Whenever a Brit takes on the world in some international contest or other, our duty appears clear. Cheer on the hero who’s flying the flag. But what happens when the hero concerned is using the flag as a dartboard? Can we really feel a surge of patriotic pride when Ken Loach wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Wind that Shakes the Barley, a film which dramatises “the exploitation and the oppression of the British State”? There’s no doubt that Loach is a gifted director, and one moreover who has produced remarkable cinema on a shoestring. It’s hard not to admire the man who brought us Cathy Come Home.

But how are we expected to feel as Ken hoists aloft an award for a film in which the British are “depicted as sub-human mercenaries burning thatched cottages, torturing by using pliers to rip out toenails and committing extreme violence against women”? Of course, Loach isn’t the first film-maker to depict the Brits as callous, cottage-burning, woman-torturing imperialists defeated by a freedom-loving citizenry. In Roland Emmerich and Mel Gibson’s The Patriot, the British are also black-hearted and villainous oppressors. And in Neil Jordan’s IRA epic, Michael Collins, the agents of the Crown are wickedly murderous.

But while Gibson was an Australian, of proudly Irish descent, and Jordan was a son of County Sligo, Loach is as English as they come, a pensioner from Nuneaton. Therein lies his appeal for the Cannes jury. After awarding the Palme d’Or to Michael Moore in 2004 for Fahrenheit 9/11, Ken Loach was the obvious winner this time round.

The judges in Cannes have shown that they enjoy rewarding directors who rubbish their own countries, and that enjoyment is all the greater when the countries being rubbished are America or Britain. What makes the enjoyment positively exquisite is when a contemporary political lesson, preferably about the folly of the Iraq war, can be read into the award. Giving Michael Moore the Palme in 2004 for his anti-Bush polemic was almost too obvious. But I’m glad to say the French feting of Moore did have the predictable, and desired political effect. President Bush was re-elected that year with the highest number of votes ever.

The jury have been a little more subtle this year in giving their top prize to Loach. But only a little. The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not actually subtitled “The Brits were at it all 80 Years Ago” but Loach doesn’t mask his desire that people should read into his account of colonialist excess in Ireland a commentary on current events in Iraq. You don’t have to be Mark Lawson, Tom Paulin or Germaine Greer to detect that Loach’s depiction of the British in the 1920s is meant to put us in mind of the Allies in 2006 — indiscriminately violent and repressive in their suppression of an insurgency, ultimately doomed to failure.

Should the parallel have eluded anyone, Loach himself collected his award with a clenched fist and a barely-coded request, “maybe if you tell the truth about the past, you might tell the truth about the present”.

It’s an invitation which is hard to resist. The truth is that films like Loach’s that glamorise the IRA give a retrospective justification to a movement which used murderous violence to achieve its ends, even though the democratic path was always open to it. They help legitimise the actions of gangsters who have been torturing innocents for decades, and lend enchantment to an organisation which aspires to govern part of the UK although it remains enmeshed in criminality.

And if it’s the truth about the present that Loach wants, let him consider just who the insurgents in Iraq are. Whom would he want us to empathise with most, and see as modern equivalents of idealistic young Irishmen? Those terrorists who were officers in Saddam Hussein’s Baath party for whom torture was a route to promotion? Or the Islamists who wish to impose a totalitarian version of their religion in Iraq and irrigate the ground on which they wish to advance with the blood from the hostages they behead? The hard truth is that a genuinely innovative, ground-breaking and artistically challenging film would be one which bothered to tell the truth about the British Army — the bravery of men under fire in Ulster, the courage of those who restored order to Sierra Leone, the coolness and aplomb of those who helped bring peace to the Balkans, the ongoing sacrifice of those bringing peace to Afghanistan and Iraq.

When Ken Loach was a boy, we produced film after film in which British servicemen were contemporary heroes, but now it is inconceivable that such a film would ever be made. Perhaps the most important question we can still ask the cultural establishment is a simple, “Why?”

And at the creative peak of TV ...

If you want to know where some of the nation’s most creative energy is being directed, can I suggest tuning into ITV1 tonight? I don’t know who is responsible for The X Factor: Battle of the Stars but he or she is something special. We have had audience participation talent shows before, we have had exercises in celebrity humiliation, indeed we have had the two fuse (Strictly Come Dancing). But never, I think, before have we had such a gloriously inventive subversion of the genre. To invite individuals whose fame is due entirely to PR contrivance to have their performances assessed by Simon Cowell is piquant in itself. To watch Dr Gillian McKeith, the aggressively nannyish nutritionist from You are What You Eat, sing I Just Want to Make Love to You, sounding like Miss Hoolie from Balamory and looking like a Christmas decoration, was bizarre enough. To have her competing for survival against Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee covering a Robbie Williams number on the one hand, and Captain James Hewitt, accompanied by Rebecca Loos, singing Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love on the other, was simply too much irony for me to absorb at one sitting.

That a man chiefly famous for seducing our future king’s wife and then trying to sell her love letters should be competing for public affection in a bank holiday variety show alongside a woman chiefly famous for allegedly seducing the captain of the England football team and then producing semen from a pig on live television is not, I think, what Lord Reith hoped for when he created public service broadcasting 80 years ago.

• The writer is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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