Of all the animals of prey, man is the only sociable one.
Every one of us preys upon his neighbour, and yet we herd together.
The Beggar's Opera: John Gay

Tuesday 14 April 2009

Iannuci the prophet


Life has been particularly busy imitating Art this week, as the doings of the McBride/Draper menagerie come to light - 'they looked from pig to man, and from man to pig again....but already it was impossible to say which was which' - and this is set to continue with the imminent release of Armando Iannuci's 'In the Loop'.

Iannuci, whose prescient e-mail storyline from 'The Thick of It' has become compulsory - and compulsive - YouTube viewing this week, said on the Today programme that the current political furore is the result of a culture of the end justifying the means that has sprung up over the past ten to fifteen years.

He obviously moved in more scrupulous circles than I did during the 80's if he thinks it's that recent (see Confessions of a Former Labour Acolyte vol 1 and vol 2), since some of the embryonic NuLab advisors were even then justifying some very dubious means like nobody's business. It's just taken them 25 years to reach the top of a very greasy pole (or to float up to the surface, if you prefer).

When 'In the Loop' appears and the inevitable comparisons are drawn with our glorious leaders, I hope Iannuci comes up with a disclaimer as good as Heinrich Boll's ('The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum'); any resemblance between a real newspaper and the obscene, muck-raking gutter publication he describes in his book, he says, is 'neither deliberate nor accidental, but simply unavoidable.'

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