IF YOU chose to watch Betrayed by New Labour (Channel 4) last night, and then flipped to She’s Gone (ITV1), you’ll have had an unsettling evening. Both were about lost innocence, paranoia and nothing being as it seems. Greg Dyke provided a bitter political denunciation, Ray Winstone a disturbing psychological drama, but they left a similar acrid taste.
Betrayed by New Labour was Dyke’s chance to repeat what he’s been saying in print to a wider audience. The former Director-General of the BBC believes he was hounded by 10 Downing Street to distract attention from embarrassing revelations about the way the Government had railroaded Parliament into war on false grounds.
His opening remarks set the tone. “I used to run the BBC until I was forced out for defending it against a savage attack from the Government,” he explained. Remorse for his own misjudgments was not high on the agenda. Other remarks suggested that he wasn’t just a valiant crusader for truth, but a humble man of the people. “I tried to make it more human to work here,” he said, as if he were a kindly secretary putting spider plants on people’s filing cabinets. Could we have our first media martyr, Saint Gregory Dyke?
The problem with this programme was also what made it interesting. Dyke comes across like a genial, if truculent, London cabbie, but underneath he is seething, convinced that Tony Blair has got away, if not with murder, with a deliberate and irresponsible deceit. He is even more furious because, when the BBC looked like exposing the Prime Minister, Alastair Campbell stitched him up a treat.
Like a prosecuting barrister who has lost a case on a technicality, Dyke wants to make sure that the world knows that the villain dunnit. So he concentrated overwhelmingly on the ferocity of Campbell’s attacks, while glossing over his own errors of judgment, errors that helped Campbell to succeed.
Advertisement
The blow-by-blow account was fascinating in itself. There seems to have been something increasingly desperate in Campbell’s conduct. It conjured up colourful wildlife images: a squid squirting a cloud of ink in the face of a predator, perhaps, or a cornered skunk, dousing it in stinking liquid. In the end, though, Campbell came across as a brave worker bee, heroically throwing away his career in a desperate and, at least in the short term, successful attempt to save his queen. Perhaps he is our first new Labour martyr, Saint Alastair the Vituperative, who sacrificed himself so his master could look blameless.
It is easy to get bogged down in the details of who knew exactly what was true and untrue, and when. But towards the end of the programme Dyke asked the former Cabinet Office intelligence analyst Crispin Black, a blunt question. Did he believe the Prime Minister and Defence Secretary when they said they did not know that the “45 minute” deployment warning applied only to battlefield weapons? “No,” said Black. “Do you? Does anybody?”
Blair has been technically vindicated, but has still suffered a massive loss of credibility. He has lost a particularly aggressive and manipulative spin doctor. As for the BBC, Greg Dyke was greatly loved, but the corporation’s output was less than inspiring on his watch. Bizarrely the whole sorry farce may have worked out rather well for Joe Public.
The deceitful stratagems and betrayal of trust were more personal in She’s Gone (ITV1, Sunday). Ray Winstone, Britain’s cuddliest gangster, played Harry, who experienced the worst nightmare of every father of teenage daughters.
Harry’s daughter disappears in Istanbul while working for a charity in her gap year. When he flies out to investigate, he discovers a) that the charity never existed b) that she was working as a stripper c) that she is a lesbian and d) that she may have been abducted as a sex-slave by a corrupt businessman. Well, Istanbul is built on the remains of Byzantium, so a plot of Byzantine complication was only to be expected.
Advertisement
What made this slightly ponderous story compelling, though, was the way it explored the power-relations and uncomfortable sexual ambiguities that can lie beneath the surface of father-daughter relationships. By turns aggressive, frustrated, tactless and terribly hurt, Winstone captured this brilliantly. It was a walk in deep, dark woods, where no spin-doctor can protect you.