A Bob Each Way

with Bob Ellis

Sincerity vs sanity

Tony Blair has 'bottomless wells of sincerity', some commentators have said, that he draws on wonderfully when he tells his next big lie. It's no longer a lie to him because the sincerity is so sincere. And he looks in the mirror and lo, he truly believes.

His Iraq War allies Bush and Howard have similar Method Actors' ways of saying and also believing the unbelievable. It's partly why they still wield power in their respective amazed and baffled countries. Their simulacra of true belief (in WMDs that were never used, in Saddam's evil, in the magic effect of taking his face off the banknotes) has hypnotised their people into a kind of weary shrug that lets them get on with their self-delusion.

It's no small gift. Bush, whose image (and self-image) is somewhere between Henry Fonda's and Jimmy Stewart's Mr Smith and Gary Cooper's undaunted sheriff in High Noon, has used it to empty America's vaults of a trillion dollars it could ill-afford and spent it lavishly on his bankrupt Texas friends and the random slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent foreigners, and no-one can work out how to stop him because he seems so sincere.

And Howard, who must be the best actor this country's politics has ever produced (compare the Wile E. Coyote transparency of Peter Costello, the bright big smiles and double-takes of Tony Abbott, the Eric Morecambe sweaty brow of Peter Reith) goes hypnotically on and on.

We know he's lying, and his every sentence is, or contains, or telegraphs a lie. We know it's a kind of sickness in him – he'd lie about the whether if you asked him what it was like, but he does it so well. Like Blair he truly believes whatever last words just escaped from his mouth: it's not safe to go to Bali but I'm going there; terrorist cells are forming in Australia but don't worry, be relaxed and comfortable, we'll punish those evildoers after they kill you; terrorists didn't target Australians in Bali and if they did it's because we're so happy, they had no other reason to do it, they're just evil, that's all, and they hate our happy way of life. We have a seven billion dollar surplus but none of it can go to the universities, we can't afford it. And so on.

It would take an Olivier or a Barrymore or an Adolf in full detumescence to propel this nonsense over the footlights, and Howard I fear is in the league. He'd win any poll of the worst Prime Minister we've ever had but there he is, prattling away, telling nightly whoppers, more or less unpunished, respected for it somehow. He lives in a world of his own, and it seems wrong to interrupt him.

Sir Ralph Richardson called acting 'dreaming to order' and this may, just may, have a component of what we call Leadership, or The Vision Thing. Blair had a dream in which he and Bush sorted out the heathen, bringing democracy everywhere. Bush had a dream of extending, via the Presidency, his old mates' oil business into Afghanistan and Iraq and slaughtering however many of the heathen got in his way.

And Howard...had a dream of being taken seriously in the world. Deaf, small, ugly, with a speech impediment, no particular eloquence and really ugly teeth, he dreamed he'd be a world statesman, applauded by Congress, offered tea-cake by the Queen Mother, made Deputy Sheriff of the South Pacific, and randomly torture however many of the heathen he could catch and lock up in the desert with their snivelling children.

And because he's such a good actor it's largely come to pass.

And because Simon Crean is such a bad actor the show may go on. The show's run may be extended, by popular demand.

And it's a pity.