'Official Secrets' and getting the perspective right on Blair

“I think we were lied into an illegal war,” says Katharine Gun, excellently played by Keira Knightley in a film well worth watching, Official Secrets.

Back in 2003, Gun was working at Britain’s communications spying centre, GCHQ, when she was included in the distribution of an email from the States, asking for blackmail material against a number of UN Security Council delegates, to push them into backing a resolution authorising war on Iraq.

Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun about to take a life-altering step
Sadly, it didn’t stop the war

Gun, appalled that the resources of GCHQ were being used merely to provide cover for the UK and US governments, leaked the email. To keep the spoiler small, let me just say that the film includes a particularly telling exchange about her role.

“You work for the British government,” she’s told.

“No, not really,” she replies.

“No?”

“Governments change,” she explains. “I work for the British people. I gather intelligence so that the government can protect the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people.”

The film was an excellent way of spending a lockdown hour or two. It also brought back memories. Not particularly cheerful memories, accompanied as they were by a sense of disappointment and even betrayal.

Huge demos against the invasion, in London and around the world
Also couldn’t stop the war

Huge numbers, up to a million, had demonstrated in London against the war. Dubya Bush, US President, and Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, had flopped from one unconvincing source of authority for war to another. They claimed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but weapons inspectors on the ground had found none. Blair went for a United Nations resolution because British legal opinion said he needed one. When he couldn’t get that authorisation, he asked his Attorney General to provide a different opinion, which he duly did.

Dubya had clearly decided to go to war in Iraq however weak the justification, and Tony Blair had decided to go along with him, with or without authority.

They went in, toppled a deeply unsavoury dictator, but at huge cost: as well as six-figure casualties in the fighting, the war spurred the emergence of ISIS, leading in time to its blood-chilling dictatorship and many more years of war to break it.

No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ever found. And, when the legal advice offered to the government was finally published, it confirmed all our suspicions: the Attorney General had warned that invasion would be illegal and potentially lay Ministers open to prosecution as war criminals, unless a covering resolution was obtained from the UN. He only changed that view when it became clear the resolution had failed.

Nothing people could say or do would change anything. Not the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Not Katharine Gun laying her job and liberty on the line. Not even the law would restrict its behaviour: it was going to war even if the action was illegal.

It was all deeply depressing.

That’s why I find it ironic now to be labelled a ‘Blairite’, as I have been by many on the far Left of the Labour Party. Far from an enthusiast for Blair, I felt betrayed by his behaviour over Iraq. And there were other issues on which I felt his government behaved reprehensibly. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has left public sector bodies, in particular hospitals, still struggling today. Blair even repudiated one of his best initiatives, the Freedom of Information Act, when he realised it could be used to force him to reveal information he would rather hide.

No, I was never a Blairite. And today, the committed supporters of Blair are few indeed. But the difference, in assessing Blair, between those of us who refuse the label ‘Blairite’ but don’t belong to the hard Left, is that we’re not prepared to write off his governments’ achievements as though they never happened.

Among others, they include the major assault on child poverty. The minimum wage. The Human Rights Act. Devolution of powers to the nations of the UK. Freedom of Information. The Good Friday Agreement. Huge investment in the health service.

The latter is particularly topical, given that the health service is today struggling so pitifully to cope with Coronavirus. Had the investment started by Blair continued, instead of being reversed in the name of austerity, how much better-placed would the NHS have been to cope with the present pandemic?

Lives have been lost due to austerity. Thousands of lives. That’s worth bearing in mind when we assess the Blair legacy.

Without being a Blairite, I’m in no doubt that the governments he led were infinitely to be preferred to the one we have now. And, in arguing for a return to a Labour government, that’s something we need to proclaim loudly. Things would have been better without the last ten years of Tory government.

What’s more, he achieved far more than those who followed him as leader, and who lost power to the Tories or failed to win it back. He achieved far more than Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn. Whether their policies were good or bad, they were unable to enact any of them.

You can only do any good at all if you get into power. Which Blair powerfully demonstrated. And you don’t have to be a Blairite to understand that. 

I reject that label. But I also refuse to belittle the good he did among the harm.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking for a good way to spend a lockdown evening, you could do a lot worse than watch Official Secrets.

Films: aren't they for enjoyment?

What I don’t like about most film reviewers is that they seem to emphasise originality above all other qualities. This means that they tend to value only those shows that have broken with tradition by doing something utterly different, like abandon plot, character or coherence. Sadly, in my view that means they end up doing something tediously the same: bore me to tears.

I cling to the outdated and banal notion that the cinema ought to be fun.

At the moment there seems to be a bit of fixation in Hollywood with to biopics about unusual and outstanding scientists.

That’s produced two highly entertaining films marked by some fine performances. I find Alan Turing exceptionally interesting. My admiration isn’t limited to his role in breaking the Germans’ Enigma code in World War 2, but is based at least as much on the thinking that prepared him for that work, and which he took further through it, on what has come to be known as the “Turing Machine.” That theoretical model of a fully automated, mechanical process underlies all modern computing.

And then there’s the bitter tragedy of his life. Hounded to his death by the police in a Britain that still had laws against homosexuality, to which it sacrificed one of its most original thinkers.

Turing with the boys of Hut 8.
One of whom happened to be a woman

A film has to limit its scope, and the biopic of Turing, The Imitation Game, focuses on the battle against Enigma and on the persecution of the homosexual, and does both things well. That produces a fine and highly watchable film, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the leading role, well supported by Keira Knightley. Its narrow focus does mean, on the other hand, that a great deal about this unusual man is left. Curiously, though, that very fact did spur me to tackle the biography, by Andrew Hodges, on which the film is based. Alan Turing: the Enigma gives a far more complete picture (well, yes, it’s a long book). It also explains where the phrase “the imitation game” comes from: Hodges uses it to describe Turing’s striving in the 1930s to appear to be someone he wasn’t.

The Theory of Everything does something slightly odd in the genre, by telling the story of a living scientist, in this instance Stephen Hawking. The performance of Eddie Redmayne in the lead role is outstanding; he contorts his face to try to look like someone suffering from Motor Neurone Disease to the point where at times I wondered how he could keep acting. And at other times whether I was really looking at Hawking.

Stephen and Jane.
In the short time before the MND struck

The film is based on the autobiography of Jane Hawking (brought to life by Felicity Jones), and tells the story of their life together from falling in love while Hawking was a postgraduate, to their divorce but continuing affection. It’s entertaining and well told. A good way to spend a couple of hours.

The French playwright Jean Giraudoux called one of his plays Amphytrion 38, on the grounds that he could count 37 previous treatments of the Greek myth of Amphytrion. On that basis, Ex Machina could probably be referred to as Pygmalion 99, though 99 may be a low estimate.

You know the story: a man (yes, it’s always a man), somehow fashions a woman (and, yes, she’s never particularly hard on the eyes). Then he falls in love with her and finds that she doesn’t entirely reciprocate his feelings, if she reciprocates them at all.

Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina
making it clear you play at being a god at  your own peril

Ex Machina introduces some good twists and turns into that basic structure, and moves it into contemporary times – we’re talking Artificial Intelligence, curiously a notion dear to Alan Turning – rather than a statue into which a god breathes life. It also has an ingenious ending, which it approaches by sustained creepiness throughout, and all in a glorious setting.

And then finally there’s the film which even I have to admit is probably pretty rubbish, but which I enjoyed all the same. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I like sports films (as I like thrillers and court room dramas – all I have to see is police milling around with forensics experts in white suits, or lawyers going at each other hammer and tongs, to want to see more). 

Now most sports films follow one tried and tested formula: team doing appalling badly after suicide of star player/gaoling of manager/ghastly accident killing half the players (delete as applicable); new dynamic manager/fading star breaking from alcoholism/young player ignored by agents due to poor physique (delete as applicable) joins and the victories start to pile up; after a suspense-laden semi-final won in the last gasp of match time, the team qualifies for the final of the prestigious knock-out championship; in that final, against the favoured team of the year, it either wins in a nail-bitingly close encounter despite attempts to cheat by the opposing side, or is beaten in a nail-bitingly close encounter from which it emerges head held high and with honour resplendent.

Kevin Costner being thoughtful in Draft Day,
a film that requires little thought

Draft Day is nothing like that. First of all, it takes place within the space of less than a single day, thus preserving the classical unity of time (which, as I’ve said before, I rather like). If, like me, you know nothing about the process by which American football teams draft players from the College game, the film will teach you some quite intriguing lessons: it’s redolent of a slave market, which considering most of the players are black, is particularly poignant. I might add that I had a small and politically entirely incorrect smile when one black player announced “I’m going to be a Brown” (he was joining the Cleveland Browns), but I suspect that wasn’t an intentional joke.

What gives the film its entertainment value is the negotiating process in which the leading character, played by Kevin Costner, trades with other team managers the right to make different picks among the players on offer, in order to maximise what he sees as the benefit for his own club.

It’s a decidedly second – well, probably tenth – rate film, but I enjoyed it.

In memory of a woman who taught us about ourselves

It’s easy to be critical of Freud and psychoanalysis, often because it deserves it. Having watched people spend a fortune on years of analysis and emerge neither better or worse off for it, except financially, it sometimes seems little more than an inspired way of putting money in analysts’ pockets. 

In that context, it’s perhaps ironic that one of the examples Freud himself gives of the working of the subconscious, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, is that while he often loses bills, he never loses cheques. Rather sets the tone for the therapeutic profession he launched.

That being said, and whatever the shortcomings of the therapy, in every way other than the financial, Freud’s insights into the workings of the mind are invaluable.

Take another example of the subconscious, from the same book. Freud talks about crossing the whole of Vienna on foot and only realising after getting home that he has crossed a great many busy streets and must have stopped at the edge of each to check when it would be safe to cross, but can remember none of it. That’s an illustration that speaks to me: I’ve done the same, admittedly in London rather than in Vienna, and have piloted myself around many obstacles with no conscious thought while I was doing it and therefore no memory afterwards of having done it. And it’s worked a dream, if it's OK to use that word in this context.

The subconscious does habitual things well, like changing gear: easy when you don’t think about it, likely to go wrong if you do.

That’s why the trick in sport is to internalise technique: if you have to think about how you’re using your hands or your feet, you’re likely to get it wrong; when the subconscious handles it for you things go a lot better; so the advice ‘concentrate’, while useful for a beginner, is exactly the opposite of what you should do when you get proficient.

As well as the subconscious, Freud’s other great theoretical construct was the sex drive. Humanity’s hunger to create is never stronger than in the urge to procreate. Sexuality is wrapped up with life itself, which it helps create, in that complex of forces Freud summed up as ‘Eros’, the Greek deity of love.

And yet that principle is not enough. Because in the human psyche, there is an urge to destruction alongside the tendency to create. At first Freud hadn’t allowed for this second principle, now summed up as ‘Thanatos’, the daemon in Greek mythology personifying death.

Even more powerful is the notion that both are intricately linked. The sexual act, though fundamentally creative, also involves destruction: the self is lost, destroyed, as ‘I’ dissolves into ‘we’. Anyone uncertain of the intimate links between sex and self-destruction need only ask Bill Clinton. Or for a more jaundiced and less self-justifying response, perhaps Hillary.

The death principle added a new dimension to psychoanalysis, which saw the dissolution of as the basis for the emergence of something new: that dissociation allows a new becoming and therefore provides a mechanism for development.

And who came up with this powerful and enriching insight? Not Freud himself but a nearly forgotten pioneer of analysis, nearly forgotten perhaps precisely because she was a woman in a world dominated by men: Sabina Spielrein.

Sabina Spielrein:
added the destructive principle to Freud’s theories

It’s obviously for her insights in psychoanalysis that she most deserves to be remembered, but nearly as striking is the tragedy of her life itself. A Russian Jew, her path through psychiatry started as a patient, when she was admitted to the care Carl Jung in Zurich. Jung, who seems to have had a thoroughly Clintonian view of professional practice, had an affair with her but that didn’t prevent her recovering her mental health and then graduating from the University of Zurich as a psychiatrist in her own right, with a thesis in which she first stated her death principle.

In 1924, she moved back to Russia with her husband and two daughters. She set up a child psychoanalysis clinic in her native Rostov-on-Don and kept it going clandestinely after psychoanalysis was banned in the Soviet Union.

In the 1930s, her brothers and her husband were murdered in Stalin’s purges. Having first suffered in this way at the hands of the Communists, she then fell victim to the Nazis in 1942 when she and her daughters were shot by German occupying forces ridding Rostov of Jews.

After her death, her work sank into obscurity despite its significance. There have been attempts to rehabilitate her reputation, most recently in the  film A Dangerous Method covering the time she spent in Zurich. Her role is played, rather well, by Keira Knightley who like Spielrein herself deserves to be taken more seriously in her profession than she often is. It’s facile to write her off as just a pretty face, just because she has a pretty face.

Keira Knightley: like Spielrein herself deserves a better press

It was on 12 August 1942, 80 years ago today, that Sabina Spielrein died at the hands of a Nazi Einsatzkommando. Analysis has its faults, but even so understanding the psyche has to be an essential condition for improving the therapy of the mind. So today has to be a good occasion to celebrate the contribution of another woman to healthcare, one that is different but just as significant as those of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole or Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.

If that does a little towards restoring her reputation, so much the better. After all, how much more can anyone do than to help us understand ourselves?