World King (Season 4 Summary)

The UK's Long-Running Political Drama Blows up in our Faces

A lot of praise has rightly been lavished on the brilliant final episode of Succession Season 3 last week. Fans have commented on the Shakespearean theatricality of the final scene (spoiler alert), in which the Roy siblings are stripped of their inheritance and reduced to an agonised tableau as Tom - Tom! - betrays his wife and Logan Roy betrays everybody.

All these plaudits are well-deserved. But this attention has tended to overshadow Succession’s no less compelling British counterpart. At first sight World King might seem a little too similar - possibly because of the British writers involved in both series. But this would be a superficial reading. It’s true that the two series deal with wealthy, sociopathic people who wield great power and are dysfunctional, childish and pathetic in their personal lives.

But whereas Succession takes place in a mostly American milieu, where Dallas meets Fox News and the new era of Trumpian populism, World King has a very British combination of Jacobean tragedy, In the Thick of It, Brian Rix farce, and what one can only call a Smurf-like dystopianism, all of which is firmly-rooted in the very specific cultural context of Brexit.

The cleverness of the series is the way that it uses minor characters to lay seemingly false trails for the bigger events that follow. Take what happened last week. At the beginning of the episode, we saw the Minister for Trade Policy Penny Mordaunt touting Brexit in the United States and literally trying to beg/bully/cajole an ailing superpower into doing a trade deal with Global Britain and letting us ride shotgun once again.

So far Mordaunt hasn’t really featured in the series,for all her glacial hauteur, her Sunsilk hair, and propensity for windy bombast, so naturally we did wonder why this was happening. But then it turns out that the billionaire chancellor Rishi Sunak was also in California, speaking to tech firms in Silicone valley and - according to the Financial Times - meeting with private US healthcare providers!

Why would the Chancellor of the Exchequer be doing that, one wonders, while the NHS is on its knees back home - to the point that firemen were obliged to try and resucitate four boys who died in a fire because there weren’t enough ambulances available? We don’t know. Because Rishi was forced to return without having that meeting, after accusations that he had abandoned the hospitality sector in the midst of the latest Covid crisis.

Or perhaps he also saw Liz Truss’s Instagram Christmas card, posing like a Renaissance queen from the Lidl Middle, in front of the flag and the globe, and he sensed that some kind of palace coup might be underway. Because Sunak may act like a engaging Sainsbury’s middle manager, but there is no doubt that he wants to be king one day, and he is not going to allow himself to be upstaged by a woman who rose to prominence talking about pork and apples.

But all this was just the taster of what was about to come. Of course episode three had ended with a cliffhanger in which we weren’t sure whether the World King’s party would lose the seat in North Shropshire that it had held for nearly two hundred years, because of a bye-election that he had triggered trying to get his mate off a corruption punishment.

But no one predicted that the Lib Dems would take the seat with a majority of more more than 30,000, with a candidate who delivered a moving speech about decency and integrity.

Surely, many of us wondered, this must be the end? The moment when the emperor finally gets his comeuppence and stands naked in front of his party and his country, exposed as a useless and dangerous charlatan? Not so fast .

Once again, World King never quite gives viewers what they expect. It is true that Johnson apologised to Sky News and said that he had ‘taken responsibility’.

But did he? Had he? The cleverness of the writing - and of Johnson’s epic performance as a a bloviating amoral narcissist (Jeremy Strong, eat your heart out. THIS is acting), means that even as he seemed to be apologising he was actually blaming the media for not disseminating the positive messages that he expected of them, and the public for not understanding how positive these messages were.

One could almost feel sorry for Johnson, as he muttered ‘booster’ over and over again like a shaman trying to make it rain. Not since Kendall Roy cowered in a tv studio has any major character looked so abject, hollow and pitiful.

But by the end of that interview Johnson was back in bullyboy mode, jabbing his finger at the Sky journalist and accusing him of breaking the ‘golden rule’ by asking him unauthorised questions. At this point World King moved back to the outlying characters. Thus we heard from those famous ‘senior Tories’ and ‘worried Tories’, that Johnson was in Last Chance Saloon.

Within hours of that statement, Johnson’s cabinet secretary had recused himself from the inquiry he was heading after it was revealed that he had been a guest at one of the potentially illegal 2020 Christmas parties he was supposed to be investigating. And then the head of the government’s new charities watchdog - a personal friend of Johnson’s - was forced to resign before taking up his post, following allegations of bullying and inappropriate behaviour in a previous job.

Could it get any worse? Yes it could, because it now turns out that David ‘Lord’ Frost has resigned as Minister for Brexit - the same Frost who has spent the last two years alternately headbutting the EU and punching his own face, while also trashing his country’s reputation.

Not since Logan Roy laid his hand on Tom Wandsgam’s shoulder has betrayal been so unexpected and so painful. This was something none of us saw coming, and that few of us would have believed possible.

And even as we were still trying to absorb this stunner, the action moved deftly away to the engine room beneath the palace, where leaked messages revealed that Brexit ‘hardman’ Steve Baker has expelled Nadine Dorries from the Tory WhatsApp group!

This may not seem like a major development. But bear in mind that Dorries’s unrequited love - or should we call it adoration? - for the World King is one of the more plangent sub-plots in the series. And now she is GONE FROM WHATSAPP, in the course of a piece of dialogue that the bard himself would surely envy:

This is vintage Steve Baker. A curt ‘Enough is enough’ delivered with all the clinical ruthlessness and finality that we have come to expect from God’s chosen instrument of Brexit, followed by Andrew Bridgen grovelling at his feet. As I said, it’s the minor characters you have to watch.

So this is where we are: the World King at bay, isolated in his tawdry flat with his grasping wife, deserted by his associates, wounded but not destroyed, because none of his would-challengers have the courage to step forward and stake their claim, and none of them know what to do with the awful shambles that he has left them and in which so many of them were complicit .

Some viewers may complain of a certain deja vu from last year’s season. After all, here we are again, facing a new pandemic wave, Christmas in the balance, while the World King dithers. Some will say, haven’t we seen all this before? The NHS on its knees, asked to do the impossible, while Johnson brags about vaccines yet won’t take the unpopular steps required to reduce the spread of the latest variant?

The answer is yes. But the similarities are entirely deliberate. That’s the morbid fascination of the series. And now here we are - the World King staggering on like a zombie because no one dares destroy him. And we must carry on. Until we reach another end, which may not be the end, but another beginning of yet another series.

Because that’s the nature of the long form, isn’t it?