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Gordon Brown's past is catching up with him, because he can't deny his fully consummated, tongue-on-tongue love affair with Fred the Shred, just as Iraq caught up with Tony Blair," says David Hare.
Our leading political playwright, a career-long chronicler and critic of the Left, thinks the rows about Damian McBride's emails and Jacqui Smith's bath-plug are mere aftershocks of bigger scandals that have already shattered the party.
"What we are seeing in the email scandal and in the financial compromises is the result of a decision Labour made on the point of defeat in 1991 to never again be the party of opposition to either the press or the City," Hare continues. "That was the plan, to cosy up to those two institutions. Didn't work, did it?
"Blair was plainly in love with the City, so Labour bet the house on the expansion of the financial sector, partly because it did such great things for the economy and produced huge amounts of tax for the social programmes Brown believed in.
"Now it turns out that the financial sector has ruined the country, Brown is in an impossible situation. Labour is certain to lose the next election - to be replaced by the most profoundly unimpressive Conservative opposition ever. And I don't think Labour can come back until Iraq is cleansed from its system. Which will be a long time yet."
When Hare says things like this, you pay attention. He analysed the seeds of New Labour in his 1994 play, The Absence of War, part of his massive state-of-the-nation trilogy at the National Theatre. He portrayed the slide into Iraq in the documentary play Stuff Happens (2004) and last year looked at Labour's descent into financial sleaze in Gethsemane.
"I can't claim to be disillusioned by New Labour because I was never illusioned, although like lots of people I thought Blair was very refreshing at first," he says.
I am apparently not alone in wondering whether he will be drawn back to the party's corpse. "The BBC did ask me to write a six-part series dramatising the history of New Labour," Hare reveals, "but I've written about the beginning and the end of it and I have no interest in the middle. And although I'd love to write for television I just can't write the quantity. A year when I write three hours of drama is a wonderful year for me. And I'm 61. I simply can't devote five years of my life to television now."
The day we meet the newspapers are also full of stories about the brutality of the police at the G20 protests. Hare has often juxtaposed the actions of the political class with the experiences of those at the sharp end, the "poor bloody bastards on the front line, doctors, teachers, social workers".
Is there a big police play to be written, then? Definitely, yes, he says, but he's been there, done that, in Murmuring Judges, the play in his trilogy which dealt with the judiciary.
"But what's going on with the police is fantastically interesting," he adds, "because [like Labour] it no longer has its own culture. They used to have a "canteen culture" in the police, a trade union feeling that was both good and bad. It was in many ways reactionary but they did feel genuinely responsible for the communities they were serving. Now, we have all these graduate policemen who are interchangeable with politicians. I think people are right when they say Thatcherism destroyed all these separate cultures. It was very anti-police as well as anti-mining."
The same thing, he suggests, was done to the BBC and NHS. "If you destroy all the cultures that stand for something separate we are left with a society that is purely materialistic."
Hare is emphatically not discounting the prospect of writing more big plays in the future. But we have met at the Royal Court to discuss his two new monologues. Berlin and Wall premiered separately in April at the National Theatre and the Court: Wall is now back at the Sloane Square venue, and Hare will perform both pieces together on Broadway in May.
The writer first tried out the form in Via Dolorosa, a personal but incisive response to the Arab-Israeli conflict drawn from his first visit to Jerusalem. Directed by Stephen Daldry at the Royal Court in 1998, it was the first time Hare had performed ("I don't think I 'act'") since he was at Cambridge.
He has come to relish the simplicity of the solo shows. Since 1998, Hare has, of course, collaborated with Daldry on the Oscar-nominated film adaptations of The Hours and The Reader, each of which took him even longer to complete than a full-length play. "I will do anything Stephen asks me to do because he is touched with genius, but each film is a three-year commitment and involves constant revolution because of the way he works, so I think he, like me, finds it a relief to put on something like this quite quickly."
The first of the new monologues, Berlin, details Hare's baffled response to that confused and confusing city while working there on The Reader. "It's essentially cabaret, me doing my Dean Martin, sitting on a stool and telling jokes," he says. The second, Wall, is a far more sombre and serious essay on the monolithic "peace fence" Israel is quietly erecting along its border with Gaza. "The two pieces are tonally very different, but it seemed a cute idea to write about one place where a wall had come down, and another where a wall was going up."
It is a brave thing for Hare to put himself and his opinions alone on stage in his seventh decade. Although he credits his childhood as a "lower-middle class, semi-detached provincial boy", the son of a merchant seaman in Bexhill, with giving him a writer's sense of outsider status and aspiration, he hated his childhood. Ditto his schooling at Stowe and at Cambridge, where he was "educated out of his class". Most of his early plays, he says, were written out of self-loathing.
Now he has a settled air to him. There's the knighthood, which he accepted because it was "an artistic honour" and he thought it was good that "a playwright of the Left" should be recognised. There's the comfortable life in Hampstead with his second wife, fashion designer Nicole Farhi (he has three children by his first, agent Margaret Matheson).
He hasn't personally lost money in the credit crunch ("no investments, don't believe in 'em") and is thankful that serious plays seem to be doing well in the recession, although he acknowledges that films like The Reader will in future be harder to make as budgets contract. Yet there is an underlying tension in him.
"One of the things that no one tells you about getting old is that the panic gets very deep," he says, "and like most writers, I feel I'm only just getting the hang of it when I haven't got much time left."
I wonder, too, how it feels to be a self-professed romantic socialist and to be so often disappointed, to see the New Labour dream go the same way of the post-war idealism he examined in his first major hit, Plenty.
"I wish I thought that the present financial collapse meant that there was the kind of radical rethinking going on about the way we live that we saw in the 1930s," he concedes. "But the game's in play. I have no idea of the way the 21st century is gonna fall out. And I have lived long enough to see that the argument about how you deliver social justice, how you create abundance and how that abundance is distributed, never comes to an end."
* Wall is at the Royal Court (020 7565 5000, www.royalcourttheatre.com) until 25 April.
Reader views (28)
Blair was the leader and his policies have caused all these great economic problems to the state. Brown was a minister , he could have been sack by Blair and not vice versa.Blair was very incompetent PM and he was there only for himself and the money.
- Nicholas, LARNACA-CYPRUS, 20/04/2009 13:44
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what?..saint tony of anyone paying him, wrong?...
- Jonnie Of Brixton, brixton,london,england, 20/04/2009 11:32
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Obviously! Obviously! Obviously!
- Fraser, Telford Park, 20/04/2009 08:44
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Blair may have started the rot but Gordon Brown, lusting afterhis job, should have been working to correct matters for when he took over. But no chance!
- Edwin Underhill, beaconsfield, bucks, 17/04/2009 16:13
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Of course Bliar started it. He is a slimy unscrupulous person who can act. He knew exactly what he was about - power, fame, money, and he's got it. Any party would have done for him. It's just that there was a vacancy at Labour. However, Incapability Brown is now rounding off the muck-heap Blair built up.
- Judith C, London, UK, 17/04/2009 15:30
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What has ruined the UK is the welfare state.
When the country was masculinised, it and its organs had real authority. Now it is dying out from a lack of children, dysfunctional children and drifting aimlessly because it has no centre of gravity now that men have mostly been removed from being the head of families.
- Brenda Blessed, Plymouth, England, 17/04/2009 14:34
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Abso-bloody-lutely, spot on! Let us not forget it either.
- WA, Oxford, England, 17/04/2009 13:30
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Having basically ruined the country, he then legs it before having to answer for his crimes.
- Chris, Woking. UK, 17/04/2009 12:25
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Sure he's sold out. Big house, rich wife, comfortable life. Who? Well no, not Tony Blair. The man with no illusions.
- Sadie, London, 17/04/2009 12:20
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Yes Blair is partially to blame for the mess that the UK now finds itself, but he alone is not responsible.
The Labour Party as a whole, the Jacqui Smiths, the Millibands and the Becketts etc all share a portion of the blame.
And we should not forget the Tory Betrayers of Lady Thatcher, such as Ken Clarke, Geoffrey Howe, Michael Heseltine and the other Iscariots in the Party. These are the scum that allowed Labour into power to begin with then they disgustingly stabbed Thatcher in the back.
We should forever hold these reprobates to account for their actions.
- Eoin Mcgreeghan, Derry, NI, 16/04/2009 17:16
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Clearly Tony Blair has much to answer for, but he was aided and abetted by others, notably Gordon Brown. Let's face it, before the falling out over the leadership they were both hugger-mugger with Mandelson in creating the New Labour project. In addition, throughout his time as Chancellor, Brown provided the financial regime in which Blair was able to operate successfully for so long. The "black arts" of spin were jointly developed as was the relationship with the city, and Gordon Brown, who at one time eschewed dinner dress, is all too content to adopt it now he has the leading role. And Mandelson, well where there is wealth there is Mandy.
- James Elliott, Eastbourne UK, 16/04/2009 15:09
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If only some of these larger than life figures,when voted in!!! would stay in this country and run it properly,instead of galavanting all over the place poking their noses into other peoples affairs.
- David., Chertsey.UK., 16/04/2009 14:55
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Shallotman, Basildon, that would be nice, but unfortunately it will be the usual choice between Red Idiots & Blue Idiots, and maybe the option of Yellow Idiots.
Political parties need a new approach, away from the same old same old. Times have changed & so too should the political parties.
- Dom, London, 16/04/2009 14:52
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The architects of NuLiebour were Billy Liar, Gormless Clown and the man who taught them both how to lie, Peter Mendacity Mandlieson.
Not forgetting supporting roles by Spinmeister Campbell and Damien McPoison.
Britain-hating traitors every one of them!
- Keith Lonsdale, Doncaster, 16/04/2009 14:11
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That our society is becoming much more materialistic is correct, but have to agree with previous commenters that a man of his age should know better than to try and continue peddling "undergraduate socialism".
- Madmax, London, UK, 16/04/2009 14:05
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YES YES YES
NOW HE'S SCARPERED..........TO BECOME A PRIEST!!!!.
- C Cusano, Bedford, 16/04/2009 13:54
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No matter how the political correct Labour changes and into whatever the flavour of the day, they are finished forever.
The working classes owes them a massive payback on election day, now they have found a new working class party that will put the people and country first.
The other parties in Westminister will rely on traditional votes but belive me are we all in for a shock on election day.
The BBC is rotten with trendy leftwing influence and there will be a clear out and bring it back to what it used to be as non partial bias. The whole left wing establishment is on borrowed time or as you can call it a slow painfull death.
- Joe, Swanley Kent, 16/04/2009 13:46
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No. Its the idiots that put him in power.The same idiots that put Thatcher in power.Talk about an uneducated country,you keep voting for one of two parties,both of which produce pathetic results for the majority working and middle class.If you do not want to be whinning about the party in power in 10 years time,vote for a new party,prehaps the logo,"Yes we can" will help.
- David, london, 16/04/2009 13:13
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Of course Blair is responsible. He was leader of the party. The problem is that he managed to hoodwink a lot of people to vote for him and his party. Shame on you who did vote them in ! He then promptly passed the rotten country over to brown, a man with an ego so large that he didn't mind what he was taking over. The amazing thing is just how much further down he has managed to drag the UK..
- Joanna, london, 16/04/2009 13:00
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"BBC approved state subsidized very wealthy peddler of undergraduate socialism, anti Americanism & hatred of Israel"
In which case you're seriously ignorant of Hare's recent work, which has offered some of the most complex and intelligent critiques of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I've come across in the last few years. He just doesn't see things in such simplistic black-and-white issues.
You, on the other hand...
- Michael, London, 16/04/2009 12:44
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Phil Jones - Well said Sir!
Gormless Clown, Tony Bliar and the rest of those ghastly Nu-Labour rats should be forever consigned to the stinking quagmire of socialist failure.
Those arrogant,patronising and greedy Nu-Labour politicians, under Brown have bankrupted Britain, destroyed the so-called "Criminal Justice System", persecuted decent and hardworking taxpayers and created a generation of young alcoholic criminals who are breeding like rabbits and will be claiming benefits for the rest of their lives.
Shame on these incompetent Nu-Labour crooks!
- A.Non Pc, London,UK, 16/04/2009 12:42
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Martin from Bracknell said - I make no allegations regarding Hare, but generally for "Left wing playwright",
I read "BBC approved state subsidized very wealthy peddler of undergraduate socialism, anti Americanism & hatred of Israel"
Well said Martin. But isn't it nice to see them turning on themselves. I don't hold out much hope for the boy Dave at the next election but he can't be worse than the odious brown!
- Chris, Brighton, England, 16/04/2009 12:39
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There is no doubt this is all Blair's legacy, but Brown has not learnt any leason that's why his govt is in decline.
- Abdullah, London UK, 16/04/2009 12:34
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How do we get an extra box on the voting slip that states, none of the above.
- Shallotman, Basildon, 16/04/2009 11:57
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Of course, Tony Blair's responsible!
- Fraser, Telford Park, 16/04/2009 11:50
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Yes Blair and that other cabbage, Gordon Brown.
- Dave Davies, Basingstoke, 16/04/2009 11:34
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How come all well known & state subsidized playwrights are of the so called "Left" ?
Also, who needs investments if your wife is a seriously wealthy fashion designer ?
I make no allegations regarding Hare, but generally for "Left wing playwright",
I read "BBC approved state subsidized very wealthy peddler of undergraduate socialism, anti Americanism & hatred of Israel"
Who needs 'em
Martin
- Martin, Bracknell England, 16/04/2009 10:36
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The 'New Labour Party' was Blair and Brown, and after the next election that 13-year-old party will die -- never to return. As far as the traditional 'Labour Party' which will fight the next election, it and its leftwing policies will be as unelectable as ever. Labour in any form will be gone from the political equation in the U.K. for a generation.
What terrible damage to the fabric of the U.K. the New Labour Party was able to achieve. From country to E.U. province, and within the province, Devolution, which saw a unified whole fragmented into parts. The education system decimated. The judicial system a joke. The Treasury bankrupted. What a legacy Blair and Brown and their 13 years will have left -- a mess in many ways, for others to pick up the pieces.
- Phil Jones, London UK, 16/04/2009 10:25
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