Armando Iannucci’s deadpan political satire The Thick of It is, without a doubt, the 21st century’s answer to Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay’s wonderful Yes, Minister, and like that immortal series it has now spawned a book. The good news is that just like the Yes, Minister diaries, which adapted the scripts and introduced elements of new material, this is not some lazy cash-in but a lovingly crafted, beautifully designed and very cleverly written companion piece to the last days of the government that employs the formidable spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker.

Purporting to be a folder belonging to Tucker which has been lost on the train, this is a dossier of interviews, e-mails, transcripts, letters and other ephemera, liberally peppered with his trademark profanity. As a character, Malcolm Tucker elevates swearing to a new level, and this is not a book for the faint of heart:

Are focus groups helpful? In a word: absolutelyfuckingnot. Fuck no. The problem is that focus groups are made up of members of the public and are therefore intrinsically unreliable / lop-sided / racist / mental. They are also ‘run’ by marketing ‘people’ for ‘the purposes of qualitative research’. In other words it’s the mad leading the mad creating a feedback loop of fizzing shit.

As satire, this book succeeds wonderfully. The pols are empty headed, shallow and weak, as evidenced by their half-arsed book proposals; the special advisers are brutal thugs led by Tucker, who, as in the TV show, is not quite as scary or powerful as he thinks he is; and the career civil servants hold the whole lot of them in contempt. The modern media come in for plenty of stick too – journalists and broadcasters have created the 24 hour news cycle that needs to be kept fed by government, and they are loathed for it (for example, here’s Tucker on Sky’s Adam Boulton: “try to pretend he doesn’t look like a male Sandi Toksvig wih a glandular complaint”).

The ultimate target of both book and TV series is the infernal compact between media and the spin doctors who threaten, bribel and cajole them in to reporting the news the way they want, to the detriment of policy making and intelligent debate. While the message of this book may be that we get the politics, and the politicians, that we deserve, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s damn funny and very, very fucking clever indeed.

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