“I’m so glad I don’t do Veep any more because I don’t know how I’d respond to the situation in America now,” he said on Tuesday. “I mean, I don’t want to bring a downer on the evening … but we are that close to the end of the world.”

Taylor, the host, described the “chaos and ineptitude” of Veep’s White House as antithetical to beloved Washington drama The West Wing, “where everyone was very capable”, brilliant and idealistic. Veep, he assumed, was “closer to reality” – but Iannucci’s counter-argument was that, in some ways, The West Wing was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He recalled being given a tour of the White House by Barack Obama’s longtime “bodyman”, Reggie Love. The West Wing staff he met, he said, were “absolutely obsessed with the TV show The West Wing. They kind of hold that show in higher regard than their own job.

“[Love] was showing me around and he said, ‘Here’s the Roosevelt office, this would be where CJ and Josh ... ’ It’s you! Why don’t you say, ‘This would be where I would sit down’?

“They’re very excited by the fictionalised versions of themselves.”


The sort of people who couldn’t help but relate the real-life White House to The West Wing – “political nerds”, Iannucci called them – had come to dominate politics behind the scenes in the last 10 to 15 years. Though he has been campaigning to increase voter turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds in the upcoming British election, he is less supportive of the proliferation of young people in advisory roles.

“These 20-somethings do politics at university, graduate, maybe become a researcher for a politician or maybe join a thinktank and, before they know it, they are these senior advisers to cabinet ministers.”

While researching for In the Loop, he said he encountered people in their 20s who had helped to draw up the constitution of Iraq.

“None of them had bought a car, or organised a mortgage before – but they were brought in to help tell an entire country how to run itself,” he said. “That was the frightening thing.”