I have a theory about Gordon Brown and the Chilcot inquiry. It’s a bit half-baked, but you shouldn’t mind that. You want a fully-baked political theory, you don’t come around here. You want the Parris page for that, or one of those Nelson or Forsyth bits up front. Back here you get the leftovers. The off-cuts. The sort of analysis you might get if you imprisoned a renegade unit of soldiers from the Los Angeles underground in a shed full of odds and ends, and told them they wouldn’t be let out until they produced a column. Held together with whimsy, and references you won’t really get if you’re not quite the right age to have watched The A-Team. You know the drill.
Anyway, my theory is this: Gordon Brown will ace the Chilcot inquiry. Slam-dunk it, hole-in-one, back of the net — as many sporting metaphors as you like. The Chilcot inquiry, my theory goes, will be his finest hour. He’ll disown Iraq, bury Blair, and become an anti-war hero. A sort of George Galloway you don’t want repeatedly to kick in the head.
Ideally, he’ll have a letter. It will have been written in late 2002 and it will say something along the lines of ‘Dear Tony Blair, I oppose the war in Iraq which I think is totally wrong and probably illegal, but I’m not resigning because it would bring down the government and we’ve got lots of stuff to do and the other lot — hahahaha, sorry, don’t mean to laugh, I know this is serious — are still being led by Iain Duncan Smith, who’d probably be even more up for a chaotic bomb-happy ruck than you are.’ And he’ll give it to Sir John Chilcot.
And then Sir John, of course, will have to read it. Not so easy. Potentially, that’s where the whole plan could break down. ‘Dear Tumbly Beaver, I appease the wart on Yvette,’ etc. But he’ll get there eventually, and then he’ll pull off his glasses and say ‘gosh’ and then the world will see that Gordon is right and everybody else is wrong and that’s how it has always been. And then he’ll win the election.
It’s not a very good theory, I appreciate that. In terms of actual likelihood, I’d say it’s about 9 per cent, tops. I just thought it was important to get it out there. I mean, imagine this was a film. A proper film. I don’t mean one of those tedious, political docu-drama things which you always find yourself watching to the end, even though you remember it first time round and know perfectly well there isn’t going to be any shagging or a car chase. I mean a proper drama with proper characters, all of whom behave with motive, and rationality and common sense. Chilcot: The Movie. We’ve got about 20 minutes to go. How is it going to end?
He can’t take the Jack Straw defence and say he was only obeying orders. That would make for a rubbish ending and anyway, it’s not Gordon’s style. He never obeyed orders. Likewise, he can’t just plead incompetence, in the manner of Geoff Hoon. Tony Blair will probably take the Campbell line — sheer defiance, all guns blazing — but that wouldn’t work for Gordon, either. He’s spent the last eight years studiously not talking about this stuff. When Blair stood before the nation and stared us all down with the messianic gleam in his bonkers, beady eye, Gordon hid under his desk with his coat on his head, going ‘lalalalala’. It would be nice to think he’s about to tell us why.
Gordon Brown convened the Chilcot inquiry. Nobody forced him to. He’s agreed to appear before it, which he didn’t have to do, and he’s now offered, out of the blue, to do so before the election, even though Sir John had already specifically told him he wouldn’t have to. Realistically, there aren’t many reasons why somebody would behave like this. That’s why I’ve cobbled together my theory, which holds that he planned this years ago. That’s how it would happen in a film, anyway. He’d be a man who had something to say, who had set up an arena in which to say it, and who had determined to get it said at the best possible moment.
Because the only logical alternative, surely, is that he’s a short-termist idiot who always takes the easy option, who has spent the best part of the last decade wriggling himself into a corner, and who is about to come badly a cropper at the very worse possible time. Actually, 9 per cent is pushing it a bit, isn’t it? Best make it 5. Or maybe 3.
‘There aren’t many films which are truly important,’ Alex Salmond once said to me, ‘but this one is.’ We were talking about Braveheart, Mel Gibson’s fanciful re-imagining of the life of William Wallace, and the way that, in Salmond’s view, it directly helped to bring about Scottish devolution.
Not just Salmond’s view, actually, but mine, too. Grim, eh? I’m actually quite fond of Braveheart, but I do concur with the consensus among critics that it is the worst ever film to have won Best Picture at the Oscars. Most likely this is a distinction Braveheart will lose in about six weeks, thanks to Avatar.
I think Avatar might be a truly important film, too, in terms of environmental awareness, and capitalist colonialism, and the general unacceptability of invading places to steal their stuff. Never underestimate the mind-shifting power of a quite rubbish film. It’s not the good ones that change the world, but the rubbish ones.
A thousand war films shaped our impressions of Nazis far more effectively than Schindler’s List. Gay rights advanced enormously in the 1990s, not because of Tom Hanks’s humourless swooning in Philadelphia, but because of a thousand rip-offs of Rupert Everett’s cuddly campery in My Best Friend’s Wedding. It wasn’t Malcolm X that revolutionised the race debate in America, but Eddie Murphy in The Klumps.
Right now, there seems to be a spate of Australian films about Aborigines. There are bittersweet love stories, and grim tales of alcoholism and abuse, but the hit seems to be Bran Nue Dae, shown last week at the Sundance Film Festival. According to quite a few reviews, it’s ‘important’, too. It’s also a feel-good musical. Film is a low art.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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