Could it be true?
Every day between now and the election, Tortoise’s Alexi Mostrous will examine a claim from the campaign trail. Some will be outlandish, some believable. Some might even be true.
When Rishi Sunak unveiled a plan this week to reduce migration by hiving off visa decisions to the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), some comedy fans experienced deja vu. Seventeen years ago, the political satire The Thick of It broadcast a special episode called Rise of the Nutters. A central plot line involved a special advisor leaking the flagship policy of a fictional PM to “move the handling of immigration to a non-political executive board” so as to avoid ministers having to discuss specific numbers during interviews. As Armando Iannucci, the series creator, wrote on Twitter: “The Thick of It is writing this election.”
