Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Comedians used to be very coy about being Tories, at least until GB News made being a right-wing pundit a lucrative career option. But the tweedy Andrew Watts – a man once described as ‘too Radio 4 for Radio 4’ – was never going to pass for a socialist firebrand. 

He’s been away from comedy for some years, working as the communications officer for St Ives’s Conservative MP Derek Thomas and helping him fight (and, spoiler alert, lose) his seat in the 2024 general election.

Now out of work given that defeat at the hands of the Lib Dems, this is Watts’s account of that job, far from the febrile Westminster environment depicted by The Thick Of It, and instead focussed on fending off correspondence about bin collections, the decision to put down Geronimo the alpaca (some 200 miles from the constituency), or why anti-vax or men’s rights loudmouths were on to something.

Over his time in the MP’s office, Watts got disillusioned not so much with politics but those who engage with it. He’s saddened how little people know or care about the subject – and frustrated by those who did contact their elected representative about the pettiest problems.

Describing the letters he wished he could have written back is probably the show’s strongest section, allowing Watts to vent about their ignorance or narrow-mindedness. And who are those who have the most time to make the biggest fuss over the smallest issues? Pensioners. Which is why the political system always favours the older generation over the young.

For all that, Watts concedes that the political system is important for having identifiable people who can take responsibility in a world where decisions so often seemed to be made by faceless bureaucracy or ‘computer says no’ algorithms. Where else can an ordinary voter turn to help?

The comic also raises some issues that challenge the orthodoxy. Rivers, he says, are cleaner than ever thanks to post-privatisation investments; it’s only because we’ve started measuring sewage discharges that things look bad. I’m not sure facts completely bear that out – 4 million hours of discharges in 2024 compared to 1.75 million in 2022 – but that he doesn’t lean lazily into received wisdom is to his credit. 

Watts is definitely an old-school conservative Conservative, based on tradition and decency and responsibility rather than the more aggressive, intolerant types who dominate the media. He states that he’s very much against following the ‘right-wing, grifter pipeline’ that many of his colleagues have, and is happy to call out capitalism when it  is wrong, such as pointing out that the NHS form to diagnose depression was created by Pfizer, the maker of anti-depressants.

All well and good, but ‘where are the jokes?’ you might ask, and that would be valid. Watts has a wry turn of phrase when he needs it – such as describing the pensioner-appeasing Tories as ‘the political wing of Saga Holidays’ and a very pithy line about phone sex – but there are sizeable chunks here when the comedy is on the back-burner.  A more obvious comic routine about sperm donation didn’t especially fit the show’s narrative, nor stand out in a crowded field of similar stories. 

While Love Tory isn’t tight enough to heartily recommend, it is an insightful picture of life at the more quotidian end of politics. If Watts could harness enough of those exquisite turns of phrase, there could even be a sitcom in it. But would Radio 4 take it?

Review date: 25 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ The Boston Bar