The prime minister and the prankster: The story behind the stunt blamed for May's nightmare conference speech

'I didn’t know if she’d have rules, you know, like, if you get within a certain perimeter of the prime minister, that’s it, it’s a code red, you go down. I did have it in the back of my mind'

Brodkin hands Theresa May a fake P45, on stage in Manchester last year (AFP/Getty)

On Wednesday 4 October 2017, two people woke in their hotel beds in Manchester with a certain trepidation about the day ahead.

One had been struggling with a bad cold, a cough and a sore throat for almost a week. She had a long and important speech to give, a speech on which the morning papers claimed her job depended, and that job was prime minister.

The other had a less lofty undertaking laid out before him, but it was a matter of life and death.

“I was flicking through the papers,” says Simon Brodkin, the doctor-turned-comedian-turned-professional prankster who, armed with a Conservative Party conference lanyard and a mocked-up P45 was about to make a small bit of British political history. “I was seeing a lot of pictures of snipers on rooftops. A lot of men with guns. Tensions were running high in the country at that time, and terrorists do make a prankster’s job that much harder.”

Brodkin has got plenty of previous of this kind of stuff, on the England football team, on Kanye West, Manchester City, Sepp Blatter and Donald Trump, but this was something altogether more ambitious.

“Was I scared I was going to get shot? In a word: yes. People always say to me, ‘Oh, careful you don’t get shot.’ Usually it’s close members of my family. I’d never really felt like I would before, not even when I went after Trump in Scotland. [In 2016, Brodkin interrupted a Trump press conference at his Turnberry golf club holding some Nazi painted golf balls].

“But this was different. There was so much tension around. I didn’t know if she’d have rules, you know, like, if you get within a certain perimeter of the prime minister, that’s it, it’s a code red, you go down. I did have it in the back of my mind.”

Both characters would end that day’s drama very much alive, albeit with one having suffered the worst day of their professional life, while the other enjoyed what was probably the best. Both performances had been a long time in the planning.

“With the stunts that I do, you’re always looking for a target. You want to punch up, and there’s no more up than the most powerful person in the country, although that day, and in the many months since, she has seemed like anything but,” he says.

“She had called that election on ‘strength and stability’, and it had all been utterly undermined. It just felt that there was this groundswell of public opinion, that it might be time for her to move on. That was what I felt the temperature was like at the time.

“I just thought, ‘Oh my God, imagine handing the prime minister of this country a P45.’ That just made me smile. It represented the mood of the country. And then I thought, ‘Oh, hang on, if we can make that P45 from Boris Johnson it felt like tying all those things up together.”

In the minutes, hours and now almost a full year since, people have complained about the “security risk” Brodkin posed to the prime minister. That “anything could have happened”, but that is far-fetched. “How did this idiot manage to get to within a few feet of the prime minister?” people have breathlessly asked. But the answer is straightforward.

“Once you have an idea for a stunt it’s worth working out whether it can be done, where it can be done, how it can be done. And the conference started to feel like there could be the potential there. She’ll be making a speech, she’s up by herself. I thought, ‘Well how am I going to get access to the conference?’

“And there is a very simple answer to that question. I applied online, under my own name. It was just a normal, boring application.”

To watch the speech back now, it is clear Theresa May is struggling with her voice right from the start. In fact, she had been struggling badly with a cough during her interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show three days beforehand.

It has since been suggested it was Brodkin’s intervention, and the heightened nerves it engendered, that rendered the prime minister unable to speak. It’s also been said that the rousing applause that greeted his ejection unsettled the magnets on the backdrop, causing them to fall off moments before the end.

She had just begun a passage attacking Jeremy Corbyn when Brodkin rose from his seat.

He is certainly right that tensions were high. I was in the room myself, in the far corner, 50 yards or so to the prime minister’s right, in seats reserved for the travelling Westminster press pack. Most of us us had witnessed something highly traumatic out of our office windows just six month before.

When a bizarre and eerily silent commotion started occurring at the front of the stage, and something was clearly going awry though nobody knew what, there was a palpable sense of fear and dread.

No one was really paying attention to the giant screens above the prime minister’s head, where in the bottom corner, a shaky piece of paper appeared, with the letters P45 writ large in the bottom corner.

Brodkin can be heard saying, “Boris told me to give it to you.”

As Theresa May finally takes the piece of paper, desperate to to get rid of him, she loses it.

“It’s the Conservative Party that has a vision of an open, global, self-confident Britain,” she says. Then adds: “While our opponents flirt with a foreign poricy of neutrality and prepare for a run on the ground.”

“I was amazed that she took it,” Brodkin says. “She smiled as she did so. So thank you, Theresa, for that. I did it in a very non-threatening way. I never want to scare people, or cause alarm.

“I’d dressed as a little Tory boy. Blue tie, blue cufflinks, side parting. So when I handed it to her, I looked like an aide trying to hand her something for her speech or something.

“After she’d taken it, her security team were so unalarmed they just lowered me back down, as if they were going to sit me back in my seat.

“So I went up to Boris and did my best Tory boy voice: ‘That’s it Boris, I’ve given her it from you. Went well don’t you think?’ I gave him a slap on the thigh.

“That was the point at which they appeared to work out, that guy should definitely not be there. The snappers were following me. Alarm bells were ringing with security. That’s when they realised, ‘Get this person out.’

“That’s when the atmosphere did change, a visceral change, a wave of negativity towards me. The chants of ‘Scum! Scum!’ and then being dragged out did confirm that they didn’t want me there.”

As Brodkin was dragged out by security, a second wave of personnel rushed in. Huge sections of the press seats vacated in an instant and stampeded towards him, still not very much wiser about what exactly was going on. In the adjacent press room, scores of journalists jumped up and rushed towards the auditorium, seeking to cut him off at the exit.

“I was sitting on the end seat and I could see he was going to be led out past me,” says the Telegraph’s chief political correspondent, Christopher Hope. It was he who, in the footage that went slightly viral later, was so penned in to the melee that his dictaphone appeared to be pressed like a Taser against Brodkin’s neck.

“In more than 10 years in politics, my experience of these things is that when you have an intruder, or someone who eggs someone, or a protester, or someone who gets involved in a way that they shouldn’t, is that you’ve got about a minute before they’re led away.

“I put my arm around him and just started yelling questions at him. Who are you? Are you an activist? What did you give to the prime minister? We didn’t know he was a prankster. You only have a minute to ask everything you can.”

Brodkin recalls events somewhat differently.

“Usually, after a stunt, there’s sort of an eerie calm. The security services remove you and it’s kind of quiet.

“That is not what happened here. I was followed by this baying swarm of political journalists, trying to work out what was going on.

“They were thinking, ‘Who is this guy? He is shouting all sorts of things.’ I don’t think any of them were thinking ‘comedy’.”

“They were asking me these amazingly serious political questions. ‘Why have you done this? What have you done?’ And I said, ‘I’ve given Theresa May a P45!’ And they shouted, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Because Boris told me to!’

“And this was the best bit. One journalist said, ‘When did he ask you? When did the meeting take place?’ That was one of my all time favourite moments. They were all having to walk backwards. They were hitting bins, they were hitting lampposts and shouting, ‘When did he tell you! When did he ask you to give it to her?’ I was just leaving a trail of fallen cameramen and journalists.”

It was at that point, however, that things got a bit more tense, albeit briefly.

“I was taken out of the melee and into the security zone and there was utter silence, and shit got serious. Six very large armed officers formed a ring around me. They don’t know what’s happened, they just know I’ve been dragged out by security having done something wrong. I’m stood there with these burly guys. In real life, I am a tiny Jew.

“And they’re surrounding me with these guns and they’re all being very serious, right until one of the coppers looked to me and said, ‘Big fan of your stuff mate. But I think you might have pushed too far this time.’ That’s when I was thinking I’m in serious doodoo.

“Then this detective came along, this smart looking woman. You know when they’re not wearing uniform they’re pretty high up the chain of command. She immediately thinks she’s got me bang to rights.

“She flashed her badge to me and said, ‘Right. How the hell did you get in?’

“I said, ‘I applied.’ She said, ‘What do you mean, you applied?’

“I said, ‘Online.’ She said, ‘Under who’s name?’

“I said, ‘Mine.’

“Then you could see her thoughts, you know, what is she going to be able to do me for, just slowly ebbing away.

“She said, ‘Okay, let’s just arrest him shall we; whack him in the back of the van.’”

Back in the conference hall, unbeknownst to Brodkin or to the phalanx of media that had rushed after him, things had turned from bad to very much worse. Barely halfway through the speech, with whole pages still to go, Ms May had lost her voice entirely, and it was anything but clear how on earth she would make it to the end. By the point at which she did, the set was falling apart around her.

“It was a very difficult day,” one of Ms May’s aides said. “I remember the huge outpouring of support for her in the hall. And there was that rather nice picture of Amber Rudd getting to her feet and willing her on. But if was a rather tough day.”

As things were getting worse for the PM, things were getting better for Brodkin.

“It was all over fairly quickly. At the end of the process they just said, ‘Sir, you are free to go.’

“One of them said, ‘By the way, that was very funny.’ I got a couple of photos with them.

“I guess it was Manchester, it was Theresa May, it was the police, who suffered huge cuts under her.”

Brodkin didn’t see the rest of the speech, and still hasn’t watched it. “They don’t give you live TV in the cells,” he says, which is not unreasonable. “But I heard reports she was struggling. I did feel sympathy for her.”

Ms May has another speech to give this Wednesday, and Brodkin, who has worked for years as a standup, says he would be happy to meet up.

“All of being a politician is about performance. If she wants to meet up we can try and work on delivery.”

But he does offer one, more radical suggestion: “She still hasn’t used that P45, has she?”