A SCREENWRITER who famously portrayed Tony Blair as a war criminal has said that plans to install the former prime minister as the ruler of Gaza “feels like a satire I might have written myself”.
Alistair Beaton, who wrote The Trial of Tony Blair in 2007, said Donald Trump’s plan to have Blair as part of an interim government of the devastated Palestinian territory “beggars belief”.
The Scottish satirist told The National: “I think the whole thing is a recipe for disaster and it almost feels like a satire I might have written myself.”
Blair has been announced as the first member of Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace”, which he hopes will govern Gaza in the event of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
The US president has said he wants Blair to be the "interim leader" of the ruined territory.
Beaton, who also wrote for Not the Nine O’Clock News and Spitting Image, said: “Nowadays, as a satirist, you do feel that reality is hard on your heels and threatening to overtake you.”
He called the plans “fundamentally insulting to the Palestinian people” and added: “If the situation wasn’t so tragic, I find it grimly funny: an unhinged president and a delusional ex-prime minister who are going to be running the Board of Peace in Gaza, it really is almost beyond belief.”
Blair, Beaton added, should not be in charge of Gaza but rather “in the Hague” for the illegal invasion of Iraq.
He said: “The history of western interference in the Middle East is one, largely, of disaster and I don’t think this is going to be any different.
“It’s got a grotesque edge about.”
The longstanding Blair critic said the former prime minister had always possessed an air of “megalomania”.
Beaton added: “There’s a visionary zeal that’s quasi-religious, not just in the fact that he is a believer in God, but a quasi-religious zeal about changing the world that is deeply disturbing.
“One of his lines was always to say: ‘I’m doing X, I’m doing something because it’s the right thing to do.’
“One doesn’t really want somebody with that kind of fervour to be running a country because you should be doing the well-judged thing to do, not the thing that fits with your visionary zeal.”
Beaton also worked as a speechwriter for Gordon Brown during his time as shadow chancellor, which he joked was "one of the hardest jobs" he ever had, as he had to make the notoriously dour politician "entertaining".
He also had a line reporting on party conferences for BBC Radio 4 and was present when Tony Blair told the Labour Party he wanted to tear up Clause 4 of its constitution, the section which committed the party to public ownership of the means of production.
Beaton added: “Watching Blair close up at these conferences, there seemed to me a lust for power.”
Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 66,000 people and is increasingly recognised as a genocide, is “one of the great crimes of history”, Beaton said.
He added: “I would love the peace plan, if it is a peace plan, to work and I sort of hope it does.
“I think the chances of it working are remote and I think it shows, fundamentally, contempt for the Palestinian people.”
