SHARED OPINION

Blair vs. Brown an epic feud that Homer would have been proud of

FRANK JOHNSON

The Observer's serialisation of Mr Andrew Rawnsley's new book about the government tells how the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have not got on. We knew that already. But that was the point. That we knew it already was why we read on. The first audience for Homer or the Greek dramatists also knew the plots already. What mattered was the way they told them. The Observer's version of the old Blair–Brown epic was well told. The tale will be told time and again in many forms: books, columns, on Radio Four, many times on television, probably in the end as a play.

The hates, loves, hopes and fears of our famous politicians are to us what those of the gods were to the ancients. We have to make do with the former because we do not live in a heroic age. We, the audience, long ago decided what the basic material should be. It is the reworking of that material — in the form of memoirs, television documen- taries and Sunday serialisations — that we judge. We do not much like it if the story is changed radically. None of us would persist with a version which has Mr Brown and Mr Blair getting on perfectly well. Racine was able to rework the Greek material as late as the 17th century, Cocteau even later. But a new character may be added here, a new instance there, provided they do not alter the plot we know and love. Thus Mr Rawns- ley, in his reworking of the ancient Blair– Brown narrative, has a marvellous new scene: the telephoning of Mr Charlie Whe- lan in the Red Lion by the Prime Minister.

Mr Whelan is Mr Brown's press officer. He and Mr Brown are up to something. The details need not concern us this late in the day. They are irrelevant to myth's broad sweep, which is that Mr Blair disapproves of Mr Brown, whatever he is up to, and vice versa. Whatever it is Mr Brown and Mr Whelan have been up to — and it is some- thing to do with government policy on the euro — it has surfaced in the first edition of the Times. Mr Mandelson, a central charac- ter in all of our civilisation's myths, alerts the Prime Minister by telephone. Mr Blair stalks his palace looking for his henchman Mr Alastair Campbell, another mythical archetype. He cannot find him. Has Mr Whelan slit Mr Campbell's throat? We are not told. Mr Blair therefore personally tele- phones Mr Whelan. He reaches him in the Red Lion, a mythical location hard by the Labour party's old Smith Square headquar- ters and therefore a place associated with Old Labour, as is Mr Whelan. Mr Blair tells Mr Whelan that the story is 'too hard'. Mr Whelan should 'row back'. Mr Whelan, busy confirming the story to various politi- cal reporters, replies that it is 'too late' to do so because the story is `up and running'.

What may be of interest to audiences here is the willingness of a prime minister personally to telephone Hades, and the somewhat brusque way in which Mr Whe- lan receives him. But my own eventual reworking of the Blair–Browniad will slight- ly inflate this scene, using. Mr Rawnsley rather in the way that Shakespeare used Holinshed. Like the porter in Macbeth, the scene will offer the audience respite among the murders, insanity and horror.

Mr Blair, who presumably reached Mr Whelan on the latter's mobile: 'Tony here.' Mr Whelan: 'Tony who?'

The Prime Minister: 'Tony Blair.'

Mr Whelan: 'I am not at the Treasury now. I'm in the Red Lion. I thought I told you not to phone me when I'm busy.'

Mr Blair: 'Yes, I know. I'm very sorry but this is an emergency. I couldn't find Alastair. He didn't ring me about this Times story.'

Mr Whelan: 'I should be so lucky.'

Mr Whelan's mobile begins to crackle, as mobiles have a habit of doing.

Mr Blair: 'This line is breaking up.'

Mr Whelan: 'The line on the euro, you mean? Tell me something new.'

Their conversation ends by both agreeing to remain confused.

Perhaps it did not happen like that. That will not matter.

At the Royal National's new Hamlet, with Mr Russell Beale the other evening, the thought occurs; something is missing. That is, the politics. Whatever else Hamlet is about, it can be argued that it is also about politics. Some critics and commenta- tors agree, but only up to a point. True, we hear of Elsinore's foreign policy concerning Norway. Denmark is also affected by Nor- way's policy concerning Poland. The highly political-seeming Norwegian king, Fortin- bras, takes over Denmark at the end when almost the entire cast is dead. But all this is only touched on, it is said. It is not essential to the play which, for modern audiences, or at least for modem directors, is about Hamlet the private, not public, figure. So at the National we did not see Fortinbras seek Danish permission to cross towards Poland. He did not appear at the end. He did not appear at all.

But it is possible that, to an Elizabethan or Jacobean audience, politics in Hamlet did not have to be dwelt on because it was obvi- ous that the play was political. They knew much about kingly usurpers, or great ones who believed that they should have the throne, or that they have been usurped. Thus the text constantly suggests that Ham- let believes Claudius to have usurped a throne which is rightly his. We remember Hamlet telling Horatio that Claudius 'hath killed my king, and whored my mother'. But the next line is less often noticed: 'Popped in between th'election and my hopes' — 'elec- tion' here meaning choice, or appointment, or ratification of the king by the nobility, as technically then happened in England and Scotland. Earlier in the play Hamlet, when Rosencrantz asks him 'your cause of distem- per', blurts it out as the ambitious sometimes do: 'Sir, I lack advancement.'

It could plausibly be claimed that the sec- ond scene of the play — after the first on the battlements — consists of a privy council meeting. A modern-dress production would be justified in depicting it as a Cabinet meet- ing, with Civil Service minute-takers, and so on. Much official business is transacted, including the sending of a diplomatic mis- sion to Norway. Almost Hamlet's last words in the entire play — that is, when Fortin- bras's arrival is not cut — are political. Remember: though he has only minutes to live, he is by now king. Claudius, now dead, had designated him such. 'I do prophesy,' says Hamlet, `th'election lights on Fortin- bras. He has my dying voice.'

It seems odd, when so many theatre directors are 'political', that nowadays they leave the politics out of Hamlet. Perhaps it is because most are left-wing, and Hamlet's politics are neither left nor right, though that should not test the average theatre director's ability to make them left.