Afternoon:
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IN THE LOOP is laugh-out-loud funny. If, like me, you have worked in the belly of the No 10 beast, then the tears of laughter are mixed with winces at the uncanny accuracy of so much of this film.
In the week of Gordon Brown's Damian McBride smear fiasco, this should be no source of amusement for Labour spin merchants.
Peter Capaldi's vicious chief-spin-doctor character, Malcolm Tucker, and the hapless young adviser Toby (Chris Addison) — are here caught up in a British prime minister's rush to support a US administration lurching towards war in an unnamed country. Its basis in the run-up to Iraq in 2002-03 is scarcely veiled.
Their battle over interpretation of a flimsy report rings true.
I remember asking a Foreign Office high-flier — now an ambassador — in late spring 2002: “So what about that intelligence dossier, eh? When are we going to see that?” He grimaced: “There's nothing — I don't know what they're going to put in it.”
The result — the notoriously “sexed-up” September 2002 dossier — was scarcely more convincing than is the hasty cut-and-paste job pulled together by Tucker to win a UN vote in the film.
It is the whole atmosphere of such spin operations, though, which is most accurately and hilariously rendered here. We see the contempt of spin doctors for bumbling politicians. Tucker yells: “No you do not think that!” as hapless minister Simon Foster makes his fateful comment on radio that war is “unforeseeable”.
I remember a very senior Labour spin doctor standing shouting at the TV as a backbencher went alarmingly off-message in 1997: “You wanker, you wanker!”
There is the endless dissection of ministers' news performance — the feeble Foster again. I was there when one prominent Home Office minister justified his contradiction of a confused official line on the Today programme to his boss, Home Secretary Jack Straw: “Well what could I say? The Prime Minister's a tosser?'”
Systematic, cynical leaking to the press is the norm. One education speech I wrote for Blair and sent to the Treasury, hitting the “send” button minutes before leaping into the PM's convoy to RAF Northolt, was leaked to the Sun by Treasury spin doctors, with a bizarre hostile spin, by the time our plane had landed in Manchester.
And there is the awe of British political operators at the power on display in the US — something I saw in staffers returning from trips such as Blair's fateful visit to Crawford, Texas, to discuss the coming Iraq war with President George W Bush in April 2002. I'd certainly like to think that a US spin doctor might once have told Damian McBride, as James Gandolfini's general does Tucker, “You know, turkey, you might be a scary little poodle-fucker back there in London, but here you're nothing.”
I'm sure it's Capaldi's cadaverous face and biting Glaswegian accent that makes me think instantly of Pat McFadden, Blair's political secretary and now employment minister, even though Tucker is supposed to be modelled on Alastair Campbell (a man I actually always found funny and likeable). And Toby is the image of so many twentysomething special advisers I have known.
Three years ago, Gordon Brown asked me to be his speechwriter. I turned him down. Watching
Damian McBride self-destruct and Malcolm Tucker swear, I am so, so glad that I did.
* Andrew Neather worked for the Labour Party from 1996-97 and was speechwriter to Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Tony Blair from 2000-02.
Reader views (1)
More greedy pigs' snouts in the trough YET AGAIN.Just how thick do they think we are?!Very strange how the council tax "error" was "spotted" by Mr Straw just prior to the figures being publicised...
Pigs might fly.l wish this lot of swine would fly,to somewhere a great
distance away,never to return,and as soon as possible!No wonder the country's going down the pan,and the public's perception of the powers that be is so dire.
- River, Hastings England, 08/05/2009 13:57
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