The Ministry Of Truth

There are rare occasions on which you just have to stand back and applaud.

Armando Iannucci has today provided one such moment.

Do you ever spend a lot of time composing angry emails in your head? I mean the sort of ones you feel like writing after you’ve just gone into a bank and said, ‘I’d like to take five pounds of my money out, please’, and the staff member says you can’t because the bank’s new policy is only to give money to customers who’ve a counter-signature from their next-of-kin with an accompanying list of items you’re going to buy with the money, provided they’re of no practical value and can dissolve in water; plus, it’s a requirement of the bank that anyone asking for money has to agree in advance to a small piece of throat-surgery involving the insertion of a microchip near your oesophagus that allows the bank-teller to alter the pitch of your voice remotely so that on occasions you can unexpectedly sound like Beth Orton; and now if you turn to that monitor up there behind you, you can see footage shot yesterday of the assistant manager hosting a children’s birthday party on a makeshift rug made from your money while serving champagne to your next of kin?

I mean the sort of letter you write after that; one full of your most venomous threats brilliantly articulating all the shades of your fury, one that will go down as the finest document in protest literature.

Well, that’s how I’ve been feeling ever since Tony Blair mouthed off about how ‘feral’ the media had become in its relentless pursuit of opinion over fact. Incensed, I was; livid; my head-veins positively whip-lashed with rage.

All week I’ve been working out in my head a poisonous reply to post here; the ultimate summing up of Blair’s maggot-headed slipshoddiness with the truth, something about how only a man with the soul of a clown-fish could possibly have a go at the press for their ‘confusion of news and commentary’ and berate them for not pushing facts over opinion while at the same time telling his party that ‘judgments aren’t the same as facts: I only know what I believe’, which, if you analyse it, is him putting opinion over reality and thus challenging 2,500 years of Western epistemology; oh yes, I was working up to some blindingly furious berating of him for surrounding himself with mimsy little yes-horns like Ruth Kelly who bleat opinions about how immigrants should learn English, but who do so by saying, and I quote, ‘we can recognise the richness that diversity brings, and try to not only recognise people’s identities but then create frameworks in which those people come together’, which sounds as far away from the English language as Saturn; I was steadily brewing up a grand signing-off in which I shouted: ‘He just wants facts, does he?’

Well here’s a fact: he bombed kids without checking and everyone hates him, the squawking whoopee cushion – but then I realised I really couldn’t be bothered.

He goes in two weeks’ time. The summer’s coming, cold beers can be taken outside in the evening, strawberries now look like they mean it. I’m going to forget about him, right now. So here, now, what you’re reading is the last ever time I mention him, or get worked up about any of the ill-thought-through drizzles of eye-catching, brain-gouging ideas he has.

For the next two weeks, I plan to ignore him, quite actively and aggressively. He’s gone. This, this here, is the last time I type Tony Blair.

Aaaaaaaaah, that tastes soooo good! Now I’m off to get rat-knackeringly drunk.