Patrick Rotman’s ‘Le Pouvoir’

Having read reports in the UK about Patrick Rotman’s documentary Le Pouvoir (ie 'Power') after it was released in France in May, I was glad to get the opportunity to see it in a cinema recently. Rotman and his crew filmed François Hollande for the first eight months or so of the latter’s presidency which started in May 2012. Most of the time was spent in the Elysée palace but they also travelled with Hollande to the UN in New York and to Brussels. I thought it was a fascinating film even though my limited knowledge of French politics, particularly within Hollande's Parti Socialiste (PS), meant that many of the nuances probably escaped me. (Think of most French observers being oblivious to the undercurrents of a meeting between David Cameron and Boris Johnson.)

What struck me were things like the protocol and pomp and circumstance of the presidency, the slightly faded gilt grandeur of the Elysée, the cavalcade of Citroën C6’s whenever ministers came and went, the nearby officer with the briefcase, the obviously elite entourage, the presidential aircraft and, although I am used to French habits, the time spent hand-shaking and double-kissing (of women by men). And there is something slightly awkward about Hollande – he certainly doesn’t have the born to rule manner of certain old Etonians and all too often looks the odd man out (below at the G8 meeting in the UK last month). On the other hand, on one visit he seemed to have a surprisingly sure touch with ordinary young people.

Just after seeing Le Pouvoir, an article appeared in the July issue of Prospect magazine by Christine Ockrent. In Invisible republic (in print; on their website as What’s Wrong with France) The travails of François Hollande are a symptom of France’s deeper malaise, she makes some crisp comments about the president and his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Hollande’s problem is that although he has mastered the language — unlike Sarkozy, he went to the right schools — he simply doesn’t convey authority. During the presidential campaign in 2012 he tried hard to lose weight and look younger; now he dyes his hair too dark, the way older men do, and his waistline has expanded — though that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since Georges Pompidou, who was rather stout, is now remembered with fondness for his short but successful presidency. In fact, Hollande behaves exactly the way his friends describe him to be in private: good natured with a great sense of humour, a sharp mind and a quick tongue — the kind of jolly, clever fellow one is always pleased to have dinner with when he comes to Paris. He’s like your favourite cousin from Corrèze, the province which has elected him as enthusiastically as it once did Jacques Chirac.

She goes on to criticise France’s “system of énarques et polytechniciens” in terms similar to Peter Gumbel’s which I posted about last month. Hollande’ s “right schools”, by the way, were political science at Sciences Po, economics at the HEC business school and ENA.  Ockrent, described by Prospect as “a journalist and a former Editor-in-Chief of L’Express” is the partner of Bernard Kouchner. When considering her opinions, it is worth knowing (as Prospect readers presumably don’t have to be told) that while latterly a minister under Sarkozy, Kouchner was previously involved with the highest levels of the PS.

Rotman (born 1949) has made documentaries about various French politicians including François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Lionel Jospin. A British equivalent might seem to be Michael Cockerell, but he provides a voice-over commentary and interviews his subjects (eg Boris Johnson) whereas in Le Pouvoir Rotman merely observes without expressing opinions himself. The film has been referred to as a fly-on-the-wall documentary (eg in The Times (£) on 15 May) but as the faces around the table at Hollande’s first ministerial meeting - so many of them, so many C6s - reveal, the cameras were clearly evident and not exactly welcome. Direct cinema or cinéma vérité would probably be a more accurate description. It seems unlikely that Rotman’s film will appeared subtitled for Anglophone audiences – if it did, I would want to see it again.

Cockerell’s Life of Johnson

On Monday 26th March BBC2 showed Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, a one-hour documentary by Michael Cockerell, the latest in his long series of political profiles. It had been preceded by an interview on Sunday 25th’s The Andrew Marr Show, hosted in absentia by Eddie Mair. The interview was a little abrasive but Mair regularly lurches from the whimsical to the brusque as host of BBC Radio 4’s PM programme. Having revisited some of Johnson’s less glorious moments, Mair asked:

Aren’t you in fact, making up quotes, lying to your party leader, wanting to be part of someone being physically assaulted? You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?

Not so surprising then that the interview generated nearly 600 complaints to the BBC, according to the Press Association.

Before transmission Cockerell provided an account of the making of his programme to the Daily Mail and afterwards he discussed it with Johnson’s Deputy Mayor of London, Munira Mirza on BBC2’s Daily Politics. Having read two biographies (see below) of Boris Johnson, I didn’t feel I learnt very much from The Irresistible Rise. Cockerell seemed to have succumbed to the charm of the Johnson clan and their never-before-seen (or even developed according to Cockerell) home cine-films. The time spent on Johnson’s childhood and days at Eton and Oxford was at the price of only a cursory examination of his time as Mayor of London, and even that emphasised the 2012 Olympics. Whether the “Boris bikes” (Barclays Cycle Hire) have been as good for Londoners as for Barclays, and the value of the “cable car” (Emirates Air Line) never came up.

I did notice that Cockerell referred to Boris’s father, Stanley Johnson’s involvement with MI6 (SIS) which sent me back to the biographies. Andrew Gimson in Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson (2006 and 2012) said:

Stanley took a second degree in agricultural economics, and in the spring of 1965 he also joined the Foreign Office from which he resigned in the autumn of the same year, because ‘by then the World Bank had come through with an offer for me to go to Washington’. (page 14).

Whereas Sonia Purnell in Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition (2012) was slightly more explicit:

… [Stanley] struggled to launch a career that would put food on the table for his new family. He had tried his hand unsuccessfully at teaching and studying for a Masters in Agricultural Economics before apparently being recruited as a spy and offered, according to his own account, ‘the most intensive training in clandestine techniques known to man’. (Chapter 1)

Purnell referenced Johnson père’s Stanley I Presume, (2009) which I haven’t read and probably won’t. However, he seems to be quite open about his time in SIS, for example, to the Exeter and District (Devon, SW England) branch of the English Speaking Union in February 2012:

Stanley Johnson, our guest speaker, gave a highly entertaining account of his life from his days at Sherborne School and Exeter College, Oxford, to the present day. After leaving school he travelled alone through South America and as an undergraduate rode 4,000 miles on a motorcycle along the Marco Polo route to Afghanistan. Having won a poetry prize at Oxford and being award a Harkness Fellowship to the United States, Stanley embarked on a fascinating career, training as a spy with MI6, working at the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union.

In the 2005 general election Stanley stood unsuccessfully as Conservative candidate for the nearby Teignbridge constituency.

Reaction in the media to Johnson’s BBC double exposure suggests that nothing much has actually changed - the enthusiasts’ faith didn’t waiver and the unconvinced remained so. Usually the London Evening Standard is firmly enthusiastic, but Simon Jenkins sounded a sceptical note on 26 March:

London’s golden boy is soaring too near the sun. Boris Johnson has been flapping his Icarus wings on television these past two days in his frenetic bid for the Tory leadership. But Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show and last night’s documentary ignored his achievements — or lack of them — as London Mayor, to portray him as a variously flawed celebrity, oozing ambition. As the cameras glared and the questions grew hot, we saw the wax melt and the feathers start to fall. As they fell, I began to wonder whether any clear political ideology motivated England’s most famous “toff on the make”.

And in the same paper the next day, Andrew Neather was harsher:

He could fudge the awkward timing of his mayoral term finishing in 2016: I expect him to pick up a safe seat in 2015 (Paddy Power is offering odds on which one) and fob Londoners off with the fiction that he can do both jobs for a year. But as Johnson proved when he was an MP, he doesn’t have time for the hard graft or detail of the Commons. He is the opposite of a team player: he failed to build the alliances any leader needs, while proving an embarrassment even in the Westminster McJobs of shadow arts and higher education minister. And the sorts of failings that he manages to laugh off in City Hall, with its minimal media scrutiny and paucity of heavyweight opponents, would quickly ensnare him on the front benches.  

In fairness, some Conservative MPs realise this. He can expect a vigorous “Stop Boris” campaign. That will not prevent plenty of Tories backing his blond ambition: he is the darling of the party’s grassroots and media supporters. But if the Tories think Boris is the answer to their problems, they’re asking the wrong question.

On 28 March the Standard seemed to pull itself together behind its chosen one, with a front page story by Joe Murphy, Voters say Boris Johnson must lead Tories. Boris Johnson would smash Ed Miliband’s lead in the opinion polls if he took over as Conservative leader, an exclusive poll reveals today. Though the poll data below quoted by the Standard (LES) from a YouGov survey of 1,867 adults online from March 26-27 didn’t exactly bear this out:

According to the Standard “A Boris leadership would lure a third of Ukip supporters to the Tories from Nigel Farage’s party” but there were no statistics provided to support this. Another poll of 1867 adults carried out by YouGov on the same dates and reported in the Sun showed the above “Headline Voting Intentions” (for which presumably those polled are not reminded of the current leadership’s names) with the now usual double figure Labour lead. In this poll within the 19% ‘Other’, 13% were Ukip, 4% SNP or Green and 1% other ‘Other’.

One of the shrewdest comments about Boris Johnson that I’ve read so far comes from Rod Liddle in the Spectator (30 March issue):

To give the bloke credit, at least Boris doesn’t pretend that he is One of Us, that he has had to struggle to achieve the position in life he now occupies — i.e., Mayor of London and heir to Downing Street. Because of course he hasn’t — and neither has Clegg, or Cameron, or Osborne or any of them; it has been a gentle and easy elision from top public school to Oxbridge to running the entire country, the passage eased by immense affluence, ready-made connections and, often enough, when all this has proved insufficient, a little bit of -Daddy’s help. This stuff, the Eton-Bullingdon-king-of-the-world business, bothers me, and it may well do for Boris in the end, when the people of the country have had enough of it all. It is not a good way to run a country, as indeed we are now seeing.  

But still, as a person, and shorn of all this stuff — if that’s possible — Boris is a more likeable politician than most we have around at the moment. If the chaotic buffoonery is all an act, then it is a good act, and an endearing act. He seems to me a less nasty piece of work than most of his Conservative political rivals.

What doesn’t seem to have appeared so far is an informed logical analysis of the timing issues. Presumably if the Tories are going to change leader before the 2015 election, they almost certainly have to do it by the end of this year. So how does Johnson get to be an MP before then? If he leaves it any later, he has to wait for the outcome of that election whether he stands as an MP in 2015 or not. 

If Cameron wins in 2015, or even continues in a coalition, he will almost certainly go when he chooses, say 2016 or 2017. And his successor will probably be someone who has played a part in achieving what looks at present to be an unlikely success and will almost certainly be someone who was an MP between 2010 and 2015.

If the Tories lose they will have to choose a leader who has the stamina to be an effective leader of the opposition to a Labour government, or Labour/ Lib Dem coalition, for five years and lead them to victory in 2020 (when Boris will be 56).

Can Johnson be both Mayor and MP at the same time? If he does try that on, would there be a backlash at the next mayoral election in 2016 or even in the London parliamentary seats in 2015? If he stands down as Mayor, who takes over - Munira Mirza? Or does there have to be a mayoral by-election which Labour could end up winning in the run-up to 2015? Mirza, who has a PhD in sociology, to judge from her showing on the Daily Politics (see above) could go far, but has a low profile so far.


UPDATE 2 June

Johnson's two biographers debate his chances in today's Independent on Sunday.

Max Hastings: the Falklands war in context

The 30th anniversary of the Falklands War of 1982 has led to several documentaries on British television in recent weeks. The existence of a large amount of contemporary reporting in colour obviously must be helpful to these kinds of productions, as is the readiness to be interviewed of some of the participants, now in healthy-looking late middle age. On 1 April BBC2 screened The Falklands Legacy with Max Hastings, the journalist and military historian who sailed with the Task Force in 1982 and reported on the Falklands campaign first-hand.

On this occasion, Hastings (who with Simon Jenkins wrote a well-respected account of the war in 1983) gave only a brief account of the 10 week operation in the South Atlantic, choosing instead to spend time putting it in its historical context. His thesis was that years of British post-imperial decline were halted by the victory in 1982. (A post here last year was about Denis Healey’s “liquidation of Britain's military role outside Europe” and cancellation of the Royal Navy’s strike carriers.) Also reversed was the unpopularity of the Conservative government under Mrs Thatcher, transforming her into “Maggie”, Iron Lady and winner of the 1983 and 1987 elections. However, in Hastings’ view, the Falkland conflict’s swift success (‘The Empire Strikes Back’ as Newsweek’s cover put it), although it improved Britain's sense of pride and its image abroad, tempted later politicians into prolonged and unpopular involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Added to these experiences, the current economic constraints meant a gloomy outlook for the UK’s future aspirations for ‘hard power’.

Hastings’ journalism tends to be controversial and opinionated, and he can go astray, for example last year he was full of forebodings over intervention in Libya. But in this programme, perhaps under the guidance of its producer/director, Robin Barnwell, the case was well-made and convincing - up to a point. To my mind he omitted a key factor concerning Afghanistan: that, unlike in Iraq, the UK’s involvement has been that of a senior NATO member to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which the alliance established soon after 9/11. He might also have emphasised that 30 years ago the UK, as a member of NATO then confronting the Soviet bloc, was spending over 5% of GDP on defence. This would be about £100 billion a year in current terms, ie the same size as the health budget, as opposed to £39 billion at present. Given the resources then available and the level of competence their ownership provided, the UK’s ability to generate the 1982 Task Force and its success is perhaps not so remarkable after all. David Miller in his The Cold War A Military History describes one of the UK’s significant NATO roles at that time:

One of the major achievements of the USMC [United States Marine Corps] in the Cold War was the plan to reinforce Norway. In this, the majority of the combat equipment required by a full Marine Amphibious Brigade [MAB] was pre-positioned in Norway, housed in specially built caves in the Trondheim area. … The task of the MAB, reinforced by up to two more USMC brigades, a Canadian brigade and the Netherlands-UK Amphibious Group, was to reinforce the Norwegian armed forces in repelling any Soviet invasion.

Although the logistics of deploying to the Falklands were far more demanding, various aspects of the Task Force’s role were analogous to the Norway reinforcement which the UK was committed to undertake if required. A final minor nit-pick, although Hastings quoted Acheson’s 1962 comment on Britain, “lost an empire and not yet found a role”, he did not mention the more damning opinion of General George Brown, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, only six years before the Falklands expedition: “Britain is no longer a world power; all they have got are generals, admirals and bands”.

Some of the interviews relating to the political background featured characters who have already made an appearance in this blog. For example, Michael Cockerell, who in the middle of the Falklands campaign covered the 27 May Beaconsfield by-election, probably only remembered now because Tony Blair, then 29, was the Labour candidate in a normally safe Conservative seat. Cockerell asserted that Blair subsequently remarked to Robin Cook that “Wars make Prime Ministers popular” but didn’t tell us when this was said, and, of course, Cook is no longer with us to confirm or deny it anyway. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles has been mentioned here before too, and he took the opportunity to make the point to Hastings that Generals, Admirals and Air Marshals are keen to assure politicians that they ‘can-do’ and that Chiefs of the Defence Staff manipulate Ministers and Prime Ministers accordingly. Hastings subscribes to the emerging view that it was a reaction to the perceived failure of the British in Iraq, (particularly Basra) that led to our attempting a subsequent over-ambitious involvement under ISAF in Helmand.

As far as the Falklands are concerned, Hastings concluded that the 1982 story isn’t completely over, given the current antagonism from the Argentinians and the UK’s diplomatic isolation in South America. Looking back, the 1982 war may have been our last popular conflict, the last imperial hurrah.

ADDENDUM 9 APRIL

Anyone who missed The Falklands Legacy with Max Hastings (no longer available on BBC iPlayer in the UK) might find two recent articles by Hastings of interest. The first, in the Daily Mail on 3 April, made many of the points in the programme, and concluded:

We could not again mount a campaign remotely on the scale of 1982. We sent 30,000 men to recover the Falklands, but when the current defence cuts are complete the army will be able to deploy only a single brigade group of 7,000-8,000 men for sustained operations overseas. We have no aircraft carrier; when the Royal Navy does eventually take delivery of the two new carriers now being built at Rosyth, it cannot afford suitable planes to fly off them.
Economic forces are driving our continuing relative decline, heedless of our martial prowess. I shall forever be grateful to have shared in that extraordinary 1982 odyssey in the South Atlantic, though I shall never forget the price paid for victory by such men as the Royal Marine whom I knew, damaged for life. But 30 years on, the war looks to me like a last imperial hurrah.

The second, in the FT on 6 April (£) covered some of this ground again but put more emphasis on future defence capabilities – or the lack of them. Again, he went for the carriers:

The most conspicuous symbols of this [defence mismanagement] are the two aircraft carriers under construction at Rosyth, for which nobody can see any useful purpose because we cannot afford appropriate aircraft for them. Some of us have for years pleaded for cheap, cheerful carriers to operate cheap, cheerful aircraft. But these behemoths were started to appease the ambitions of successive first sea lords and the last Labour government’s desperation to provide jobs in Scottish constituencies. This pork-barrelling threatens to cripple our maritime capability for decades, because the Royal Navy will be able to afford little else. Even now, I would scrap the ships, to save their huge downstream costs.

And he concluded:

Intellectual rigour is what is lacking from defence policy-making, … We do not configure the armed forces according to what equipment we might need to defend ourselves, but by making arbitrary judgments about what bills the Treasury is willing to pay. … Ministers may live to regret treating defence as an optional extra because it swings no votes. Every conflict in which Britain has fought since 1945 – including Korea, Northern Ireland, the Falklands and the Gulf – has come from nowhere. The only certainty is that our children can expect more surprises, and more unexpected enemies, and we shall have precious few weapons with which to address them. Repeated random axe-blows mean not only that the armed forces are unable now to retake the Falklands – which is probably irrelevant – but, more fundamentally, that we shall own too little of anything to play an appropriate role in defending our vital interests – as we shall surely have to do before we are all dead.

Phyllida Lloyd’s 'The Iron Lady'

Much has been said and written about this film since the start of the publicity onslaught in the UK in mid-November. In support there seem to have been numerous private screenings for the movers and shakers before general release to the rest of us on 6 January. Months ago there had been a private MORI screening in Guildford (where Thatcher’s England endures presumably, though “Susan” from Farnham wasn’t struck). Unsurprisingly then, even before seeing The Iron Lady, I wondered what I could possibly add in this post, but here goes.

Firstly, there are three Margaret Thatchers in this film, summarised in the table below. 

The film is structured so that Roberts and Maggie are accessed through flashbacks triggered by Lady T’s finally disposing of Dennis’s (her late husband) clothes. There are too many flashbacks and there’s too much of Jim Broadbent’s jokey reincarnation of Dennis. My guess is that the Margaret Thatchers we see on the screen are divided about 45% Lady T, 35% Maggie and 20% Roberts.

The young Margaret is played competently by Alexandra Roach, but the Roberts period was dramatized well-enough quite recently in Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley, with Andrea Riseborough in the lead role. (Riseborough is shortly to appear as Wallis Simpson in W.E.). The Roberts’ grocery in the film appears to have been the only one where ration coupons were not required during the war.

Streep’s performance has been praised mightily and certainly her Maggie and Lady T were a tour de force of both acting and of makeup, costume and prosthetics. Oddly enough I found Lady T more convincing. Perhaps this is because only a few hundred people at most know Margaret Thatcher at 85 at first hand. Streep’s acting, particularly the voice and posture, seems highly credible to the rest of us, but we lack any benchmark. This puts her Lady T in the same category for most people as her turn as Julia Child in Julie and Julia. However, Maggie appeared regularly on television for over 11 years, and colour broadcasting had begun in the UK at the time she first entered the Cabinet. Those of us above a certain age watched her often in the years up to 1990. Also, during the Maggie period, she must have met thousands of people, including me. I thought, admittedly unlike some who worked closely with Thatcher, that Streep’s Maggie was very good but at times not quite on the button. However, I doubt if anyone else will ever do better than Streep.

The Maggie episodes include contemporary news footage leading, for example, to the sudden appearance on screen of a larger than life (and almost school boyish) Peter Allen. Despite this nod to realism, the Maggie parts of the story are also the most operatic and demand the greatest extension of artistic licence. For example, Prime Ministers do not march around Parliament with the rest of the Cabinet in their wake, like mediaeval courtiers trailing behind their Prince. But I have had a problem with differentiating dramatization and documentary when it concerns recent events. So I couldn’t help but be amused when Jonathan Powell, reviewing the papers on BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show on 4 December, told us:

… my brother worked for Mrs Thatcher for eight years and she would cook him breakfast most mornings in the flat in Number 10 and he certainly would vouch that she would never have revealed herself in her decolletage to another man, absolutely not …

For nerds like me, the BBC is sitting on a pile of documentaries about the Maggie years made by Michael Cockerell and others and, according to the FT (£), their archive is being digitised for us to watch on a micropayment basis. So I shouldn’t complain about a film drama departing from the strictly factual. However, I found things became irritatingly detached from reality in the House of Commons scenes in The Iron Lady. While these provided ample employment opportunities for male members of Equity over 50, the Commons during the Maggie period was not exclusively for men with one exception. The chart below shows that Thatcher was not alone in Parliament in her time (1 of 25 women when she arrived, 60 when she left), that things improved under New Labour, and how much further there still is to go, as there are only 144 at present (including 82 Labour and 49 Conservative).
 

Women MPs as percentage of total, 1918-2010

Among the column inches which this film has generated, I thought Boris Johnson’s views were interesting “… [the] writer and director (neither of whom, I guess, would call themselves ardent Thatcherites) …” until he turned his piece into an excuse for City axe-grinding; Matthew Parris in The Times (£) is worth a read, despite his irritating self-references to “Mrs Thatcher’s clerk”; Tom Harris, after he saw the film tweeted “dearie me”, but then blogged his fuller opinion; Tim Robey in the Telegraph explained that someone seems to have had an expensive change of heart about the music - fallout from the MORI session perhaps? Charles Moore, being Thatcher’s official biographer, has to be read, and he made the point as others have done that

:… there can be no doubt that it is calculatedly unkind to take a real, living person and portray that person as demented, which this film does. Either such a portrayal is false and therefore indefensible, or it is true, in which case the poor victim cannot answer back. The making of the film is therefore exploitative, and it is bound to hurt anyone close to her, above all, her family. In this straightforward, moral sense, the film should not have been made in Lady Thatcher’s lifetime.

The right to privacy of a public figure once retired into private life, whatever their mental health, doesn’t seem to be up for discussion, however. Surely there is a debate to be had about the border between legitimate ‘public interest’ and ‘what the public might find interesting’ and might pay to see as a film? It is perhaps worth noting that Carol Thatcher, who has written articles about Lady Thatcher, appears in the film, but her twin, Mark, who as far as I know has never spoken or written about his mother, does not.

David Owen (a former neurologist) observed in the Independent that:

While neither factually nor medically correct in every detail, this film could achieve something important and enduring: acceptance that dementia, however it presents itself, is rarely an indication of a poorly functioning brain in earlier life.

and argued that ‘Hubris Syndrome’ is the psychological frailty which undermines leaders. My pet theory is that Prime Ministers, because of the stresses of the job (eg PMQs, the oversized and hyperventilating UK media, sub-standard personal accommodation in Downing Street, too much travel induced by the UK’s view of its world role) age in office at about 18 months a calendar year, making Thatcher about 92, not 86 (see Table below).

*6 months added for every year as Prime Minister

Professor Steven Fielding blogged some astute comments, in particular in noting the similarity of the plot to that of the late Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly Deeply:

In that 1990 British-made movie Juliet Stephenson plays Nina, a widow who refuses to come to terms with her loss. As a result her dead husband, played by Alan Rickman, keeps appearing until she realises that she has to move on and starts a relationship with another man. That Michael Maloney plays Stevenson's new love interest and is also Thatcher's doctor in The Iron Lady might have helped jog my memory.

David Cameron, (perhaps with an eye to the female C1/C2 over-30 demographic taken with Streep’s performance in Mamma Mia - just kidding), told the BBC:

It's a fantastic piece of acting by Meryl Streep, but you can't help wondering, why do we have to have this film right now. It is a film much more about ageing and elements of dementia rather than about an amazing prime minister. My sense was a great piece of acting, a staggering piece of acting, but a film I wish they could have made another day.

According to The People on 15 January Lady Thatcher watched a DVD of the film “with close friend Lord Bell at her home in Dulwich, south London.” They quoted a source as saying:

By all ­accounts she was left quite emotional as she watched her life story. She actually spoke of being ‘pleasantly surprised’ by what she had seen ­although emotions do ­appear to have got the better of her as she recalled her real-life response to events shown in the film.

However, on 21 January the FT (£) reported Lord Bell as saying that he:

has no plans to see [The Iron Lady] as it will not “make any difference to her legacy”.

And finally two things not, as far as I know, reported in the UK press. Firstly, The Iron Lady had its world premiere in Beijing on 19 November at the first U.S.-China Forum on The Arts and Culture. Maggie as a medium for the exercise of US soft power – perhaps they should have called it The Ironic Lady.  Secondly, the aria, sung by Callas, background music in the film as Maggie finally leaves Downing Street, is Casta Diva from Bellini's Norma and, of course, it was John and Norma Major who were about to move in.

Streep-Maggie, Lady Thatcher, Meryl Streep

Note: Data from Women in Parliament and Government, Feargal McGuinness, House of Commons Library Standard Note SN/SG/1250, 5 January 2012.

ADDENDUM 16 JANUARY

I'm giving this film an Anticipointment Index of 4 (out of 5 at worst). This reflects that it had a very high level of hype but was redeemed for its failings by Streep's performance.

ADDENDUM 23 JANUARY

Benedict Brogan (of the Daily Telegraph) in his daily email this morning reported

Conor Burns, Conservative MP for Bournemouth West, and Lady Thatcher’s chief representative in Parliament, tweets an update on her progress: “Lovely visit with Lady T this evening. Good chat about defence, Falklands and Welfare Bill. In great spirit”. Good to hear.

‘We don’t have to stay, Henry’

The review section of the Daily Telegraph on 15 August offered readers its Pick of the paperbacks, starting with Leading from the Front by General Sir Richard Dannatt, ‘A searing indictment of how Labour failed the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan’. (Back in May, I commented on Dannatt’s appearance at the Hay Literary Festival in connection with this book, and in April posted on Matt Cavanagh’s articles on Labour and the generals.)

In contrast, but also on 15 August, Sir Rodric Braithwaite reviewed in the Financial Times Frank Ledwidge’s Losing Small Wars:

… a savage indictment of the military leadership that got British soldiers into one impossible situation after another in Iraq and Afghanistan. His conclusion is stark: “The reputation of the British army has been seriously damaged. The British were at sea in both places, devoid of viable doctrine, without awareness of their environment, lacking adequate forces and minus any coherent strategy to pursue. All this was coupled with a hubris which attracted its inevitable riposte – nemesis.”

Braithwaite concluded:

The generals can be blamed, as Ledwidge says, for not insisting that they were given objectives that were clear, consistent, adequately resourced, and achievable within a reasonable time. Instead, they assured ministers that they could do whatever was asked of them, in a misguided desire to show off their prowess and secure their future budgets. They acquiesced, may even have believed, in the dubious proposition that we needed to follow the Americans to Iraq and Afghanistan to pay, in Tony Blair’s distasteful phrase, “a ‘blood price’ to secure [Britain’s] special relationship with America”. No wonder they failed to produce a convincing military plan. It was, however, a failure of moral fibre rather than strategic thinking.
The real problem, however, goes far beyond two failed wars and it is not only the politicians and generals who are to blame. The British public, too, seems to want the country to have aircraft carrier and missile submarines so that we can “punch above our weight”, sending military expeditions hither and yon, provided the price in blood and treasure is not too high. That will not change until Britain finally works out what sort of country it is – a floundering former empire still dreaming of a global reach, or a serious medium-sized power with a realistic view of its national interests. Then it can decide what kind of armed forces it really needs and is prepared to pay for. Meanwhile, Britain will have no coherent strategy and its foreign and defence policy will remain in its present sad muddle.

Sir Rodric has been UK ambassador to Moscow and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), and is the author of the recently published and well-regarded Afgantsy, a history of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. So lesser mortals ought to take care when picking over anything he writes, but nonetheless …

Firstly, was it ‘Tony Blair’s distasteful phrase, “a blood price” ’? In 2002, prior to a visit to the US, Blair gave an interview for a BBC Two programme, Hotline to the President. The BBC News website still has an item (image below) on the programme, headed Britain will pay 'blood price' – Blair, and starting with:

Britain must be prepared to pay a "blood price" to secure its special relationship with the US, Prime Minister Tony Blair has told the BBC ahead of talks on Iraq with President Bush.

But further on it reads:

Hotline to the President presenter Michael Cockerell asked Mr Blair whether one of the elements of the UK-US special relationship was whether "Britain is prepared to send troops to commit themselves, to pay the blood price".
Mr Blair replied: "Yes. What is important though is that at moments of crisis they (the USA) don't need to know simply that you are giving general expressions of support and sympathy.
"That is easy, frankly. They need to know, `Are you prepared to commit, are you prepared to be there when the shooting starts?'"

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem likely, according to the BFI, that this programme will be turning up soon on YouTube or anywhere else. But from the BBC webpage it appears that it was Cockerell’s ‘distasteful phrase’, not Blair’s. Unless, of course, Blair had used it earlier, somewhere off the record, and Cockerell was primed to spring it, gobbet-style. Although an admirer of Cockerell’s work for many years, I knew very little about him, so his entry on Wikipedia (which, of course, may not be accurate) proved worth reading. He is 71 this month and has had seven children from three relationships, two former wives coming from high Tory circles.

Secondly, Sir Rodric’s remark ‘The British public, too, seems to want the country to have aircraft carrier and missile submarines’ touched on something I posted here, much less elegantly, earlier this month:

Perhaps in 2011, if the UK is envisaged in some quarters as having accepted being on the way to minor power status (eg eventually abandoning its nuclear deterrent, aircraft carriers and a serious intelligence capability), keeping on good terms with the US is not seen as worth the price. However the UK would need to be confident that it could address the current and future threats to cyber security without close cooperation with the US.

and I quoted the National Security Strategy:

2.11 Our strong defence, security and intelligence relationship with the US is exceptionally close and central to our national interest.

It’s difficult to argue against a former Chairman of the JIC if he thinks it a ‘dubious proposition that we needed to follow the Americans to Iraq and Afghanistan’, but I wonder what Sir Rodric would make of the programme Document broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 15 August. (Don’t worry, dear reader, you have the rest of your life to catch up – apparently it will be ‘Available until 12:00AM Thu, 1 Jan 2099’; hopefully so will the BBC).

Mike Thomson investigates the collapse of the US UK special relationship in 1973, via a revealing transcript of a phone call between President Nixon and Henry Kissinger which suggests the split was deeper and more severe than previously thought.
As Britain joined the EEC, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became increasingly annoyed at the lack of support by Edward Heath's government for American foreign policy. Mike uncovers papers which suggest that in retaliation, the US switched off the supply of intelligence to the UK.
Among those Mike speaks to are former Defence and Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and Lord Powell, later Margaret Thatcher's Private Secretary.

The problem which arose in 1973 had been described in Richard J Aldrich’s GCHQ, and he appeared in the programme. This is an extract from the chapter, Trouble with Henry (pages 289-90):

Kissinger was looking for a symbolic area to hit that would send a clear message to London. He chose the intelligence relationship. The next day, intelligence relations between the two Countries were halted. NSA went quiet, and officials told Heath that the CIA had 'suspended the supply of certain intelligence materials to us’. NSA and the CIA had been instructed to cease intelligence exchange with GCHQ and SIS. British officials regarded this as ‘sinister’.  ... the JIC discussed Anglo-American intelligence relations at four consecutive meetings during late August and early September as it struggled to address the problem. Kissinger's 'cut-off' had the desired effect, and sent shock waves through the British establishment. This event is so sensitive that even after more than thirty years have passed, the Cabinet Office still [2007] refuses to declassify further documents on the subject.
The reactions of the American intelligence agencies to Kissinger’s insistence on a cut-off varied. NSA offered a legalistic response, insisting that its relationship with GCHQ was governed by 'a binding international treaty", so it would have to investigate and see what could be done. This was a polite way of telling Kissinger that it intended to ignore him. The CIA also fudged its reply on the matter of human intelligence or reports from agents that were supplied to SIS. Certainly at a station level, some cooperation continued. The area that was hit hardest was imagery the supply of top-secret photographs from spy planes and satellites. The senior RAF officer tasked with collecting this sensitive imagery, who travelled to Washington once a week on an RAF Comet airliner, turned up and found that 'The bag just was not there.'

The Document programme had uncovered a recorded telephone conversation between Nixon and Kissinger. The President’s exasperation with the emergent EEC led him to remark: ‘We don’t have to stay, Henry’ [ie we can withdraw US forces from Europe].  Document ended with contributions from Powell and Carrington, the former very pro the UK/US special relationship, the latter now very sceptical – “ … a figment of the British imagination”. Aldrich records (page 282) Carrington’s attitude at the time:

Carrington explained that the Anglo-American partnership was perhaps a natural one, given that the two allies' 'geography and size are so different'. Although the scope and scale of Britain's residual empire was continually declining, the small remnants were nonetheless supremely valuable. Carrington continued:
Because of the number of our remaining island dependencies, we are able to provide the Americans with facilities which they would get from no one else on a comparable scale. Indeed, the very fact of our possession of these dependencies enables us to make a considerable contribution to an alliance which is important to both of us but in which otherwise our respective contributions might be very ill-balanced.
All this allowed Britain to benefit from what he called 'the massive American military technological and intelligence machine'. Carrington argued that the hidden reciprocal benefits to Britain were in three areas: nuclear weapons, research and development, and intelligence. While these things were relatively invisible compared to the requested British real estate, they were nonetheless extremely valuable. Without American intelligence, he argued, 'and particularly that derived from the NSA/GCHQ Agreement', Whitehall would be unable to assess the key military developments inside the Eastern Bloc and China, and indeed would struggle even to produce good intelligence on lesser threats in the Middle East.

Sir Rodric is surely right to propose that Britain should ‘… decide what kind of armed forces it really needs and is prepared to pay for.’ However, what if the UK concludes that it must have the capabilities provided by ‘aircraft carrier[s] and missile submarines’? Since RN submarines are equipped with either Trident or Tomahawk missiles, both from the US, and the future carriers are likely to carry the F35 Joint Strike Fighter, perhaps we should not forget what happened in 1973. The film, Fair Game, recently released on DVD, is a reminder of the US’s intolerance of anyone who wasn’t ‘with us’ in 2002. Whether Bush’s White House would have behaved like Nixon and Kissinger’s is something that only insiders can judge.