Top Tories mustn't be allowed to watch the next series of "Borgen"

I lost patience with the 10-part Danish political drama series, Borgen, during the episode in which the unfeasibly hot Danish Prime Minister pushed through a law to force companies to make at least 50% of their board members female (I mean, to appoint them, rather than force males to undergo gender reassignment procedures – although, as we’re talking about dotty liberal fantasies, you never know).


I remember thinking the left-wing wet-dreamers behind the series had simply gone too far this time: no one, apart from our own Lib-Dems, would ever put forward such a dumb idea.

Unless, of course, it’s today’s whacky, touchy-feely,down-with-the-kids-in-the-hood,  caring British Conservative Party. 

Thanks to the likes of “modernisers” such as Francis Maude and the spineless pinko stooge of a PM they’ve chosen to spearhead the destruction of everything traditional Conservatives instinctively believe. The party of Peel and Disraeli and Lord Salisbury and Churchill and Mrs Thatcher has officially turned into one of those meaningless, left-of-centre, pseudo-fascistic, social-engineering outfits currently destroying the economies and societies of most European countries.

Of course, the centre-left has always been obsessed with Scandinavian social democracies. And no wonder. All those nice, tall, smiling, blond people taxing and spending like there’s no tomorrow (there probably won’t be) in the name of social justice or equality or whatever, while all living in “green” wooden houses in the forest and ski-ing and dispensing Nobel Peace Prizes and everyone winding up with socially useful degrees and driving Volvos and enjoying lots of healthy, vigorous, guilt-free rumpy-pumpy while taking achingly ethical positions on the world’s major problems.

Borgen, of course, did nothing but add to this mad myth, and I suspect Francis Maude sent the Tory High Command box sets so they’d get the message. Forget reality – this is the blueprint. Shapely Birgitte Nyborg, with her cool, Nordic beauty, her plain-folks earthiness and her self-sacrificing, eye-candy husband, her understanding and her boundless compassion – hell, this is what a 21^st Century politician should be like. Forget the fact that her head’s full of wee broken biscuits and she appears to have no political beliefs that haven’t come straight out of a glossy, high-class Executive Woman magazine (“Success and family – can you have it all?” “Compassion – what the modern businesswoman brings to the party”, and “Women get it - ethics isn’t an option”).

I started off rooting for Birgitte (as it were) – and ended up cheering when her husband asked for a divorce and desperately hoping that the utter bastard ex-Labour leader Michael Laugesen would ultimately succeed in turfing the smug bint out of office. And she can take doughty but troubled ace TV news presenter Katrine Fønsmark (the one with unfeasibly large gob) with her – she’s really getting on my nerves: it takes a lot more than having an “ø” in your name to keep me onside.

The most interesting characters in the whole thing turned out to be Kasper Juul, the amoral young spin-doctor (the number of English terms and phrases they use is startling) and the fat old right-wing leader, who barely gets a look-in, and who'd be my personal choice as Danish PM.

The acting and the direction are good, as is the writing, and the whole thing fair zips along – but, ultimately, the achingly right-on West Wing-style political attitudes behind the enterprise wore me down. I shall mostly be watching the next series in the hope that Birgitte gets her come-uppance.

As for the issue of boardroom quotas for females, I can’t be bothered discussing the merits or otherwise of such an asinine proposal. Companies exist to make profits. The successful ones have figured out how to do this. If they thought that hiring more female executives (or blacks or Muslims or people with working-class accents) would do the trick, they’d have done it by now. You see, they really like making money. Forcing boardroom quotas on them is the equivalent of ordering them to accept lower profits. That would mean forcing down the stock market, which would mean we’d all lose. And their executives would earn less, so they’d pay less tax, so we'd all lose. And there’d be fewer jobs, so we'd all have to pay more in benefits, so we'd all lose.

Of all the many modern phrases I loathe, “That’s why I get out of bed in the morning” is my absolute unfavourite (the correct answer, of course, is either “to go to work and earn a living”, “to pee” or "to get the children to school" or a mixture of all three). Would David Cameron’s answer to the question seriously be: “to make British business less profitable”? Or “to do what the Lib-Dems and Francis Maude tell me to do”?

Let’s hope the higher reaches of the Tory Party don’t get to see the next series of Borgen: it might save us from the sort of ridiculously wanky liberal policy the twerps attempted to foist on us last week.