Replying to a parliamentary question from Charles Kennedy, Tony Blair said in January that there were no plans to send extra British troops to Iraq. Then, a week later, the Ministry of Defence announced that an extra 220 troops would indeed be heading to Basra.
Asked to explain this discrepancy, No 10 at first said that the PM had meant there wouldn’t eventually be an increase in the overall contingent of British troops. There would be an increase for a bit, but not for long. Then it said that the PM had meant purely combat troops, whereas these people were largely cooks and engineers, peaceable chaps who would not be engaged in actual fighting.
Then a few weeks ago when I spoke to Geoff Hoon, he suggested that the PM had been telling the truth when he said there were no “plans” to send extra troops to Iraq, because he hadn’t been aware of the need to do so at the time and so there really weren’t “plans”, as such. Geoff — then defence secretary — hadn’t known either, at the time. So neither the PM nor the defence secretary knew that they were about to dispatch troops to Iraq a week before they did so.
It reminds me a little of a story quoted by Sigmund Freud in which a man lends a kettle to his neighbour and when it is returned he is dismayed to find a hole in it. Confronted with the evidence the neighbour blusters: “It had a hole in it when you lent it to me.” Then: “It didn’t have a hole in it when I gave it back.” And finally: “I never borrowed your kettle.”
“The frightening thing isn’t so much that the prime minister lied, because we know he does that almost reflexively,” a Liberal Democrat told me, putting her finger on it. “The frightening thing is that he lied knowing he’d be found out and knowing that it didn’t matter a damn.”
It is stories like this that form the background to Armando Iannucci’s excellent new satire, The Thick of It, which made its debut on BBC4 last Thursday.
Iannucci recalls Clare Short’s bizarre behaviour in at first not resigning over the war despite having laid out in compelling detail why she should do so. The complete and unquestioned separation of principle from action and the habitual dissembling and lying informed every second of The Thick of It. That and the absurd lengths to which this government will go in order to appease or placate the tabloid press.
It was vicious, bravura and very funny. One hopes that the BBC, which has been timorous of late, will commission more than three episodes.
Comparisons have been made with Yes, Minister which was also called a satire. That is not what I would call it. It was a clever sitcom and always seemed a little too cosy for my liking.
Further, while there was fun to be had from Sir Humphrey’s sophistry and logic chopping, its general thrust was sympathetic to the government of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher possessed a sense of humour, then she might herself have devised something along the lines of Yes, Minister to highlight the battle between a radical, reforming government and an ossified, self-interested and too powerful civil service.
The Thick of It could not be more different. It is wildly at odds with the political zeitgeist. Chris Langham, as the hapless minister Hugh Abbot, may evoke, through his bewilderment and lugubrious countenance, our pity: but he is not a sympathetic character. The chief villain, the foul-mouthed, amoral spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, is a creature who could not be born of anything but new Labour. Come on, let’s face it: he is Alastair Campbell.
Iannucci has said of his series: “I want people to think, ‘My God, this must be what it is really like’.” Andrew Marr, the BBC’s political editor, replied: “If it is, we had better get ourselves a different democracy.” I suspect Marr knows damn well that it is too close for comfort, because he also said: “People addicted to tabloid language and values are dangerously close to getting the government they deserve.” This is where Marr may be nearer the truth than Iannucci, because of course Blair has now been re-elected to a third term.
Iannucci explains this theoretical difficulty away by suggesting that on May 5 the public trooped down to the polling stations knowing, en masse, precisely what it wanted — a Labour government with a vastly reduced majority — and thus voted accordingly. Utter rot. An individual can choose to vote Labour or not to vote Labour — he cannot vote Labour and then stipulate that he wants only a small majority.
The truth is, more than 9m people were insufficiently bothered by the chicanery about the war in Iraq to vote against the government. Perhaps they believe that the stuff on display in The Thick of It is now entirely indivisible from politics in general. It’s what they have come to expect and a change of government will not make the slightest difference.
Still, as Iannucci says, at least we can laugh at Labour and The Thick of It is probably the best television since Brass Eye offended new Labour’s sensibilities with its wonderful demolition of our paranoia about paedophilia. The more ludicrous the government, the more powerful — and funny — the satire.
