Tony Blair’s terrible decision inspired my tale of stupidity in the corridors of power – with a howl of frustration among the one-liners, says film and TV writer Armando Iannucci
Tony Blair’s terrible decision inspired my tale of stupidity in the corridors of power – with a howl of frustration among the one-linershortly before George W Bush and Tony Blair launched their war, the Arab League issued a statement declaring that invading Iraq would “”. Of all the pieces of intelligence that the CIA and British agents were gathering at the time, this turned out to be the only accurate one.
At the time, I was numb with confusion and horror that the British democratic system could allow a prime minister, fixated on a threat people were telling him wasn’t there, to get his party and his opponents to back a war with no purpose, no target, no endgame and no rationale. We all told Blair at the time it wasn’t going to end well. Now here we are, 20 years later, and only half right: it did go as badly as predicted, but it hasn’t really ended.
How could this happen? My way of processing it all, and to try and attempt some sort of answer to that question, was to make. I wanted to know what exactly goes on behind those closed doors in Downing St and Whitehall ministries. How do some massively stupid decisions get made? The show wasn’t about Iraq: I wanted to cover the groupthink and moments of dysfunction that impact on government every day. I wanted to explain how the system gets us into those positions.
It feels real, an appeal to the heart, an offer of vulnerability, but that phrase “I only know what I believe” is a false friend: it sounds casual but actually subverts the tradition of empirical inquiry we’ve been successfully using since Aristotle. Normally, if we have a hunch, we test it. If we’re looking for an explanation, we eliminate every available solution or possibility until we find the right one. On a day-to-day basis, to survive, we first believe what we know.
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