Billed as a piece of “groundbreaking, biting satire”, Alistair Beaton’s latest take on Westminster folly was probably bound to disappoint (Channel 4, January 18). While the construction of a post-Blair era world, framing the events leading to his final downfall – in this case being sent to face a tribunal at the Hague – is indeed an intriguing idea, a crawling pace and lacklustre dialogue meant the Trial of Tony Blair lacked teeth.
Nevertheless, efforts to hold our politicians to account and keep their terrible abuses of power in the public conscience are to be applauded, and the story raises important issues.
The central theme follows Blair’s delusional, helter-skelter downward spiral from PM, and self-appointed world statesman, to meek obscurity, his legacy (an illegal and immoral war) haunting him throughout his grubby demise.
And grubby it is. Rather than repenting, Blair is inconvenienced by vivid apparitions from a distant, bloody war. These merely distract him from his vital purposes – setting up the Blair Foundation, dictating his memoirs, nurturing his “legacy”…
Unfortunately, this is also ultimately where the screenplay falters, stumbling between drama and farce. Thus, harrowing visions of wounded and dead Iraqis are set against Robert Lindsay’s almost amicably oafish Blair and a production line of obvious Westminster-club gags.
Obsessed with potential sales of his forthcoming autobiography My Legacy (which even his publisher ultimately shuns), Blair becomes increasingly isolated, misjudging warnings delivered by his aides, wife, former allies and enemies alike. And so he blunders through a series of Christmas Carol-esque warnings, his moment of epiphany arriving too late — on his final motorcade to Heathrow airport, this time in the back of a police van on the instruction of an extradition order.
It is a perhaps suitably low-key ending. Whether intentionally or not, however, it leaves us hollow and unsettled at the whole sorry mess. Maybe our Tony is the scapegoat, a product of the party machine and the vagaries of the political system Beaton sets out to send up – apparently to provide a plausible backdrop to events, the legal process requires the incumbent PM (a disgruntled and resentful Gordon Brown) to dob him in.
While it is true that cabinet colleagues, advisors, and political colluders — not to mention the pitifully cowed mainstream media — are all in some way culpable, this seems to drastically underplay Blair’s increasingly tyrannical ways. Specifically, such treatment fails to do justice to Blair’s zealous desire to use military means to pursue his new world order, as he explained in a recent speech in characteristically duplicitous tones.
Far from being a lesson learned, it seems the misguided forays into Afghanistan and Iraq are to be repeated again and again in our name, and it is more important than ever to organise effectively to oppose such misleading arguments and hold our leaders to account.
By Caroline
