of a news essay that is almost outrageously unfair but devastatingly accurate”
Watson wanted to expose the disconnect, as he saw it, with the winners on the Thatcherite right and the rest of society. In the course of filming, and with a lack of self-awareness that is astonishing the four manage to come across as appalling people – so much so even the right wing press turned on them once the documentary was aired. That they were shown the edited film before it was broadcast and still didn’t see how things were going to play out is perhaps one of the more surprising details of the whole saga.
It is an astonishing watch. The four are clearly stiched up by Watson but at the same time they are completely willing to do and say the most extraordinary things with no concept of how the public will react. Of the many things the public could have been shocked by – shooting seagulls whilst drunk off the back of the boat was one they picked, so much so one of the men was prosecuted in the Scottish courts for doing so.
Cheyney, perhaps the key figure and most outspoken of the four said a decade later when he made another film with the BBC about the documentary:
“We could not have done or said more stupid or irresponsible things in front of a camera”
All four suffered becoming, for a while, national hate figures. The left hated them as examples of the worst of Thatcherism. The right hated them for giving a vulgar and false impression of Thatcherism.
Why is any of this relevant to your Sunday morning?
Well apart from encouraging you to watch an extraordinary piece of television, at the time the documentary was filmed a 22 year old metal trader and very keen fisherman was invited to join the trip – but didn’t go. In the end like John Buckland, who actually says on camera he might stay in London to keep trading and miss the trip, that 22 year old does miss the trip for “one last trade”.
His name was Nigel Farage.
If he had gone on the trip, we’ll never know if he would have said and done similarly outrageous things but by association he’d have probably been hit by the same public reaction. How do I know this? Because Nigel Farage told me himself ten years ago. He even sent me a link to the documentary which you can watch and see Cheyney’s film a decade later discussing just how bad the blowback from it was.
If Farage dodged a bullet not making the trip, he was less fortunate the next month when after a curry a few pints, he was hit by a car and hospitalised. The life of a twenty something metal trader in Margaret Thatcher’s deregulated city was all about risk and reward. But Dulwich College educated Farage was not a product of the working class. Saying that, doesn’t mean anything.
Keir Starmer wheeled out his old dad again last week. He was a tool maker by the way, if you hadn’t heard. Starmer was keen to explain why Farage is not a working class hero, that Labour voters should not look to Farage because he’s fake: a posh boy pretending to be a man of the people.
Ok, that is actually true, however trying to ‘out working-man him’ isn’t going to work.
David Cameron, keen to escape the Eton toff label famously, and to be fair, rather effectively, told the electorate “I think it’s not where you’ve come from it’s where you’re going the matters to people”. In a by-election in 2008 Edward Timpson won the traditionally Labour seat of Crewe and Nantwich despite Labour activists trying to throw off his campaign by turning up to barrack him dressed in top hats and tails. It did not work, indeed it shone an unflattering light on Labour.
The posh label doesn’t really stick, besides nobody is really buying Starmer as some kind of world class ideal either. Like most of his party he is solidly middle class, metropolitan left and the real champions of the working class left can’t abide Starmer.
Farage will escape any electoral injury from this blunt attack, nor should the Tories touch it.
The real question mark over the scenario of a Reform Government is experience. Not one of them has ever had a role, in government. I still cannot find a single person who can tell me how they will be able to run anything – and that’s my friends in Reform!
Both the Tories and Labour know just how hard a job government is. There are no simple solutions and obstacles everywhere. But just saying the leader is a posh type who went to public school isn’t going to stop the Farage bandwagon.
The Conservatives will be better off trying to lure the fish away from Farage by offering better bait.
His is not exactly as it seems.
