Anthony Horowitz’s Diary: Dinner with Saddam, anyone?

I have written a play, but a month after it was sent to half a dozen theatres, I have heard nothing. Either they’re being slow or they’re so shocked that they cannot bring themselves to respond. The play is called Dinner With Saddam and takes place in Baghdad on the evening of the Allied bombardment. It’s a comedy. Is it even possible, I wonder, for an English writer to portray an Arab family in a humorous way without laying himself open to charges of racism? And when all things are considered, was it good or bad timing to send the play out just one day before the Isis forces launched their first bloody attack?

But I cannot see any way to write about the horror of Iraq except through comedy. Tony Blair cropped up on Radio 4 this week in his role as Middle East peace envoy — and that’s a joke, isn’t it? My jaw drops as I hear him arguing that the 2003 war had absolutely nothing to do with the vacuum of power and the collapse of internal security which has led directly to the disastrous situation in which Iraq now finds itself. I remember the US ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, arguing that the deaths of up to half a million children as a result of sanctions was ‘a price worth paying’. She wasn’t being serious, was she? And then there’s the continued non-appearance of the Chilcott report. I once had a conversation with one of the members of that committee who promised me that they had finally nailed the truth. Chilcott has become a gag in both senses of the word.