There's a feeling nowadays that Tony Blair and his government are beyond satire. When reality reaches a certain level of absurdity, the poor old satirists just can't compete.
I have to admit to occasional moments of despair when life has trumped anything I could possibly make up - such as the teenaged Euan Blair turning up legless in Leicester Square, or the reprieve of Phoenix the calf during the foot-and-mouth epidemic.
But let's not throw in the towel. Like the ever-inventive Steve Bell, satirists just have to raise their game. Most reviewers enjoyed Alistair Beaton's The Trial of Tony Blair on Channel Four last week, but there was a feeling that it somehow missed its target. I enjoy Beaton's writing and I share his view that Blair should be behind bars, but I also felt something was lacking. Having observed our dear leader at close range when I was a lobby correspondent in the late 1990s and written my own satirical novel about him, I think I can suggest where this particular script went wrong.
Beaton's Blair is recognisably the man in Downing Street - shallow, charming, over-confident and increasingly delusional about Iraq. The script homes in on Blair's religious convictions: there's a nice line about him praying for guidance from above before approving the fifth terminal for Heathrow.
But a successful satire, in my view, has to start off gently and gradually twist the knife. Make your victim sympathetic to start with and then pick him apart, drawing blood towards the end. Beaton's narrative turns this principle on its head. Because of Blair's pangs of guilt, the audience feels increasing sympathy for him as he is hung out to dry by Gordon Brown and Hilary Clinton. I can understand the need to generate a degree of sympathy, but the risk is that it blunts the satirical edge. By the end we are even sorry for the poor chap, rather like Toad in The Wind in the Willows.
The problem comes when Beaton's Blair, out of office and with time on his hands, starts to hallucinate about bodies and coffins. We even see him washing his hands obsessively like Macbeth. This is implausible for anyone who has observed the real Blair. Other politicians may belatedly feel guilty, but Blair's self-belief is as rock-solid as Margaret Thatcher's. His inability to imagine that he might be wrong depends directly on his relationship with the Almighty - his "irreducible core". His skill in politics comes from a rare combination: a complete absence of self-doubt, coupled with a complete lack of fixed political convictions.
When watching Blair, I often think of a remark made about another politician whom I once trailed at close quarters, François Mitterrand. "Mitterrand is like water," his political contemporary Michel Jobert said. Blair is more than a barrister; he possesses not just the protean skills but the disconnected moral sensibility of a great stage performer. His only real competitor among politicians is Jeffrey Archer. Like Simon Russell Beale moving from Iago to Hamlet to Malvolio to Macbeth, Blair completely inhabits the role he's playing at the time. Perhaps he should be up for an Olivier award? Now there's a satirical thought.
