Will a Stand-Up Comedian Ever Be British Prime Minister?

Beppe Grillo, Photo by Mauro Edmundo Pedretti

The Beppe Grillo Story is now about three boozy lunches from being turned into a Hollywood film. He's Karen Silkwood meets Patch Adams. He's an everyman for our time, a True Patriot, battling against the "establishment" – men in dark suits who "don't understand what ordinary people want". He knows. Ordinary people want a guy in jeans with a beard. They are pro-jeans and beard. They are avowedly anti-suit. On Monday, in his first election, this ex-stand-up comedian took one in every four Italian votes for his supposedly leaderless Five Star Movement, making them and him the biggest story in Italian politics in a generation. Well done him.

He is not the first European semi-joke candidate to get elected in recent times. Over in Iceland, not long after the financial crisis nearly turned the entire country into a North Sea cannibal holocaust, there was The Best Party: elected on a pledge to build a Disneyland in Rekjavik, work towards "a drug-free parliament by 2020" and probably point-blank refusing to form a coalition with any party who hadn't watched seasons one to five of The Wire. They won six of 15 seats and their leader, TV comedian Jon Gnarr, became Mayor of Rekjavik – a position he has kept since and remained fairly popular in. Iceland was the tester for this cunningly innovative new politics. Now, after Grillo, the gates are wide open.

There was a common theory around 2010 that Europe was "turning right" because, everywhere you looked, centre-right parties were suddenly winning elections. That theory was wrong. In fact, rather than angling towards any coherent ideology, Europe was simply "turning". Centre-left parties just had the bad luck to be in power when the financial tsunami slammed into the continent's beaches. So the public lashed out at the only people who you can ever truly lash out against: those in power. The prevailing mood wasn't: "Fuck the left!" It was: "Fuuuuuuuck eeeeeeeverybody!"

It is the 360-degree machine gun double-bird-flip that became, and continues to be, the only sane ideological voice of our times. “We know something is terribly wrong,” it says, “but frankly we don't know how to fix it. So, in the meantime, we're just going to stab the people in power as hard as we can for as long as we can and that will at least make us feel better.” Hence how the Lib Dems have shrivelled to a neutrino-sized nothingness. In a bygone age, their role was to absorb the protest vote: to hoover up the desperate furnace of anger and despair at the heart of the British electorate into votes for meaningless opposition.

Now, anyone who wants to go "Well, fuuuuuuck that guy, but also fuuuuuuuuck that other guy, too," has to lend their vote to UKIP, who have seen their support soar. This week, Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror offered us the hilarious prospect of a cartoon bear being elected to Parliament. They forgot that Hartlepool already elected a monkey mayor. Reality has often only been a half-pace behind.

It's nothing new that radical times bring out the folks selling radical solutions. In the 1920s, desperate voters threw themselves at their local fascists and bought pricey uniforms so they could join in the pageantry in the hope that they'd maybe one day be able to dream of having a job again. In our age, they're turning to comedians. These are the people who understand the communication mediums of our times; who blog, who are "big on Twitter", who already give good speeches and who are skilled at whipping their masses into an ordered, focused mob. And who do that very dangerous thing: "talk just like you and me".

So could it happen in Britain? After all, we're also fucked. We also hate everyone. Is there a Mosley of comedy out there ready to soak up our rank disaffection? Russell Howard would be best placed. He already has a political platform: Russell Howard's Good News, where he focuses on the sort of news worn-out electorates claim to love: Good News. Exactly the sort of news that people who claim they never listen to or watch the news say they love (“It's always so depressing, you see – so negative. Like, they're always complaining. Honestly, when I get in from work I'd rather do something with my time that's going to lift my spirits. Like watch Friends DVDs.”).

It'd be pretty easy to convert that base of neggy-news-deniers into a political party that focuses obsessively on what's already great about Britain and refuse to acknowledge anything suggesting that all is not rosy and swell. They'd style it as “changing the discourse”, “doing away with the discredited old politics of negativity”. “Forget What's Wrong with Britain, We Believe In What's Right with Britain,” they'd sloganeer.

As we all know, pollsters already use Friends DVD ownership as a proxy for the median voter, and Howard looks like the sort of man who has little else on his shelves (apart from The Da Vinci Code, The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night Time, an unread copy of 50 Shades "to see what all the fuss was about", Wolf Hall and a bookmarked first volume of Game Of Thrones). If I were David Cameron, I'd be drawing up a list of "shockingly crude gags" Howard has told that I could pass over to the Daily Mail togenerate some faux-outrage over.

But whether it is Howard or simply someone like him, they won't be alone. Europe spent 2008 to 2012 electing the right to replace the left. Pretty soon those parties' terms will be up and we'll still be fucked. That's when these professional outsiders will have their velvet revolutions. The Latvian Michael McIntyre, the Czech Roy "Chubby" Brown, the Portuguese Micky Flanagan.

And then, as successive governments of clowns turn out to also be – well, governments of clowns, we will have to accept a generational sigh of anguished despair as we finally work out that the problem wasn't with right or with left, nor with insider or outsider. The problem was with democracy itself, and the what's-in-it-for-me avarice on which it is unavoidably built. That'll be a heavy day indeed.

Or perhaps even before then, rather than Eton, PPE and Spad jobs, the political classes will hit back and work out that the new best way up the ladder is to get themselves down to the open mic nights. Starting their career with "Have You Ever Noticed" jokes and ending it with the inspection of a mass-hanging while taking the salute in a general's uniform. That would be something we could all laugh at.

In fact, screw Beppe's happy-ending blockbuster. The story of a sinister clown who seduces with humour and then destroys an entire continent: that would be the greatest story ever told. “Have you ever noticed, right, how it's our ethnic destiny to dominate Europe? I mean, we're already so bossy. You go round to a German mother-in-law's house and the meal is like a military operation… and the pudding!!! [Goes into hilarious impression of German hausfrau serving pudding that concludes with a coded reference to Anschluss].” That sort of thing.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

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