Politics & Power Quote by Rory Bremner

Aging is supposed to sand down your politics into something safe, property-friendly, and mildly smug. Rory Bremner takes that familiar arc and flips it with a grin, using the expectation itself as the setup. The line works because it treats “getting more conservative” not as a serious law of human nature but as a social script we all pretend is inevitable: you accumulate stuff, you start protecting it, you start calling your caution “wisdom.” Bremner’s “weird thing” punctures that inevitability and quietly implies the real oddity is how normal the slide is.

The kicker, “selling Marxist pamphlets on the Holloway Road,” is doing multiple jobs at once. It’s a self-mocking exaggeration that inoculates him against accusations of earnest preachiness: don’t worry, I know how ridiculous it sounds, I’m a comedian. But it also smuggles in a sharper point about Britain’s political center of gravity. If drifting left feels like a punchline, that’s partly because mainstream debate has made anything beyond managerial centrism sound like cosplay.

Holloway Road isn’t an abstract street; it’s a specific, recognizably London place with a history of activism and working-class politics, close enough to old radical traditions to carry cultural memory. Bremner frames radicalization as something local and physical, not an online posture: leaflets, pavement, eye contact. The subtext is less “I’m becoming a Marxist” than “the older I get, the less convincing the status quo feels,” delivered in a way that keeps the audience laughing while he changes the subject from personal quirk to national drift.