On learning of his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 Harold Pinter diplomatically acknowledged that he was unsure to what extent his political activism had played a part in the award. Unfortunately, that open question does a disservice to Pinter’s memory and to the credibility of the Nobel Committee; for while Pinter’s contribution to literature was a great one, his contribution to politics was less so.

Pinter’s dramatic work has an inescapably political dimension in its portrayal of domestic lives that are pervaded by fear of external and often unperceived threat. In The Birthday Party, two strangers threaten and eventually apprehend the main character. In The Caretaker, Aston is in terror of the electroconvulsive therapy intended to ward off insanity. In The Dumb Waiter, a person unseen sends messages on the dumbwaiter.

He valiantly campaigned against torture and – through the writers’ association, PEN – for freedom of artistic expression. But when Pinter attempted to identify threats in his explicitly political writings, his work descended to crude caricature.

Pinter turned to political writing at a time when other leading left-wing dramatists perceived the limits of radical theatre. In an interview in 1996, he said: “Political theatre now is even more important than it ever was, if by political theatre you mean plays that deal with the real world, not with a manufactured or fantasy world.”

Yet the political world that Pinter conjured up was an extravagant fantasy. In it, the Western democracies exemplified not imperfection or even moral failings, but venality and bloodlust. To Pinter, the modern US had only one point of comparison: “Nazi Germany wanted total domination of Europe and they nearly did it. The US wants total domination of the world and is about to consolidate that.”

In its nefarious designs, according to Pinter, the American leadership was assisted by a culpable populace and a mass-murdering British prime minister. In his Nobel lecture, Pinter asked rhetorically, with reference to Tony Blair and President Bush: “How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?”

The irony of these imprecations was that Pinter did not see what Mr Blair himself expounded in a lecture in 1999. After the collapse of communism, the international order had not become a pacific system of liberal states. It was menaced by a reversion to atavistic and genocidal nationalisms. Mr Blair named Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic.

Pinter gave support to the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, and characterised Nato’s hesitant and necessary campaign to rebuff Serbia’s aggression against Albanian Kosovans as “kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in”.

You might have thought that a man who condemned the intervention in Iraq for “demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law” – would welcome the spread of international legal process against those, such as Milosevic, who orchestrate campaigns of xenophobic violence. But to Pinter, it all finally came down to the high crimes and misdemeanours of the Western democracies.

Pinter’s political message was not a plea for the US to abide by due process and pay – in the formulation of Thomas Jefferson – a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. It was sophistry couched in the unrelentingly scatological language of the lavatory wall. Posterity will surely judge Harold Pinter as an impassioned voice and a great artistic talent; it is less likely to honour or even recall the areas in which he went astray.

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