Matt Forde: Defying Calamity
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★☆☆☆☆

IF you weren’t sure who Matt Forde’s demographic is, consider that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, was snapped at one of his recent shows. A self-confessed Blairite, Forde trades in “political comedy” that lightly pokes fun at the political class while also being part of it (see also: Have I Got News For You).

But, I hear you ask, why would you, an avowed lefty and veteran of the Corbyn years, be here at a show that is clearly not aimed at you? Well, maybe it’s a bit of anthropology. What exactly are Forde’s goals, and how is he achieving it with his demographic?

Give credit where it’s due: Forde is a master propagandist, the Shaman of the self-styled sensible voter, the people who cling to the good ship centrism even as it sails into rightward waters.

For the most part this is a show about Keir Starmer. Forde’s role is to convince this audience that Starmer and his government are not callous towards the elderly, the disabled or vicars who hold up placards against genocide. This is instead a man, who makes “tough decisions … the benefits of which will be felt ten years from now.”

But remember, this is a comedy show after all, and Forde knows his audience would blanch at a full hagiography, so there’s an impression of Starmer as a boring and nasally voiced nerd. This creates the sense of a balanced take, but the underlying message is clear: a good decision done by a boring man with a nasally voice is better than bad decisions done by reckless charmers such as Trump and Farage.

Those alleged good decisions? Perhaps Forde supports the UC and PIP Bill that recently passed and which campaigners say will kill disabled people. Maybe it’s the decision to push forward authoritarian online regulation or arrest senior citizens because they expressed support for a campaign group. We’ll never know, because if there’s one thing that Forde gets right it’s that politics is both policies and storytelling, and this show is an attempt at the latter to salvage the reputation of a Prime Minister, who, at time of writing, was on an approval rating of 23 per cent.

We do get a weak defence of the now-scrapped winter fuel policy. There’s also a bizarre framing of the Starmer/Trump summit as one in which “Alpha dog” Starmer took “masterful” control of Trump. In Forde’s world, Starmer is a weird amalgamation of Mr Bean and James Bond.

But there’s a small, barely perceptible, shuffling in the audience as Forde brings up migration and again evokes the spectre of “tough choices” and a joke about how the infamous “Island of Strangers” speech sounds like an ITV gameshow deftly inserts a political message that implies migrants drain services: “10 British people, 10 migrants, but only 5 GP appointments, what’s gonna happen?”

Of course such a framing ignores the wider context of why people struggle to get NHS appointments which is not because of migrants but years of governmental neglect from both the Conservative Party and Labour, neither of which believe that healthcare is a human right any more.

On the day after the Met Police arrested over 400 people in London for the horrific crime of holding a placard, Forde is silent on the increasingly authoritarian turn and the genocide that inspired it, the themes that will almost certainly define Starmer’s term in office. Forde is likely smart enough to know that even here, things may get ugly if he dares to claim Starmer’s “She [Israel] has a right to defend herself” speech was somehow misinterpreted.

On that note, when Forde takes a more personal turn, to talk about his recovery from cancer and the long term effects, he’s engaging, sympathetic and genuinely funny with an excellent sense of showmanship and stagecraft. He’s also a talented impressionist and I couldn’t help but chuckle at his pitch perfect take on Lee Anderson’s North Nottinghamshire drawl. Behind the propagandist, there’s a genuinely talented comic here.

But Forde has both found his demographic (people who are “into politics” to the extent that they know the names of the Shadow Cabinet, but aren’t aware of that 100,000 people in the UK die in poverty each year) and his ability to gently preach to them amid funny impressions, so it’s unsurprising he devotes most of the show to this element.

In summary, this is the performance of a court jester, an act that prods and pokes at the throne without ever piercing it. It’s a show about Labour without daring to mention the cruelty, stupidity and complicity that has already become emblematic of their term in office.

In the next election, against both Reform to the right and a New Left, Labour’s narrative - the one that Forde is already campaigning for here - will be to frame themselves as the sensible centre between both socialism and barbarism. Outside these echo chambers, they haven’t noticed that the latter has already arrived.

Matt Forde: Defying Calamity runs until August 24. Tickets: edfringe.com