Yes, We Know Who You Are

There’s something unusual about the 2005-10 period of Doctor Who, when Russell T Davies was its executive producer and head writer. (Well, there’s probably lots of unusual things about it, but this blog post is only interested in one of them.) Classic stories from the 1970s implied that in the near future, Jeremy Thorpe or Shirley Williams were Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the 1988 Sylvester McCoy story The Happiness Patrol features a thinly-veiled parody of Margaret Thatcher as the villain and, after Davies was gone, Matt Smith’s Doctor would meet Winston Churchill on a number of occasions (Ian McNiece’s portrayal of Churchill is now the subject of a spin-off series of audio dramas courtesy of Big Finish Productions). But in Davies’ era, the Doctor actually meets the Prime Minister of the day - or at least, the person who’s meant to be the Prime Minister of the day in the Who universe. In fact, he meets several of them. So, then, here we have a chronicle of all the PMs of the time and an attempt to work out a rough political timeline of the United Kingdom in the Doctor’s world.

"They die through inertia, in the face-down of challenge."

 In one of the very first new series stories, the 2005, two-parter “Aliens of London” / “World War Three”, we meet no fewer than three once or future Prime Ministers. First up is, of course, a bloke who’s meant to look a bit like Tony Blair. “Aliens” is a satirical story (it aired only about a fortnight before the UK’s general election of that year), and towards the end of Part One it is revealed that the current Prime Minister, thought missing, has in fact been murdered by the titular aliens when Rose Tyler finds his corpse stuffed in a cupboard. The story goes that the extra portraying the deceased PM was hired on the understanding that he was Tony Blair’s lookalike, but when he actually turned up on set it was found that the resemblance wasn’t as strong as hoped; resultantly, in the final product we never see him up close. But the various references throughout the story to “weapons of mass destruction” and a female backbencher “not being one of the Babes” makes it very clear who he, and the incumbent government, are meant to be.

With the unnamed PM missing, the acting Prime Minister is Joseph Green, Chair of the Parliamentary Commission on the Monitoring of Sugar Standards in Exported Confectionery, and described by Andrew Marr (guest starring as himself) as “hardly the most important person right now”. However, with the rest of the Cabinet stranded outside London after a faked alien invasion causes a lockdown, Green is the most senior MP available and hence becomes the man in charge by default. Most unfortunately, Green isn’t actually Green at all, but Jocrassa Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen, one of the invading aliens who has killed the real Green and assumed his identity. In a chilling omen of things to come some years later, the only things he plans to do in office are abuse his position to make his family rich and start a nuclear war that destroys the entire planet.

An insane, overweight man with something strange about his hair inexplicably becomes head of state and is unwisely given access to nuclear weapons.

 Naturally enough, it falls to the Doctor to defeat the aliens, and one of his companions in this story is the aforementioned backbencher, Harriet Jones, MP for the fictional constituency of Flydale North. Throughout the story, the Doctor is sure he’s heard of her somewhere before, and once he’s dispatched the alien menace by blowing up Downing Street (long story) he suggests that Jones should run for the now vacant post of Prime Minister and, as he sees her running to reassure people that the threat has passed, he remembers who she is: the Prime Minister known as the architect of Britain’s Golden Age, who won three elections in a row.

 

This is to change, however, in Harriet’s next appearance in the 2005 Christmas special, “The Christmas Invasion”. At the end of this story, the newly regenerated Doctor has forced the Sycorax (the ones doing the invading in the title) into retreat when Jones orders a secret government organisation to launch an energy weapon that destroys their ship. The Doctor is furious with her (even though their leader had literally tried to stab him in the back after surrendering and only failed because the Doctor killed him first and the Doctor had just made Jones paranoid about all the other hostile alien races out there… but that’s a post for another time), and summarily brings down her government by whispering the words “Don’t you think she looks tired?” in an aide’s ear (harking back to a similar incident with Thatcher, apparently). When we last see her, she is facing rumours of ill health, being unfit for office and facing a vote of no confidence - in stark contrast to the Doctor’s prediction of the Golden Age. (Davies later confirmed on a commentary that the Doctor had changed history and ended Jones’ political career early; Jones would later find redemption in the 2008 series finale, “The Stolen Earth”.)

The next time we hear of modern-day politics in the show is in the 2007 series finale, “The Sound of Drums” / “Last of the Time Lords”, but before we get on to who became Prime Minister there, let’s try and fill in some gaps. “Aliens of London” was set in early 2006, one year after its broadcast date (due to an absolutely fantastic plot twist where the Doctor accidentally returns his companion, Rose Tyler, home, but ends up returning twelve months after his departure when he was aiming for twelve hours), and “The Christmas Invasion” is set at Christmas the same year. In the latter story, Harriet states that she “got in with a landslide majority”. This could be either an election for leadership of the Labour Party, or a snap election that she called to seek her own mandate (the phrasing is ambiguous), but let’s assume the latter (if it was just a leadership election, then she served out the remainder of the term won by Not Tony Blair and then won three general elections, meaning she was Prime Minister for at least fifteen years, which seems pretty unlikely - of the nine Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom to serve for more than a decade, seven were from the nineteenth century or earlier).

So, assuming that, in the Doctor Who universe there’s a general election in early 2006 - presuming they also had one in 2005, only a year after the last one. Then Jones’ downfall comes at Christmas of the same year. In “The Sound of Drums”, a character makes reference to “the downfall of Harriet Jones”, which is said to have happened at the time that the next Prime Minister first appeared. The best way to reconcile everything (that I can think of, at any rate) is that Jones resigned shortly after Christmas 2006 and another member of the Jones government won the ensuing leadership election and became Prime Minister. However, the unnamed new Prime Minister, for some reason or another, then announced a General Election that took place in mid-2008, which is the setting for “Drums”. (Gordon Brown toyed with the idea of an early election for several months after becoming Prime Minister, only scrapping the idea in October 2007, so if we say Harriet held on for a couple of months and her ‘downfall’ was losing the vote of no confidence, not actually resigning, that gives us a bit of a window to work with.) This brings us on to…

  

Harold Saxon, alias the renegade Time Lord known as the Master. Saxon ran as a third party, the “Saxon Party”, and won a huge majority despite the fact that nobody had heard of him eighteen months ago, with cabinet ministers defecting to his party en masse in the run-up to the election (he promptly dismissed them all as traitors and had them all killed at the first cabinet meeting). Indeed, this old tie-in website suggests that so many politicians came over to him there was little left of the old parties. He was helped in all of this by the Archangel Network, a mobile phone network that was actually using subliminal messages to persuade people to vote for him - when pressed, people struggled to name even one of his policies or anything about his platform. (Of course, he could’ve waited seven years and then his platform would’ve been indistinguishable from any of the main parties’, but I digress.) Straight after winning the election, “Saxon” claimed to made contact with alien life which was actually the homicidal remnants of humanity from hundreds of trillions of years into the future (long story), as part of a plan to enslave Earth which succeeded until time was reversed, whereupon he was murdered by his wife (long, long story). (“Drums” aired in the same week that Tony Blair resigned and Gordon Brown - widely expected to call a snap election - became Prime Minister. Blair had set out a timetable for his departure the previous year, so much like “Aliens” before it, this was a canny piece of scheduling.)

In “The Runaway Bride”, set at Christmas 2007 and broadcast before “Drums”, a tank tasked with shooting down an alien spaceship is informed “Orders from Mr Saxon - fire at will!”, suggesting that Saxon is already in government at this point - perhaps he entered government, then broke away to form his own party? You might think “why not just win a leadership election instead?”, but maybe a completely new party was more appealing to the electorate and made them more susceptible? If we take “The Sound of Drums” as taking place in June 2008, then eighteen months previously (which is how long the Master is said to have been on Earth, creating the Saxon persona) was Christmas 2006 - i.e. indeed exactly when the Jones ministry fell. Launching the Archangel network would also presumably require him to be in government to have some influence over it. There was some dialogue in “Last of the Time Lords” in which the Master stated that the Doctor was responsible for changing history by prematurely ending Harriet Jones’ premiership, allowing him to sneak in as Saxon, but this was cut before filming.

(The Master appears in one more Davies-era story, The End of Time, where he isn’t Prime Minister. However, he does end up as President of the United States (long, long, long story), so it’s worth noting that he’s possibly the only fictional character to be both Prime Minister of the UK and President of the USA.)

  

The last Davies-era Prime Minister appears not in Doctor Who, but in its sister show Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009); Brian Green. With the entire cabinet dead and the leading party turning out to be a mass-hypnosis hoax, it’s fair to assume that another election was called after Saxon’s death, meaning that in the Doctor Who universe the country could’ve had four general elections in as many years, with the last two both being in the same year. Green’s party is never stated on screen, but I get the feeling he’s meant to be a Conservative. That might just be my own bias, though, since as you will see, he’s a pretty nasty piece of work.

Anyway, Green faces a rather nasty crisis concerning aliens who want one tenth of the Earth’s children to use as drugs, and after exempting all the children of cabinet ministers he decides to choose children from schools at the bottom of the league tables, then tells one of his civil servants, John Frobisher, that his own children will be taken to keep up the pretence of the children being selected as random, causing Frobisher (played by future Doctor Peter Capaldi, incidentally) to kill his children, wife and finally himself. Torchwood manages to save the day, but Green is recorded by Frobisher’s assistant having a conversation where he tries to cover up his actions and pin the blame for the whole thing on the United States. The recording is to be released, ending his political career. So, the Davies Prime Ministers ended very much where they began: in a time of crisis, with another one on the way soon.