“Have I got any Tories in?” Geoff Norcott is “the UK’s only declared Conservative comedian,” his publicity claims – which will come as a surprise to Jim Davidson. Norcott has been doing the rounds as a comic for 15-plus years, and it’s only in the last couple that he’s come out as a right-winger. I’d guessed, from afar, that that was just a canny piece of branding. It’s certainly done wonders for his career: he’s now the Telegraph’s go-to man for comedy comment, and earlier this year, out of all proportion to his profile or accomplishment, he was drafted on to Question Time.
In his act, he has the good grace to admit that that gig came about only to satisfy diversity quotas, as he puts it, savouring the irony. In fact, on stage, he’s got good grace all round: I bow to no one in my dislike of the Tories, but Norcott comes across as a likable lad. Yes, his show, Conswervative, is an apologia for this working-class comic’s rightward drift, insulting Jeremy Corbyn, mocking the supposed sanctity of the NHS and defending tax avoidance. But it plays more like a wind-up than a battle cry: Norcott’s politics feel open-ended and lightly worn. I suspect he’d be back in the Labour fold before long, if it weren’t for the current state of the party, or for the shot-in-the-arm that Toryism has given to his standup career.
There’s only silence, by the way, when he pops that introductory question about Tories in the crowd. Which is just as he wants it: it sets up the conceit that, in comedy, it’s some kind of radical act to be Conservative. (When Norcott asks the same question after the interval, he gets a different, altogether rowdier answer: it’s amazing the difference a G&T can make to confidence in one’s Conservatism.)
The first half offers background to Norcott’s journey to the dark side, as he recalls his former career in education, which brought out his inner disciplinarian, and his contempt for “trendy teaching”. He’s not a man for indulgence, Norcott – hence his attraction to the Tories, who are the party of personal responsibility, he seems to believe. We liberal lefties, meanwhile, are far too soft on misbehaving kids, say, or people with depression. And yet, the Brexit aftermath has exposed our hypocrisy: our mask has slipped, Norcott tells us, and our supposed loathing of the poor stands naked and revealed.
Most of this is delivered with a playful spirit: Norcott is happy to send up his own Tory callousness (when proposing the NHS abandon anyone over 80, say), and there are plenty of droll gags, like the one about baby boomers getting blamed for everything, including “eating all the cod in the North Sea”. It’s just as well, mind you, because the arguments seldom stack up. One section invokes sympathy for the millennial generation in the age of austerity, as if austerity were a force of nature rather than a project authored by his beloved Tories to fleece the poor. He’s strikingly weak on Brexit, admitting apologetically that he voted Leave without any compelling reason to do so.
And yet, part of the charm of the show is that Norcott looks like he’s up for an argument. He’s not claiming a monopoly on being right, he repeatedly asks us to heckle him if we disagree (one gent in the back row is seriously miffed that Norcott has dissed junior doctors), and you get the impression that, on whatever point you chose to challenge him, he’d give you a fair hearing and a decent answer back.
Finally, I don’t buy the idea that comedy is monopolised by left-wingers, although I admit they’re well represented – inevitably, given that “every joke is a tiny revolution”, as Orwell said. No one ever said “every joke is a tax cut for the rich” – with the possible exception of Jimmy Carr. I do agree that few comics are out-and-proud Tory voters, but that’s not surprising because what is there to be proud about? Maybe that’ll change: the stigma of voting Conservative seems to be falling away. In the meantime, you could do worse than indulge Geoff Norcott, who seems more of a tease than a Tory – and if he is a Tory, is situated at the (hitherto little-known) lovable end of the Conservative spectrum.
