The Bush and Blair revival show: first reviews
Simon Hoggart: Dead fish day
Our prime minister looked pretty rough. But he was James Bond at the poker tables compared with the president. At the best of times - and these are not the best of times - Bush finds it hard to find the right words, so he thrashes about in the hope that some will pop into his head, like wasps into a jam jar. (At one point he called the sectarian attacks in Iraq “unsettling”. It’s a word, I suppose.)
Matthew Norman: Together they rode off into the sunset…
As they walked out together to face the press, smiling with a sort of studied sombre courage, the closing scene that came to mind was the one in which Butch turns to Sundance and says, with the sort of inspired gallows humour we can only hope they reprised in the Oval Office yesterday: “For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”
Posted on December 8th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
| See also • Links and stuff between May 23rd and May 24th • Walls come tumbling down • The enviable life of Jack Straw |
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Filed under Iraq, T.W.A.T., UK politics, US Politics |
Matthew Norman’s a marvel isn’t he?
This is a peach:
Perhaps even at this late stage they dredged up some gallows humour, with a heavily knowing “Yo” from Mr Bush and a wearisomely ironic “yo” in response from Mr Blair.
Blairwatch has Bush saying in his defence: “I see families who die.”
Where to start with the meanings of that one…let me count the ways…
Yeah, but, but, but. Hoggart, who (like David Miliband) serves largely to remind one of how great a figure his father was, is as much a courtier as anybody else. He writes an occasionally amusing parliamentary review, albeit always basd on largely the same conceit - if, for instance, they’re disucssing nuclear power, all the various speakers will be described as if they were diffferent sorts of power station and so on. But he’s quite happy to put the boot in if anybody outside the Westminster village has anything disruptive to say (witness his cheerleading for Rob Liddle’s unscrupulous attacks on Tony Benn, for instance).
Which is the trouble with these people: they can all tell what a liar Blair is, they probably despise the man, but they’re a part of what he’s a part of and they’re quite aware of that. Doesn’t mean they’re not occasionally funny or perceptive (Andrew Rawnsley would be another one) but at the end of the day they’re court jesters, really.
“Bush … thrashes around …” He used to have advisers of sorts.