His Masters Voice

HIS MASTERS VOICE

Walk through security, past police in jumpsuits. Wander up the path, crossing the road – Downing Street – to the opposite side. A young blonde woman is pushing a baby in a pram.

Knock on the black door, Number 10. It opens. Inside, to stand around with a bunch of other lowly political hacks. Mainly ill tempered and ill dressed. In the entrance hall two of them get in an argument about who will ask what question, when.

Tedious, waiting. Listening to the protestors from Cyprus, yelling through a bull-horn from way across the other side of Whitehall. Everyone in the Prime Ministerial Offices can hear that shit they shout. Probably they don’t listen though, and who can blame them.

The carpet is probably good, and so probably is the interior décor and the paintings and the rest. We wait a while, having our un-precious time wasted. Missing deadlines, racking up more minutes heading for another 12 hour day.


No illusions here, waiting for the Press People to come and fetch us like obedient dogs. David Hill, the PM’s communications chief, eventually does.

More walking, down a corridor. Hot rooms. Into the cabinet. One of the most famous offices in the world. Which used to be used by the government to make decisions and discuss policy. Before Tony Blair ripped that up and set it afire in exchange for informal, un-minuted chats with advisors on wars and such like.

Sit-down in one of the cabinet seats. Wait a bit, then Tony Blair walks in. Dressed in a pink shirt or perhaps white and dark pink tie with stripes. Look and act of a man just finished fucking a beautiful woman. He’s just smoothed through a Commons debate on Iraq, beating Michael Howard and the ineffectual Charles Kennedy. Like the drums they are.

Even though everyone but the Prime Minister is right, he owns that chamber. He owns the debate. He makes the rest look like play politicians. He wins without trying. And he’s been in his job at the top of Labour for a decade. Running the show for almost as long as I can remember.

Now he sits there in the big chair, in the PM’s chair, in the Cabinet Office, 10 Downing Street. He is easy ugly satisfaction. He is pally. He's a real pal.

He asks on or off-the-record? and answers his own stupid question because we’re too shoddy to merit faux secret briefings. We ain’t gonna get: “between me and you reporters looking for a story, I fucking hate Brown and I knew there were no weapons and just didn’t care a damn”.

And then it starts, predictable enough. Strong economy, record education health police investment. Government’s record stands in testament to its very self and the man him very self. Stability, crime fighting, breaking a leg to beat anti-social behaviour. Asylum seekers to be locked up, asylum seekers are being tackled, numbers are falling.

A proud record.

None prouder than Iraq. He calls it “The Iraq Thing”, the thing is war. Defeated a dictator. “I’m proud to have dealt with barbarous dictators.” You misunderstand the Butler report if you think it damning or critical of the government, of the security services. Are wrong if: you concentrate on the fact there were weapons of mass destruction and was an immediate threat, right up until the time they never really were and we knew as much.

The Prime Minister will tell you the crucial part of the Butler report. He’ll be kind enough to draw your attention to what matters. What matters is: Butler says there was good faith. He says the threat from Iraq was real. He says Tony was right. And I’m certain he believes it to the core of his soul. He doesn’t understand what everyone else is so worked up about. That could be a sign of insanity.

And Tony says muslim voters, if they are thinking about not supporting him, should go and talk to muslim Iraqis. Hop a flight there, hope it aint shot down on the approach to Baghdad International.
He makes the suggestion because he adds one and one and gets not two. Muslim Iraqis hate Saddam, we got rid of Saddam. Muslim Iraqis like us. The Prime Ministerial logic, which fails not in the comfort of the Westminster residence but which sounds hollow in obscene heat and lawlessness of the new frontier in the war on everything. It sounds clean and cool and clear and it utterly absurd looking down a cheap AK-47 barrel.

And Tony says the big thing is Palestine, and that’s why it’s so important we keep up our efforts on that front. The PM hopes to have some better news on that front in the Autumn. (He does not elaborate and no one asks him to because that is not our job, to push him on factual issues which are of no interest to our editors. We know the game and are under instructions).

He talks for 45 minutes, near enough, that talisman period which will always remind of but one thing.

No hard questions are asked, and if they were he’d not answer the fuckers. His home.
After, all hacks are allowed to have their picture taken, sitting next to him. Like Santa in a grotto. Like schoolkids with a pop star.

I got little dignity, but just enough to refuse a picture. I go walking down the hall instead, and out the front door, and Number 10 is behind me and the evening is hot and very gray everywhere. I carry messages to you all from your Prime Minister.

He says: “Its been a tough time because sorting out Iraq is important and I just hope people understand that whatever their feelings about the war that Iraq and the world is a better place without Saddam in charge of Iraq and I think that is clear even now despite all the reports and everything we’ve been though and the best evidence of that is to talk to the people in Iraq who will be very clear about that.”

He says: “All I say about the Iraq thing which I think is maybe I haven’t said to people enough is that whatever we did was going to be difficult. If we had walked away from Iraq and left Saddam in charge that would also have been difficult people shouldn’t be under any doubt about that. I don’t mean difficult just in terms of the rupture of the American alliance and so on, I mean difficult in the sense that Saddam left there with us walking away would have been far bolder and far stronger in what he was doing.”

We don’t think back to the pre-invasion days, when diplomats were saying the problem with a massive military build-up in the region is that it develops its own momentum. Makes war inevitable. Leaves the US, the UK no way to back-down on war and save face. Tony Blair admits it now, but times have changed and memory has too and no one gives a fuck about details anymore because we’ve had too much and anyway it’s all split milk now, all that misery and those fucking falsehoods.

And anyway, the summer holidays are here.

Spot The Happy Ending

Prologue

Fine days these, as summer comes to its end. Still heat in the sun, high clouds and blue in the sky. Sit in the park to fall asleep listening to the cricket. In the evening the widow open, hearing night come in over the city on the breeze. Life at war.

Mortared sleep
In recent days the conversation has reached a conclusion: that what we are waiting for is more bloodshed. Hope worn so thin that death is a solution. If enough people die, maybe that will stop the killing. If the drip-drip-drip of far away murder becomes a torrent, and comes closer to home, maybe the logic of the situation will change. Will be forcibly shifted of its axis and onto something different. An end to the downward spiral if more used bodybags are being shipped back to the US, to the UK.

The logic is foul and ugly, and almost certainly wrong.

At Christmas, things looked grim enough. Sleeping one night, fitfully, cold in a tent, on a US military base north of Samara, in liberated Iraq. Two mortar rounds came over the wire and exploded close enough to rouse us and the 4th Infantry soldiers. Nothing more happened. The Americans smoked cigarettes and we all talked a while in the freezing blackness and went back to bed. Most places you turned in that country someone was shooting or shelling or rocketing. People had stories they shouldn't have to tell. Dead and mutilated Iraqis, dead and mutilated Americans. RPGs, bombing and such. Fuckit, its war, why not? Handful of eyes for a handful of eyes.

We talked then of the shitpile everyone was stuck in for the unforeseeable future, for years and years. Everyone wanted to wake up and find it was a dream gone bad. Cling to the thin, unrealistic hope maybe the people who run The War could get their act together, maybe it wasn't too late.

But it was already turning into a long fucking dream and it's getting no shorter. Hard to escape the feeling now that this shadow has spread in ways that are becoming less and less controllable. The problem is, the problem was maybe too big in the best of lights and was anyway allowed to fester in the darkness.

Everyone wants to leaf through their Sun Tzu and see what's said about the art of war. And to paraphrase, it says don't fuck up. It says prepare carefully. It says know your enemy. It says, the most successful wars are the ones anticipated and avoided. Not deliberately sought by politicians and fought by their lights.

Months have passed, the damned seasons have changed, and today in the newspaper there was:

12 dead Nepalese cooks and cleaners. Eleven shot in the back with an automatic rifle, one beheaded with slow painful cuts of a hand-knife.

Two French journalists captured and threatened with death by the Islamic Army of Iraq - which has already killed an Italian journalist and some Pakistani hostages.

Whatever the hell is happening in Najaf, the on-going foul comedy of truce and war which has most recently left all the Shia fighters in the city, still armed, still an army, still run by another cursed religious leader. Still there to be crushed by the new Iraqi interim government and its CIA leader who is independent of the US and only works for Iraq's interests.

Whatever the hell is happening in Fallujah, Ramardi and Samara. Places which aint reported on because no fucker dares go there now they are to dangerous for the US and official Iraqi forces, and journalists who value their lives.

No one wants to say civil war, but Iraqis are fighting Iraqis again and still, in Najaf and elsewhere. Sun Tzu doesn't say if it looks like shit, smells like shit and tastes like shit it's shit. But he knew it as true.

And today there was:

Suicide bombings in Isreal, the grimmest kind of hostage crisis in a Russian school, close to Chechnya. On-going investigations into the bombing of to Russian planes. Murders thought to be carried out by Black Widows. (Women who kill, not through religious motivation, but to avenge the murders of their husbands, fathers or brothers by the Russians as part of the Chechen war - a mess so bloody, underhand, ruthless and shot through with ruined lives Iraq pales alongside. Vladimir Putin says the war is won and simultaneously calls it a war on terror. Like its American cousin, it's a shitpool largely of Russia's own making and only partly about terrorism.)

EPILOGUE

All so hard to understand, with the schools still on holiday and the football season back and girls or boys to chase and money to be made and days to get through or friends to see or pasts to forget.. The normal beat of life. Most people in this world don't live a life like mine or yours, that's all. It's easiest to see if you wake at 5am and see the morning there cold and hard and grey, the day ahead impossible and too much for too many.

We only talk about how fucked up everything is because anything else sounds like a lie and makes us laugh as you can when the gun is pointing at someone else's head. The mortars are still falling but not on me.

The Rules

PROLOGUE

What we are dealing with this Monday morning is a man named Tom Kelly.

He’s the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, and he’s standing in front of the assembled journalists of the Westminster lobby, telling them something. An on-the-record briefing.

What he’s doing is, he’s feeding them a line of shit.

THE RULES

And the line of shit tastes like this -

A reporter asks if the Prime Minister thinks invading Iraq in the way he did has made terrorist attacks against British targets more likely. In other words, has a war that killed (so far) more than 10,000 Muslim civilians, pissed off a lot of Muslims and made the extreme minority want to kill some of us.

The honest answer is; “Yes, naturally.”

Tom Kelley doesn’t say this. He says: “I’m not going to get into scoring the threat on a scale of one-to-ten, but the threat level was high before Iraq and it remains high”.

Then he tells everyone something they know; that terrorists attacked before Iraq.
What he means is; Iraq has nothing to do with this.

He wants to destroy any suggestion that our actions generate reactions – equal or otherwise.

Tom Kelley – on behalf of the PM – wants to rewite the rules of physics because they have become unhelpful. He wants to share his special knowledge that black is, in fact, yellow. A spokesman for an existential ruler.

Remember it’s Monday morning, March 15th. News of the Spanish election result broke overnight and it’s clear as hell is hot that the Spaniards have done something major; they’ve kicked out a government they think has been lying to them.

They’ve kicked out a government as a direct result of our war on terror.

And they’ve kicked out a government they think has caused them the grimmest kind of trouble. A government that has played its part in putting 200 corpses on the streets of their capital city.

Instead of some kind of hysterical, idiotic, patriotic reaction – instead of lurching around in blind self-righteous rage – the Spanish have thought it through and come up with a different answer.

They’ve decided invading Iraq is a cause of the terrorist mass murder in Madrid.
The Westminster Lobby is interested in this. Because if the logic is followed, if the same rationality were to kick in here, Tony Blair will lose the next election.

He’d be fucked.

That’s why the line must be locked down. That’s why Tom Kelley refuses to comment on what has happened in Spain, saying it is a matter for the Spanish people. The British government saying it doesn’t like to get involved in the politics of other nations.

If you look at it, there’s so much crap, it’s heartbreaking. What we are dealing with is Jack Straw denying the attacks on the British Embassy in Turkey were really attacks on British interests. What we are dealing with is Tony Blair telling us it’s okay if we disagree with his political decisions, just as long as we don’t think he’s a fundamentalist maniac.

And what we have is a Prime Minister who WILL win the next election. Because we are not the Spanish and we don’t want to ask why. That’s a pile of shit we’ll leave for another generation to feed on.