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.