University of Westminster
At an academic gathering on Doctor Who I was criticised for
describing Harriet Jones – a character who appears in three Doctor Who adventures - as the
programme’s perfect Prime Minister, albeit not the Doctor’s. Apparently I had
failed to appreciate that she’s “another Tony Blair”. My own view is that the Tony Blair figure is
in fact the Doctor himself: indeed, I rather suspect David Tennant played the
Doctor with this in mind. For the
purposes of this blog post, however, I wish to defend Harriet Jones.
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| Harriet Jones: We know who you are |
We meet Harriet as a backbench Member
of Parliament in “Aliens of London”/”World War Three” (2005) when she is
bothering Downing Street with a proposal to improve cottage hospitals. Thus from the outset the writer associates
her with the welfare state and National Health Service. We get no New Labour
mantra from Harriet about targets and private sector involvement, the staple
fare of the Blair and Brown governments: rather, she is driven in her quest for
excellence by her mother’s experiences in hospital.
The writer intends us to like
Harriet Jones. She tries to protect Rose
Tyler – from Slitheen and Sycorax alike.
She purports to forbid the use of the Osterhagen Key, whereby Earth’s
inhabitants could commit collective suicide.
Her endless proffering of her ID card and identifying herself, with the invariable
response “I/We know who you are” is not just done for laughs: it establishes
that she is, by prime ministerial standards, self-effacing. At the same time she is decisive – prompting
the Doctor to blow up Downing Street to do
away with the Slitheen, as well as herself destroying the Sycorax.
Architect of Britain
It’s easy to belittle economic
policy when forming an assessment of Harriet Jones: indeed this is what the
Doctor ultimately does, neatly reflecting the fact that he doesn’t have to live
here.
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| Jones supporter: Jackie Tyler |
“I’m 18 quid a week better
off! They’re calling it Britain ’s
golden age!” gushes Jackie Tyler in “The Christmas Invasion” (2005) when Jones
is well established as Prime Minister.
Not being a political thriller, the politics of Doctor Who is often expressed in terse fashion – no bad thing. We can extrapolate that the essence of the
golden age is that Jones’ government has made working class people discernibly
better off. By contrast, real-life
Britain has been characterised by the “growing gap between the very rich and
the rest” with New Labour presiding over a “triumph of the super-rich” with
“the reinvention of Britain as a massive tax-haven” (Robert Peston, Who Runs Britain? (London : Hodder & Stoughton, 2008) 7-22).
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| Jones supporter: Wilf Mott. He voted for her, much to daughter Sylvia's consternation |
Another element of our golden age
appears to be independence from the USA , a perennial Doctor Who theme (see e.g. “The Tenth
Planet” (1966), “The Tomb of the Cybermen” (1967)). As regards the invasion of Iraq , Jones quips “I voted against
that, thank you very much!” In “The
Christmas Invasion” she instructs: “You can tell the President – and please use
these exact words – he is not my boss and he’s certainly not turning this into
another war”. But the
anti-American theme is not entirely divorced from the question of making working
class people better off: fear of America ’s
rugged capitalism was always a factor
in the show’s hostility to US
domination of Britain .
(See generally Nicholas J. Cull, “Tardis at the OK Corral: Doctor Who and the USA ”,
in John R. Cook and Peter Wright (eds), British
Science Fiction Television (London :
IB Tauris, 2008)).
The Doctor is not always there
The Doctor falls out with Harriet, and gets her deposed, over her decision to fire missiles to destroy the retreating Sycorax. It is the Doctor himself who puts forward the
arguments which prompts her to destroy the Sycorax: that Earth is drawing
attention to itself and that the Sycorax are likely to spread the word that the
planet is up for grabs. Firing on a
retreating spaceship recalls Mrs Thatcher’s destruction of the retreating General Belgrano during the Falklands
War. However, Jones is defending her
entire country and planet, so the metaphor is less strong than it first seems. Jones is after all Prime Minister of a country,
not a time traveller who flits around the universe: as such she has stronger
reason to dispose of the Sycorax than the Doctor has for slaughtering the
Silence or Twelfth Cyberlegion. Indeed,
it has been suggested that the Doctor is so appalled at Jones because he sees
himself in her. In any event, the Doctor's meddling in Britain's internal affairs creates the political space for Harold Saxon - in reality the Doctor's arch-enemy the Master - to become Prime Minister, with catastrophic results for the entire world ("The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords" (2007)).
Jones makes the point that the
Doctor isn’t always there to save the Earth.
This is perfectly valid: indeed the Doctor
Who spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures rather hang on
this assumption. In “The Stolen Earth” (2008)
she says that she thought long and hard about whether the Doctor was right but concluded
that he was wrong. The message is that we
cannot rely on an ultimate rescuer, be it the Doctor or the USA .
In the end, in resisting the
Daleks Harriet sacrifices herself for the rest of us: “My life doesn’t matter,
not if it saves the Earth”. The Harriet Jones
trilogy is significant because - like the first few Doctor Who stories of 1963 and 1964 - it prompts viewers to come to
an independent judgment on the central political questions of right and wrong, rather than endlessly deferring to the judgments of the show’s “hero”.
