There was a startling pronouncement this week at a Tory party conference fringe event entitled “Is the intellectual momentum all with the left?” Rather as George HW Bush once demanded that American families be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons, Policy Exchange think-tanker David Goodhart haughtily took aim at popular culture and the idiot younger generation. He said the rise of Corbynite leftism was a fatuous and infantile fad, to be blamed on more young people going to university, and announced: “It’s all there in the Captain Underpants film.” Goodhart perhaps thinks that using that film as a term of abuse is the high-IQ thing to be doing.
Captain Underpants, based on a bestselling US series of novels for young children, is a cheerfully crude and good-natured comedy that thumbs its nose at pompous grownups in authority. Mr Goodhart, 61, may not have cared for it, or perhaps he savoured the opportunity it has given him to dismiss those tiresome young people whose votes and support the political right has evidently decided it can well do without.
It is all about a joyless school headteacher, called Mr Krupp, who is indifferent to his pupils’ happiness. A couple of kids in the school take refuge in drawing a comic book about a zany superhero called Captain Underpants, and then Mr Krupp actually turns into this character — in a silly pair of Y-fronts.
So is Jeremy Corbyn a daft non-hero like this? Other candidates are available. We often see the foreign secretary trying for lovable Captain Underpants status, the adorable card, seen out plumply jogging, often in a garishly patterned pair of what look like swimming shorts. We have also seen him suspended from a zipwire, waving a couple of union jacks, but with his underwear thankfully concealed. The one-time prime minister, John Major, on the other hand, did not enjoy being satirised as someone who revealed the waistband of his undergarments. The point of Captain Underpants is that his absurdity is a response to the peevish, boorish people in charge. Captain Underpants is silly, but likable. Bounding around in only his tighty-whities, he has energy and optimism – and, importantly, nothing to hide. Comparison to Captain Underpants is an honour that Jeremy Corbyn has yet to prove he deserves. The bleary, exhausted, calculating likes of May, Johnson, Hammond, Davis etc are more like Mr Krupp.
