Devil May Blair

Those of us born around the end of the 80s and the start of the 90s have a lot to chew over. Too young to remember a time before Blair but old enough to recall a precious year or two before Bush fucked the world – sorry, “took office” – we not only grew up in an era where wars were fought against nouns, at the end of it all we were garroted by a bunch of banksters.

You might think that I’m being sensationalist by saying Bush “fucked the world”. That’s nothing. In A Walk On Part: The Fall of New Labour, he gets called, “a morally and intellectually deficient serial killer”, and that’s before he fucked the world – dammit, I really must start spelling “took office” properly…

A Walk On Part is the stage-adaptation of ex-Labour MP Chris Mullin’s political diaries. It follows his time as a minor player in the New Labour circus, from his re-election to Sunderland South in 1997, up to resigning his seat before the 2010 “bigoted woman” General Election. It is a comic treat, serving up witty one-liners, sweetly sharp satire, and delicious impersonations of the full array of New Labour buffoons – inevitably Gordon Brown’s lower jaw conjures the biggest laughs.

(Bush) gets called ‘a morally and intellectually deficient serial killer’

Despite the high-minded content that it deals with, it is a very human play. John Hodgkinson does a fantastic job delivering a portrait of Chris Mullin: a politician who is sensitive, principled, ambitious, and ultimately frustrated by his inability to effect real change. Ultimately Chris Mullin is about as likeable a politician as one could encounter (he was ridiculed during the expenses scandal because, although being one of the lowest claimaints, he claimed back money for a TV license – for a black & white screen TV…) But at its core, for me at least, the play forces us to remember how thoroughly rotten a world you and I ‘89ers’ grew up in (someone’s got to come up with a name; why not me?) I laughed heartily at the jokes – Geoff Hoon talking about “astonishingly accurate bombing” is delightfully skewered – but it was a sad laugh. The kind of laugh that only arises when there’s naught to do but laugh, for to take it seriously would make you cry in despair.

I could write all day; to properly review this play would be to consider the whole morally pathetic 13 years of New Labour government. But that would probably kill me and bore you. The play is intelligent and it is funny; it’s human and it’s emotional; it’s almost certainly a great evening out with a friend. All of this means that you can truly consider what it is saying without being distracted by awful acting or terrible writing.

The play is intelligent and funny; it’s human and it’s emotional; it’s almost certainly a great evening out with a friend

The only gripe that I would have with A Walk on Part lies with its treatment of Tony Blair. Hywel Morgan captures his mannerisms and style masterfully. He conveys Blair’s over-earnest faux-sincerity with great skill. But Blair is never ridiculed directly; he’s a boyish rogue, a figure that we are never invited to take seriously. Worse still, at the very end, Chris Mullin concludes that Blair was only ever led astray by Bush, that naiveté was his only crime. (For Christ’s sake, the Tories seem to get blamed for Iraq more than Blair.) A Walk on Part is certainly a hilarious and smart indictment of our politics and, of course, New Labour. But it seems to conclude that it was not Blair’s fault; that none of the lying, the sleaze and the murder carried out in our name was Blair’s fault; and that is simply not good enough.

A Walk on Part: The Fall of New Labour continues at the Soho Theatre until December 10