As Much as We Want It to, Political Satire Won't Save Us

Quite beyond the usual questions of pain, remorse or sorrow, you have to wonder what it'll look like at that last, terminal moment. For the righteous: eternal life. For the rest of us, what?

If there is a hell, it's here on Earth, splayed across precisely 304 pages. We can now say this with biblical certainty after the arrival of Hope Never Dies, the first instalment in a promised series of Joe Biden and Obama buddy caper novels – or "laugh out loud bromances" if you're an American broadsheet book critic – piped fresh from the pen of Andrew Shaffer, both a New York Times best-seller and a man inexplicably still at liberty despite being responsible for 2012's Fifty Shades of Earl Grey, a zany parody of the momma's choice BDSM international smash hit.

The thrust of things is simple: Joe Biden is just an incredibly cool guy. We know this because of the memes, toothsome gaffes and carefully developed air of squiffy bohemie, plus the sheer, never-ending malarkey of it all. Here's a thing "Amtrak Joe" likes to do: he likes to get the train from his Delaware constituency to DC. Why? Because he's Daddy Joe Biden, y'all. So when his favourite conductor dies in suspicious circumstances, well you just know that he's got to get to the rootin'-tootin' bottom of things, with help from – who else – the "cold as cucumber lotion" Barry Obama. Surely liberal readers haven't experienced a comparable fission of pure anticipation since JK Rowling gave Owen Smith the double wands up in his pursuit of the Triwizard Tournament Labour Leadership back in 2016.

Naturally, the whole endeavour amounts to a rich feast of embarrassment. And not just regular, everyday mortification, but a special viral strain of skin crawling tweeness, lashed to a wafer-thin plot and a catalogue of ever zanier hi-jinks conducted in Raymond Carver prose parody (“Don’t get your hopes up, I told myself. 'Hope' is just a four letter word.”). There are a few oblique cusses thrown the way of the current POTUS (small fingers, bad tweets) and wistful nostalgia for the prelapsarian age before November of 2016 and He Who Must Not Be Named (despite shooting through the book like a trapped nerve, Trump isn’t mentioned by name once).

While there might be no upper limit on the number of boring, bad or cynical books in the world, Shaffer's has a further distinguishment. It's a novel-length symptom of something larger than the sum of its own squalid parts.

Millions of words have been devoted to Brexit’s mutating horrors since June of 2016, though only the most foolhardy comic minds have been willing to engage in terms that aren’t either kayfabe-breaking bursts of earnest denunciation, or the viral epic rantage of Jonathan Pie. No industrious Andrew Shaffer type has yet conceived of a Blair/Brown New Labour Starsky & Hutch fantasy that could serve as Britain’s answer to Hope Never Dies – the latest, most egregious example of a sickness in the current state of political piss-taking that runs across the English-speaking world. It's not a plague that respects borders or, indeed, the width of oceans. Britain is not immune from this type of gormlessness. It might only take the first genuine food riot for that grim vision to become reality.

2017 bore witness to Brexit The Musical at the Edinburgh Fringe, even if it didn’t really ignite in the way that the show's writer Chris Bryant must have hoped.

Perhaps events merely overtook it. Equally, it might just have been that the whacky "Gilbert & Sullivan does the zeitgeist" schtick didn’t hit the bullseye, despite the hype of Remainiac broadsheet reviewers. In the Guardian, Will Hutton was so moved by the spectacle of Andrea Leadsom belting out show tunes that he wrote: "There must be multiple versions mounted in every pro-Leave constituency in the country, continually revised as every twist and turn in the story becomes ever more incredible. Every old people's home, every ex-mining or ex-steel town, every seaside resort fearful of immigration should see the show and laugh at Brexit. Let's smile our way to victory – and use satire, that most British of reflexes, to consign Brexiters to history." Shockingly, the people of Stoke-on-Trent have yet to be convinced.

It’s a nice idea, the power of laughter as a cure to our heightened present, hemmed in as we are by the thought of competing existential threats. It is also a delusion of mind bending proportions. To earnestly urge the good hearted, cruelly misled folks of Brexit Britain to giggle their way back to sanity by dropping a score on whimsical musicals is an almost Dickensian note of paternal condescension. It’s also the impulse that lies right at heart of the emaciated liberal response to unavoidably political times.

What really rankles writers like Shaffer, or the #FBPE legion and admins of the "Bums Out For Drumpf" Facebook event page, isn't just the oppression of a free press, the evils of border detentions or the prospect of post-No Deal economic collapse. It’s the permanent departure of good taste that hits the hardest. Don’t you miss the gee-wizz eccentricity of Joe Biden and Barack's epic chill? Don’t you miss the memes? Sure, leaving the EU might mean the final flattening of the deprived areas that ushered it in, but consider the damage done to house prices in Honor Oak Park. It's an apolitical understanding of the world, incapable of conceiving the present through any other lens that doesn’t transmute Trump to Voldemort or Mrs May as a safe pair of hands on account of her being a bloody difficult woman.

You often see Peter Cook’s famous quote rolled out when discussing the inability of satire to counter the creep of real world reaction and violence. During the opening of the Establishment Club in 1961, he commented that it was to be a venue modelled on "those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War". It’s our misfortune to combine all the fascism with none of the cabaret.

On the 13th of July we were promised fireworks for Trump's UK state visit. £50,000 worth of crowdfunded "Trump Baby Balloon" to float above the honest direct action and regrettable "Drink Tea and Bugger Off" placards. A giant mass of airborne fabric to stalk his every move and show that ghastly man exactly whose country he was messing with. That the finished spectacle amounted to a tiny approximation of the advertised behemoth didn't seem to matter much: the point was made, however lamely.

Perhaps it’s too easy in these trying times to be unkind to writers like Andrew Shaffer or whacky protest gimmickry. After all, they might well be final proof of a divine being – because only a fully omnipotent God could arrange the hell of the present and throw us the likes of Hope Never Dies as consolation.

@DrLimes99