In defence of Harriet Jones

by Danny Nicol,
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.

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’s golden age

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.

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).

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”.