Marina Hyde on five years of watching the political circus

As a rule, Marina Hyde doesn’t do TV, or radio, or podcasts. But she made an exception for Anushka Asthana’s last episode on Today in Focus, surveying the surreal range of characters who have dominated the political scene for the last five years: “The music has stopped in the middle of a deadly pandemic, and these are the people in charge.” From why Theresa May is like Vin Diesel to “cabbage patch Draco Malfoy” Boris Johnson, Hyde says: “Did I write that? I’ve got no memory of any of these.”

Still, she proves throughout that she is as funny and essential a guide to the era out loud as she is in her award-winning columns. As she says of Johnson: “I think he must be taken very seriously indeed. But you can do that through jokes.” (And as she says of Anushka: “We will all miss you so much. We really will.”)

You can read Marina Hyde’s most recent columns – the fruits of “another backbreaking day down the whimsy-pit” – here.

And you can read about Nosheen Iqbal and Michael Safi, announced on Thursday as the new presenters of Today in Focus alongside Rachel Humphreys, here.

Boris Johnson speaks to the media in 2018.

Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

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source: theguardian.com