Be afraid Mr Blair, be very afraid

10 April 2012

Sick of the Project?

Fed up with Tony Blair, New Labour, the spinning, the doctoring, the lack of substance, the death of ideals?

But can't think who else you could possibly vote for? Well, there's a therapy group for you: it's called Feelgood, it meets nightly in the West End from Saturday and it will leave you feeling a little bit better.

Feelgood's producers are welcome to the above, but there is no shortage of material for their billboards. When Alistair Beaton's satire opened at Hampstead Theatre a couple of months ago, critics and audience seized on it like drunks finding a beer keg in the Sahara. At last, a serious, sharp-toothed political satire. One that's - most important of all - funny.

Beaton's favourite accolade is from none other than the Deputy Prime Minister himself. "Bloody hell, is that man that wrote that play going to be at breakfast?" asked John Prescott. This was on the way to the BBC hospitality suite after a Breakfast With Frost appearance. "When Prescott finally came in I couldn't get to speak to him," says Beaton. "He had four or five minders round him - like a whale in a shoal of fish."

The play is set in a chintzy hotel suite in one of the party conference resorts. Here sleeps DL - "Divine Light", as the Labour Party leader is known to his acolytes. Around him is a medical college of spin surgeons: speech-writer, gag merchant, diary secretary and press secretary, all masterminding the progress of a difficult conference. There are anti-capitalist marchers at the security fence, rebellious delegates inside and a fabulously embarrassing GM scandal brewing.

Over this presides a great comic political creation - far greater than Michael Dobbs's evil Chief Whip, Francis Urquhart, and certainly on the same planet as Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister. This is Eddie, the "Richard III of spin doctors", who, with his tantrums, his foul mouth, and his breathtakingly cynical manipulations is, according to the author, "not in any way related to Alastair Campbell".

The play had been brewing in Beaton since Labour's crucial 1994 conference, which he was sketchwriting for Radio 4's The World Tonight. This was when Tony Blair dumped Clause 4 of the Labour Party's constitution - the one committing it to public ownership. Beaton learned that, as shadow ministers trooped in to be informed of this bombshell, presentation guru Philip Gould had to be hidden in a cupboard. "Hiding in wardrobes," says Beaton, "is, of course, the stuff of farce."

Beaton had been searching for the right stuff to put into political farce and satire for almost 30 years. He wrote his first paid gag for Weekending in 1973 - about Prime Minister Ted Heath. He'll forgive, with sweet Scottish self-deprecation, the suggestion that in all that time he's never broken significantly into the comedy-consuming public's consciousness.

He has had a show on Radio 4; he was author of last Christmas's best-selling The Little Book of New Labour Bollocks. But his has been the life of a well-trusted craftsman doing the brickwork on others' careers. Beaton has been joke-wright for people as disparate as Gordon Brown and Ned Sherrin. (Why can't Sherrin write his own monologues? "Too much champagne. Bollinger.") He's turned his hand to libretto-translating, lyric-writing and sitcoms, but he is very pleased now, at 54, to find himself a hit playwright, with a work that, he says, his whole career as a craftsman has been leading up to.

Unsurprisingly, the scourge of New Labour is an old Lefty himself. Well, more sort of greenish and grumpy. He voted for Labour in 1997 with joy, and is likely to do the same this time with rather less enthusiasm.

I wonder if he really, as he's claimed, found Blair "toe-curling" back at that conference in 1994. Surely, then, anyone but the most rock-steady old Trot found Blair quite inspiring. He did put the old cart back on the road.

Did Beaton's heart never thrill to Blair? "I've been lifted by him. There was a speech in Brighton in 1995 that I was lifted and moved by. I went out of the hall thinking, 'You bastard, I've got to write a satirical piece about this.' I had to go and walk up and down the front and get rid of the emotion and come back and say, now let's put the boot in.

"Blair is very adept at tuning into hope. I've always found that ordinary-bloke stuff hard to take. But the problem is, how long do you keep on doing the uplifting and avoid the nitty-gritty? It is my job to be a professional malcontent. I suppose a really committed New Labour person would nail me and say, 'What the f*** are you doing - because we are at least doing something?' They may be right . But I can't connect with that. I can only connect with the dissonance between the rhetoric and the reality."

What we can all agree on is New Labour's stultifying lack of a sense of humour. Beaton knows more about this than most; he is the man who was briefly gag-pimp for Cabinet straightman Gordon Brown. What gags, anyway? "Ah, well, he did put them in. Only, once he put them in you could no longer recognise they were gags."

Apart from a visit by Chris Smith, New Labour rather pointedly ignored Feelgood at Hampstead. How will the damage-control systems operate now the play looms more threat-eningly on the Strand? In the past, satirical attacks on political figures have famously had their stings drawn by their targets laughing along to show what jolly good sports they were. Michael Heseltine bought his Spitting Image puppet, while John Major claimed that he loved being the show's all-grey pea-eating Prime Minister. Will the Blairs visit?

"People occasionally draw a parallel with Anyone for Denis (the satire of Number 10 life which Mr and Mrs Thatcher visited at the Whitehall Theatre). I really have to say I hope I've written a play which is too dangerous for the Blairs to come and invite me round for drinks at Downing Street. If it should happen, I trust I would have the balls to say, 'No, thank you very much'. I'd prefer it if Alastair Campbell came. I'd stay well away, though - he's a scary guy and he's large and has been known to hit people." There are other ways, of course, that New Labour gets critics on board.

David Hare's 1993 satire of New Labour, Absence of War, was so successful they gave him a knighthood. "There is a syndrome of people being mopped up by absorption, so you are invited to Downing Street and get given the OBE. I do find it astonishing. There's something in our culture that makes it unfashionable to have principles about these things. I do think distinguished commentators, journalists taking honours is corrupt - which is a pity because I was planning to be on Loose Ends shortly and Ned Sherrin has just got some new letters after his name."

So we've established that Beaton won't take a gong. We've established just how much of a radical he is. So when did he last go on a demo? "Oh, er, God, that's a beastly one: I suppose it was the release of Nelson Mandela." We have even established that his favourite restaurant is Pane Vino in Kentish Town and that he's married to a human-rights lawyer and has two step-children.

But does he want to bring the Government down? The point Beaton is keen to make is that, despite the plaudits of the Right-wing critics, the play is not so much an attack on Blairism as a lament over a general loss of integrity in politics and, indeed, journalism, a warning siren over British democracy's heart-monitor.

"I feel very comfortable about this play. Unless something extraordinary happens - Blair does something intimate with a sheep on camera - between now and 7 June, they're going to get back in with a pretty good majority. If it might be down to one seat either way I'd start worrying: thinking, what if satire does have an effect? What if two people come to the play and decide not to vote Labour, vote Green, and in comes William Hague to Downing Street, and I think, however tiny, did I have some role in that? At which point I think the only course would be suicide."

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