Who is popular today?

McEwan’s scabrous satire, in which an insect is transformed into the PM, is a comic triumph
When he published the second edition of the greatest of political satires, Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift prefaced it with an outraged letter from Gulliver himself. His chief complaint was that his book had failed to change anything: “instead of seeing a full stop put to all abuses and corruptions, at least in this little island, as I had reason to expect: behold, after above six months warning, I cannot learn that my book hath produced one single effect according to mine intentions…” The joke is not just on Gulliver, but on Swift himself and indeed on the art of satire. When did its mockery ever put a full stop to the abuses it attacks?
It seems safe to assume that Ian McEwan does not suffer from Gulliver’s delusions. His short, sharp satire on Brexit is not going to stop it, or to change the mind of any reader who supports it. The classical idea that satire can reform the polity has even less purchase now than it had in Swift’s 18th century. Its mechanism was shame: the rulers would see an image of themselves in the distorting mirror of the writer’s fable, feel ashamed of themselves and resolve to be better. But ours is an age of political shamelessness. In the era of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, the rulers create their own grotesque self-parodies and flaunt them before their adoring fans. Continue reading...