The bits of The Deal, Channel 4's drama about the infamous Blair/Brown pact, that I saw were tolerable to watch only through my fingers. The problem is the Tony Blair character. Over the past few years, after 9/11 and wars all over the place, the Prime Minister has changed. Gone are the doe eyes of the early Nineties, so "open to new ideas". Gone are the snaggle-toothed, boyish smile, the youthful haircuts. He's changed, certainly in the eyes of the public and the satirists.
The Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell and the teams behind Rory Bremner and the excellent Dead Ringers have a lot to answer for in our revised vision of the PM. Who can watch Blair give a speech now without hearing an imaginary voice-over saying "earnest brow, trust-me hand gesture, honest-Tony eyeliner"? Playing such a well-parodied character must be a tough challenge. Actors who face the glory and the horror of taking on Hamlet for the first time often dread saying the line "To be, or not to be" because we've all heard it so many times. Changing the inflection and emphasis that we expect to hear (from memories of Olivier, perhaps) can make an audience recoil. "That's not how it should be said," we think automatically. And so the challenge of playing Blair and of putting words into his mouth must have been almost as tough.
Unfortunately, I have to say that the actor and the writer both got him wrong: the scheming, battle-hardened, slightly slimy Blair we see from time to time in The Deal didn't fully come into being until around 1998. The writers have grafted characteristics of Blair circa 2003 on to his Bambi-esque pre-power self, creating a monstrous hybrid Blair: an uncomfortable mishmash of decades, a bit like Joan Collins.
I remember one of the now notorious "Britpop" parties in 1997, watching the PM quietly enter the room. I was chatting to Charles Dance who, I remember thinking, really seemed to belong on a veranda back in the days of the Raj. Meanwhile, eyes tried not to stare at Tony and failed. The moment had that surreal energy about it - a superstar has entered the room, but you want to act cool. No one wanted to be the first to rush over and gush: "So glad to meet you. We think you're great."
Instead, the new PM sipped his wine and brushed the floor with his foot. He looked shy. Far from being a slimy operator confident of bending others to his will, he seemed stunned by the fame and glamour around him. For several minutes, he stood in an empty circle. Then it was Dance, I think, who got up the courage to go and shake his hand. At which point, the thankful Tony broke into a grateful smile and started to relax. Had this scene appeared in The Deal, the PM would have stalked in, surveyed his guests with barely disguised loathing and made a scathing comment to a lackey about Eddie Izzard's dress sense. It is just not an honest portrayal of the man at that time.
Who plays you and how you come across are common subjects of discussion among political egos in Downing Street. Yes, it really is true that for the first three seasons of The West Wing, the corridors of power buzzed over the fictional decisions made by Martin Sheen and the cast. At the Labour Party conference last year, a friend said that "had they been making a UK version", he would have been the Rob Lowe character.
Meanwhile, even at the New Statesman, a fellow columnist is fretting about his place in history following The Deal. Charlie Whelan says he's worried "about the amount of swearing [his] character does". The actor playing him allegedly asked for more cursing to make the script convincing. I say: Be happy, Charlie - your screen character is no more than 11 stone, and makes you sound like a tough hood from a Guy Ritchie movie.
