Tvtropes tends to drain the specialness from an entertainment product and reveal the generic components. Applying the same lens to politics results in something like "Yes Minister", where we realize government actions aren't caused by "good" or "bad" actors, but the inherent structure.

Most current crises have a referent in "Yes Minister", including this one - when the PM denied the bugging of an MP's phone. ("He should not have denied something of which he had no knowledge.")

This indicates how few fundamental situations or tensions exist in modern government, and how often they reoccur.