FATHER FRANK’S RANTS -The Ghost

Rant Number 399 9 June 2010

Imagine a newsflash: Tony Blair indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. To escape being clapped into irons and dragged to The Hague, the ex-PM flees to the US. On the way, an avenger shoots him dead.

Far-fetched? Yet, it is what Robert Harries’ political thriller, The Ghost, provocatively proposes – well, sort of.

The Ghost is about a skeleton in the cupboard. A big one. The famous ‘special relationship’ between two sisters - the ex-Anglo-Saxon nations, Britain and America. Was one of my readings last week, while carousing in ‘The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave’. Harries is a master of the craft & his book a page turner. Along with the cool film version directed by scallywag rapist Roman Polanski, it stimulated the priest’s old grey cells, I tell you.

The Ghost conjures up the all-too-earthly, flesh and blood figure of Tony Blair. Here transmogrified as ex-Prime Minister Adam Lang. A smooth but shallow performer, indicted for war crimes incurred in the CIA-run rendition programme. Justice haunts Lang but even more does his past. A dark secret, unknown to the nation he led into war, yet the key clue to Lang the statesman. As Washington’s staunchest mate. A shocking truth, cryptographically concealed in the lines of the autobiography his ghost writer has produced. You see, since his Cambridge University Lang was...a Yankee agent? Not as simple as that. Actually, Lang the politician was controlled throughout by his wife. Yes, his clever, politically bright better half. As it happens, she, not her husband, is the one whom the CIA recruited as a mole. And she, the power behind the throne, is the one who persuaded Lang into being a pro-American stooge. Special relationship indeed!

In The Ghost spectres abound. First, that of the hack protagonist’s previous ghost writer. ‘Suicided’ by a predictable agency because of the secret he had stumbled upon. Second, there is the hero himself, played wimpishly by Euan McGregor. He too is a ghostly Mensch ohne Eigenschaften – a pale cipher of a man sans name, sans partner, sans parents, sans friends, sans future. And then there are the various, half-glimpsed spooks. The shadowy agents and assassins who are out to stop the hapless ghost writer from revealing the actual truth. Polanski’s elegant, slow camerawork renders this sense of pervasive unreality magically. On the lonely, melancholy sands of a wintry and windswept Martha’s Vineyard – actually the Baltic Sea – you intuit the poor writer is already predestined for oblivion. He’ll soon possess even less reality than the ghost he once was.

‘For the first time in my life I was confronted with the true meaning of the word predestination’ says the hero. Predestination is the right word. One of the most fascinating scenes in the film is that in which a sat-nav virtually takes over the action, so to speak, inexorably transporting McGregor towards his appointed fate. An apposite metaphor. Now you guess what it is like being driven along by God’s finger.

Nonetheless, Harries is a bit of a creep. He knows which side his bread is buttered. Nowhere in the book is there a reference to Zionism or Islam and he sucks up to the PC brigade unashamedly. Nor do Blair’s truly sinister spin doctors, Mandelson and Campbell, get even a walk-on part. Also, Adam Lang, unlike Phoney Tony, does not ‘do’ God. Is it because Harries believes religion isn’t sexy enough? More likely, the writer did not want to press the analogy between fiction and life too closely. ‘Cheeky f..k!’, Blair is supposed to have called him. Quite.

Spy stories obsess the Brits. Something about the boy scout

mentality lurking in the English public school psyche. Or maybe a lingering imperial nostalgia. The Great Game and all that. Anyway, this plot just reverses familiar, true history. In the 20’s the KGB enlisted some public school toffs at Cambridge. Notorious fellows like comrades Philby, Burgess, Blunt and Maclean. They went on to infiltrate British Intelligence, thereby causing the loss of many lives. Blunt even became Curator of the Queen’s Pictures. Rumours long circulated about some top Labour politicians, like PM Harold Wilson. If so, the Russians were quite smart, you must admit.

Many will warm to the possibility that The Ghost plot could

be true. Why? I suspect because it would let their guilty

conscience off. The Iraqi war’s moral burden would shift unto the shoulders of one single individual, the implausibly CIA & wife-remote controlled PM. But in reality the British Parliament voted overwhelmingly for the war, the cabinet backed Phoney Tony and much of the country went along with the adventure. Britain is a democracy, hence the guilt must be shared. Blaming the leader alone just won’t do. We are all – all those of us who do not actively opposed the madness, that is - complicit in the murder & mayhem caused by the unjustified, illegal war. Because sins of omission are at times just as grave as those of commission.

However, there is the tricky matter of the implied, dubious moral equation – spying for the Soviet Union yesterday = spying for the US today. Equally wrong? Abominate Bush as much as you like, think of him as the Devil incarnate, to liken him to Joe Stalin would be a wee bit over the top. Anti-Americanism is fashionable in some quarters, with the Left, especially, but, dear comrades, the priest, a reformed Marxist-Leninist, must speak the truth. Twice in the last century America has saved your precious ass, friends. Had it not been for the Yanks, today you would all be speaking German. In itself not a bad thing, perhaps. Wasn’t Old English a straight Germanic language? Certainly more pure than the mongrelised lingo that passes for English today. Still, unpopular fact though it may be, the Lefties better never forget Uncle Sam is largely the reason they exist at all.

It is singular a clever plot like The Ghost ultimately rests on the oldest cliché of all. Ultimately, it is all about a woman, the PM’s wife. Cherchez la femme. Well, what’s new?

In the movie’s final shot, McGregor dies run over by a car. Accident? Just remember what the Queen allegedly told Princess Diana’s Butler: ‘Dear Paul, there are powers of which we know nothing.’

Revd Frank Julian Gelli