Doctors Who are voting Labour and I’m pleased that the Labour Party is courting Whovians. It’s a shame that more eight year olds can’t vote. The new Labour party political broadcast has a voiceover from one Timelord, David Tennant, and it invokes the memory of another, via his son (Sean Pertwee’s dad was Who 3, Jon): “my father always said…”
What about the rest? Sylvester McCoy isn’t coy about Doctor Who in the late 1980s: “Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered.” I can’t imagine that either Eccleston or McGann vote Conservative and yet I can imagine a police box travelling through time and space.
Smith was a convincing Labour man in Party Animals. Davison’s doing another broadcast soon. I’ll let Troughton and Hartnell off the hook because they’re too long dead. But could Patrick Troughton vote Tory? I’d find that hard to believe.
That leaves us a couple of Bakers. Tom Baker is on the record as hating Labour and Tory alike: “When the Conservatives were in I cannot tell you how much I hated them. But I realise how shallow I am because I now hate the Labour Party as much.”
That might make Colin Baker the ‘Tory Doctor’. I met him in a pub in Richmond once and he seemed jolly nice. But we didn’t talk about politics.
Enough of the actors. What of the Doctor himself? He liked Harriet Jones until she destroyed the Sycorax ship. Lots of Labour supporters understand that: it’s Blair and Iraq. Jones redeemed herself when she opposed the Daleks and sacrificed her life. The same can’t yet be said for Tony. Yet.
Added: 21st April. Peter Davison’s PEB.