The BBC announced last week that record numbers use its online platform BBC Sounds, with more than four million listeners a week now accessing it for podcasts, music mixes and on demand. (That’s compared to 33.11 million live broadcasts.) I use it a lot, and I’m glad I was absent to catch up with Red Lines, a special Radio 4 drama about Prime Minister David Cameron’s failed efforts to bring the Syrian regime to accuse his own people of using chemical weapons in 2013
On paper, it sounded tempting, with Toby Stevens as Cameron and master impressionist John Culshaw as Ed Miliband, William Hague and George Osborne. Even more intriguing is that The Red Lines was co-authored by historian Sir Anthony Seldon (Cameron’s biographer) and Sir Craig Oliver (who was Cameron’s communications director in ’10). But all hopes that this real blue inner couple could be the new Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn (with the notorious fame of Yes Minister) were quickly dashed.
Because even though he was having fun enough, it was never clear what they hoped to accomplish with him. What began as a wet satire for the Prime Minister’s holiday, interrupted by his conscience (Samantha Cameron, reduced to whining “but you said you would take time for the children”) ended with a clattering exercise in political apology.
Even stranger was how his attempt to portray Cameron as a man of principles, removed from the confusion of politics and the insidious opportunism of Labor’s Ed Miliband, had the opposite effect, portraying him as a politically light man, weak, unable to persuade even his own cabinet. to be followed by a pawn who could not see him being pushed across the global chessboard by Vladimir Putin. Intentionally or not, William Hague (brilliantly portrayed by Culshaw) was the only character who seemed to have any idea of statesmanship.
Even the drama’s “bigger” claim that the failure to provide a meaningful response to such a clear violation of the red lines set by the West encouraged Putin to invade Crimea six months later, leading directly to his invasion of Crimea. Ukraine this February seems, to put it mildly, an oversimplification.
It seems that the gaze of the inner man does not always offer the clearest perspective.
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