RORY BREMNER
A
s befits someone who pretends to be other people for a living, Rory Bremner is conflicted about his identity. ‘I am not
feeling very Scottish today,’ he declaims, brows arched. It turns out this is part of the problem. ‘I have just had my eyebrows threaded in prepa- ration for a Noel Coward play, which opens on Wednesday. It’s hardly William Wallace.’ Like every Scot, Bremner – born in Edin-
burgh in 1961, currently resident in the Borders when Coward-based commitments allow – is wondering what will happen on 18 Septem- ber. Unlike the rest of us, he is combing every pronouncement for humorous possibilities. And, as his stellar CV in political satire would indicate, he is doing pretty well. ‘Here’s an interesting question, post inde-
pendence,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘Who gets custody of Andy Murray? We don’t even know how he’s going to vote. People like him don’t come out. It’s easier at the moment to come out as gay than it is to come out as a unionist.’ While Bremner describes himself as ‘genu-
inely undecided’, he is unimpressed with the Tories’ sales pitch. To this end, he has adapted a joke from his friend, the American comedienne Kit Hollerbach. She does a routine about a man who asks her if she’s a lesbian. Her retort: ‘Are you the alternative?’ So here’s the Bremner-referendum version.
‘I look at Osborne and Cameron asking: are you really going to vote for independence? And I think, are you the alternative?’ Sending a former member of the Bullingdon Club on a flying visit during which he threatened to bar an independent Scotland from using the pound was, he says, ‘completely counter-productive. The first lesson they have to understand is that Scots, and I include myself in that, won’t be told what to do.’ Then just in case that sounds a little bit
serious, he switches into the perfectly-honed Linlithgow growl of the First Minister. ‘I won’t be told by an Englishman what to do with our currency.’ Back to his own voice. ‘Then suddenly Mark Carney turns up.’ Salmond again. ‘Oh f***, I hadn’t thought about Canadians.’ Bremner has a healthy professional respect
for Salmond. ‘There are very few Scottish poli- ticians who set the world alight. Although there was one who set the curtains alight.’ He adds that this is not just a Scottish
Left: Rory Bremner is starring in Noel Coward’s Relative Values at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End.
‘Here’s an interesting question, post independence. Who gets custody of Andy Murray?’
problem and that, if it was not for Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage down south, he might be out of a job. ‘The main four for me in Scotland are Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon, Ruth David- son and Johann Lamont. Three of those are women, which is good, and Ruth Davidson is a lesbian kick boxer, which makes Theresa May look a bit dull.’ There is a serious agenda behind his compul-
sion to get a laugh. ‘We need to have humour in the debate. If I do impressions of Alex Salmond, people say “how dare you ridicule Alex Salmond, I voted for him, if you send up Alex Salmond you are insulting all the people who voted for him”. You just don’t get that with Cameron, Osborne or Nick Clegg; people accept jokes as part of the political process. It should be part of the political process in any country, that politicians are fair game for satire. It’s not another thing of undermining poli- tics, it engages people with the debate. A lot of people are switched off by the bitterness off it.’ Politics needs big personalities, as well as
gags, to engage the non-manifesto reading classes. One reason is that politics has become increasingly managerial. ‘Most government functions are carried out by Capita, Circa or G4S. The whole of the economy was delegated to the City, it was only when the whole thing blew up that government came back in and took over.’ It’s not the satirist’s job, he says, to tell
anyone how to vote. ‘I follow the referendum, I’m fascinated by it, I have my moments when I drink the Irn-Bru and think: we could be a Nordic social democracy. And that seems excit- ing. But I’m absolutely not in the business of telling people what side to come in. I want people to vote, but they must follow the argu- ments too.’ If this sounds like Bremner spends all his
time weighing up the minutiae of the debate, nothing could be further from the truth. (He hasn’t even read the whole of Scotland’s Future, the 220-page official White Paper yet. Another of his great lines: the reason the SNP has made extra childcare a key commitment is so that every woman in Scotland has time to get through it.) Instead, he has been spending a good deal
of time with Noel Coward, rehearsing Relative Values. It is his first ever acting role, directed by
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