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  • Richard Gaunt

    Politics, performance and popular culture, 09/2016
    Book Chapter

    On 2 May 1997, on leaving Downing Street as Prime Minister for the last time, John Major observed that ‘when the curtain falls, it is time to get off the stage’. There could hardly have been a more appropriate metaphor for the theatre of modern British politics. Standing on Downing Street outside the famous black door of No. 10 – both of which have become props in a political stage-set which forms the back-drop for national political life – Major addressed an audience composed nominally of television cameras and newspaper reporters who were in fact the medium through which his