BODYGUARD AND ITS TWISTS

I was going to put a spoiler alert at the top of this page, but since according to media I am the only adult in Britain who didn't watch the final episode of Bodyguard last Sunday and then spend all day Monday chatting about it on the metaphoric water-cooler that is social media, I don't feel I have to bother. So let me say that I was both disappointed and relieved that Julia Montague's death didn't turn out to be hoax, which would have been daring but also a twist too far. Of course writer Jed Mercurio, having killed off his lynch-pin character, had to twist like Chubby Checker to try to keep things interesting and watchers' brains spinning.

Keely Hawes' departure left a hole to fill which was not quite filled by the Ipad filled with 'compromat'. As an aside, I think 'Compromat' ought to be the name of the next TMZ-style website that comes along. But an Ipad can't do what Hawes does, like stand in the doorway playing with herself. Theresa May and Amber Rudd, eat your hearts out.

At that point the focus of the story fell directly on conspiracy, and DS Budd's personal life dropped into softer, if still monomaniacal, focus. Which is sort of good, because the need of Richard Madden's performance to extend to a second dimension is thus minimised. Madden has the poker face required of a bodyguard. He has the determined poker face required of a cop/soldier on a mission. He has the puzzled poker face of a victim of a conspiracy. And he has the pained poker face of a suffering war veteran who's seen too much. And the frustrated poker face of the damaged husband trying to deal with wife and kids.

In the final episode we got all those faces at once in the key scene, an extended etude on the theme of defusing a bomb, which includes a bizarre march across the city to his flat, with his estranged wife by his side so no one will shoot him. The problem is bomb diffusing stories, always cliched in suspense terms, have basically two outcomes. You snip the wire and....bam, you're dead. Or you snip the wire and you're not dead, then you can jump over the convenient wall all the cops have conveniently retreated far enough away from to make escape convenient. But without it you would have missed Madden walking through the streets with a bloodied face in a serape, like the Man With No Name, rather than the Man With No Expressions.

OK. So far so good. But from the moment Julia was killed, we, knowing we had a conspiracy, knew it had to involve some combination of political plotters (either to install Julia as PM and/or to oust the PM) MI5 plotters (to install Julia with her surveillance friendly bill) or police plotters (to avoid Julia and MI5 taking away their own repressive powers?). That last one never made much sense, but it could also have been a combo platter of two or even all three, something signalled by the stern expressions on the big time police women (Gina McKee as the Met's counter-terror chief and Pippa Heywood as the head of the protection unit where Budd is placed), and the close and cynical cooperation between Mike Travis, minister for counter-terrorism (played by Vincent Franklin as if he'd wandered in from the Labour cabinet in A Very British Coup) and MI5 director Stephen Hunter-Dunn.

The Bodyguard Award for Over-Acting By A Character With A Hyphenated-Surname went to Stuart Bowman as Hunter-Dunn. His facial contortions started out as mere Dudley Nightshade, but by the final episode they were the most serious distorted human visage seen in this country since Keira Knightly was unhinging her jaw in A Dangerous Method.

But there had to be a BIG TWIST, so instead of political conspiracy we discover that the bombings were the result of actual Islamic terrorists, working hand in hand with gangsters, who kind of entered the scene late in the story, except that the Home Secretary's assistant, who got fired early, was apparently hooked up with them from the start. It sounded like the Kennedy assassination, if you actually want to believe that the killers were either Cuban terrorists or the Mafia. And as with the Warren Report, Mercurio's big problems here are many.

Presumably all the fuss from MI5 (and Michael Schaffer, their teflon hit-man, whose face is almost equally silent-movie snarling as Bowman's) is simply to get their blackmailing material back. So why is Travis on their side here? Does he not suspect they might have eliminated Julia? Would he not worry, unless he were part of their plot?

Nadia Ali (Anjli Mohindra), as the suicide bomber Studd, I mean Budd, talks out of blowing up a Virgin Train loo, makes a nice turn at the end, but I wonder if Mercurio had seen and remembered the similar scene in Patriots Day? Regardless, the flip of Nadia begs the questions of (a) why she didn't detonate her bomb on the train in the first place, but more importantly (b) what kind of terror organisation uses its main builder of insanely complicated explosive devices as a suicide bomber? The answer to that latter is question is, of course, none. The people sent to blow themselves up are disposable. Besides, she was apparently the contact with the gangsters (how, is never explained) and the gangsters were also the Islamic terrorists' main source of income (not, say, the Saudis). So blow up one and cut off the other. Plus she remembered the name of Budd's childrens' school? Just so she could launch a terror attack there, and so Mercurio could misdirect our attention toward the people who in the real world would have been the only ones to know that school. He told her that? Was he trying to bore her into not detonating the bomb?

And why has these brutally efficient gangsters bothered to corrupt the head of the protection unit? They anticipated they might someday want to kill a home secretary? One they already had someone working for? The protection unit is not responsible for anti-crime activity, yet Pippa Heywood was apparently feeding them intel enough to live in a pretty posh house for copper standards in London. What about her intel was so valuable?

The cops themselves are interesting, Ash Tandon as Deepak Sharma and Nina Toussaint-White as Lousie Rayburn do their own sort of twisting duet, switching places in the do we believe Judd or don't we believe Judd sweepstakes, even, at the end, when it should be obvious. What is also interesting, and I found the most convincing part of the drama, was the sheer Robocop/Starship Trooper mindlessness of the armed police--a military force of occupation so focused on their methodology it seemed unlikely in the extreme not one of them would shoot Budd dead, and even more extreme no one would order the shot, if only to nip their terrorism and treason problems in the Budd, so to speak.

The British audience disliked the happy-ish ending, calling it (of course) Hollywood, ie, we wrote it and produced it this way for our audience, but don't blame us, it's the Americans' fault. I disliked the real flaws in flipping the story right at the end, whether for the need to add those final BIG TWISTS, or whether we didn't want to show MI5 or Met anti-terrorism units as being traitorous. I know which scenario would be more believable to me. It wasn't like Kevin Coster and Whitney Houston, with Keely Hawes singing at Tory Party conference while Madden looks on admiringly. But I do wonder why they did not use the great Dawn Landes song 'Bodyguard' as their theme.

ANTI-SEMITISM AND ELECTION POLITICS: THE LABOUR 'SCANDAL'

The current conflagration over 'anti-semitism' in the Labour party has been particularly well-timed, and incredibly effective. I say well-timed because it came, as if by coincidence, just as polls revealed the great distance by which Zac Goldsmith, the Etonian candidate for mayor of London, trailed Sadiq Khan in the polls, and also just after polls showed, for the first time, Labour's Jeremy Corbyn with a higher approval rating than David Cameron. I say effective because it has transformed the debate and worked in favour of three interests: the Tories, with Cameron on the attack and Goldsmith's mayoral campaign thrown a lifeline; the anti-Corbyn New Labour faction of the Labour party; and supporters of Israel. These groups are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Goldsmith had been running a cynically racist campaign against Khan, sending out leaflets targeted to various ethnic groups with names apparently originating in the sub-continent, trying to inflame them against a Moslem candidate. Those always linked Khan with Corbyn. Goldsmith (and his proxies in the Tory Parliamentary party) spent much time playing guilt by association with Khan and any number of Moslem figures, including one, Suliman Gani, who actually canvassed for the Conservatives against Khan in the general election! This was a classic 'Sir' Lynton Crosby campaign: full of Lee Atwater style coded appeals to fear and hatred.

Then came the Naz Shah scandal, as raised by the Tory blogger 'Guido Fawkes'. Shah had retweeted a meme 'calling for the forced transportation of Jews of of the Middle East'. Really? If you bothered to check, the meme actually said that 'an easy solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict' would be to 'relocate Israel into United States', showing a map of the US with Israel seemingly carved out of part of Nebraska and Kansas. The words 'forced transportation' never appear in the text, nor indeed does the word 'repatriation (also used by critics), nor indeed 'Jews'. But the word 'solution' does, which was manna to Cameron, as we shall see later. To anyone who uses the internet, the meme is obviously a comment on Israel's dependence on the United States and the US's unquestioning support for Israel. It is supposed to be a satirical political cartoon; it was originally posted, apparently, by Norman Finkelstein, an author and prominent critic of Israel, and himself the child of Holocaust survivors. You may not agree, you might think it heavy handed, you might not find it clever, but you would have to be either myopic, idiotic, or have another agenda entirely to mis-characterise its point as being to call for the 'forced' move of an entire country to another continent to eliminate a conflict. Taking it literally is like arguing Jonathan Swift supported cannibalism as a cure for famine in Ireland.

Shah had retweeted this meme a couple of years ago. Of course it's theoretically possible she might also have been taking it literally, who knows, she doesn't show much imagination. She has also been highly critical of Israeli policy in the occupied territories, and often combative, once refusing to admit an Israeli child had indeed been killed by Palestinians throwing stones. Now that she is actually an MP, she might have been more cautious. But she issued a seemingly sincere apology to those offended by the meme, which, as we've seen, would require both a very thin skin and an impossible sense of literalness. That should have been the end of that. It might have been, but of course the point was not to embarrass Shah, the point was the agenda outlined above. It was to force all Labour party members to repudiate, disavow and condemn something that they may not have seen and something which was being deliberately misinterpreted out of all proportion. Step forward Ken Livingstone, ready to pour oil onto what was still a simmering flame.

By a seeming coincidence of a sort, there was an extended piece on Goldsmith and Khan by Simon Hattenstone in Saturday's Guardian magazine. It rehashed much of the Goldsmith racism campaign noted above, but it also quoted Livingstone saying it was 'the dirtiest campaign he'd ever witnessed' and also condemning anti-semitism, albeit as practised by the Daily Mail in, uh, 1906. 'Never forget the headline in 1906: "Jews bring crime and disease to Britain"' 'Red' Ken was quoted as saying. 'And it's been selling papers, and unprincipled politicians have been using fear, throughout time immemorial'.

Between Livingstone giving the hyperbolic quote to Hattenstone and the piece appearing, the Naz Shah story had broken, and Livingstone had jumped into the fray. Not content to expose the 'anti-semitic' slurs for what they were, he upped the ante, reminding people that 'Hitler was a Zionist', because the Nazis had done deals with Zionist groups to buy Jews passage to Palestine in the early 1930s. Equating the desperate efforts to free Jews from Germany and the cynical confiscation of Jewish assets by the Nazis to making Hitler a Zionist was indeed insulting, as grossly inaccurate as Guido Fawkes, and incendiary. Kind of like Bibi Netanyahu claiming Hitler got the idea for cremating Jews from the Moslem Mufti of Jerusalem. Livingstone has already got into trouble evoking Nazis with Jewish people, and had he been concerned with the elections or his party you would think he'd think twice and/or keep his mouth shut. Instead Ken gift-wrapped some quotes for neo-con Labour MP John Mann, giving the man who's called Gerald Kaufman an anti-Semite for seeking a balanced solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma, another chance to posture for the cameras and cry anti-Semitism.But John is no doubt an honourable Mann.

Conspiracy theorists might see Livingstone as a Laurence Wainwright type character from A Very British Coup, but the reality seems to be he's halfway down the slope to becoming George Galloway, following a personal agenda increasingly deluded and bent on the self-destruction of all around him. 

Hattenstone's piece was prophetic in describing Lynton Crosby's classic technique called 'the dead cat', whereby the dead cat thrown on the dinner table distracts the guests and becomes all anyone at the table discusses. Crosby borrowed this from Roger Ailes, advisor to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes and mastermind of 'fair and balanced' Fox News. Sure enough, Labour's 'anti-semitism' led all the papers and bulletins, none of whom bothered to walk back the cat on the table and even look at, much less analyse, the original cartoon Shah retweeted. The result was that after all the anti-Semite smoke and mirrors, the nastiest Tory slur yet against Sadiq Khan, led by the Evening Standard, attracted no negative attention at all. Of course I need to point out that, as Hattenstone's piece made ironically clear, Crosby had nothing to do with Goldsmith's campaign, which is being run by Mark Fullbrook, the 'F' in the political consultants CTF Partners. That's CTF where the 'C' stands for, um, Crosby.

Even more tellingly, this brilliant political riposte bore the classic hallmarks of another Atwater disciple: Karl Rove, who ran the Bush campaigns. Rove's signature ploy was to turn his opponent's strength, and his candidate's weakness, against him. Shrub Bush is an elitist preppie who was eased through the Ivy League, the armed force  and business by family connections? Call him 'Dubya' like a good ol boy and make Al Gore a 'liar'. Bush dodged the draft and went AWOL on his cushy National Guard gig? John Kerry's a decorated war hero who turned against the Vietnam War? 'Swift Boat' Kerry, again make him a 'liar', question his 'patriotism'.

So consider: you've got a campaign based on coded racism, trying to stir up racial fear and hatred. You're accusing your Moslem opponent of at least supporting terrorists. You're fading fast in the polls.  Jeremy Hunt's lust to privatise the NHS and Dave Cameron's spinelessness over Europe are killing you. What do you do? You follow Karl Rove's precepts and make the entire Labour party anti-semitic villains, using something you can twist out of context to make it appear indefensible. . Make the Labour Party the story, accuse THEM of racism, of antisemitism, the most heinous racism of the past century, turn the attention to them. Which three-quarters of the media will do with glee, because they make no pretense of balance, and the other quarter will do because Labour, unlike the Tories in power, are powerless to affect them; they make a pretense of balance, but they fear more than anything being branded fellow-travellers.

Here's a moment from Prime Minister's question time: 'The Prime Minister told the Commons: "Anti-Semitism is racism and we should call it out and fight it wherever we see it. The fact that we have got a Labour Member of Parliament with the Labour whip who made remarks about the transportation of people from Israel to America and talked about a 'solution' is quite extraordinary." No one will ever claim Cameron's duff at following a script.

Beyond the utter ruthlessness of the Tory party and its press, there's another bonus in this strategy: you can conflate any criticism of Israel or Zionism with anti-Semitism, a conflation which becomes more pronounced as Israel's policies become harsher and harsher in the occupied territories. Indeed, even the leader of the opposition in the Knesset has just supported the building of more walls around illegal settlements. We've seen that referring to the walling off of Palestinians as part of an 'apartheid' state has got Jimmy Carter called an anti-semite. In the midst of the US presidential primaries, where walls are also an issue,  Hillary Clinton used coded language to accuse Bernie Sanders, a Jew, of anti-Semitism, because he won't join her whole-hearted doubling-down in backing Netanyahu. And no one in America, while castigating Donald Trump's Mexican wall, has dared to even mention, much less compare it to, the one in Israel.

It's here a perfect storm meets, the neo-cons and neo-libs looking to support Israel and marginalize the left get both wishes in one package. But there is a real danger here in using antisemitism to try and remove issues from debate. One leading neo-lib columnist attacked the BBC for left-wing politically correct bias for calling ISIS 'so-called Islamic state'. He conveniently forgot how that it was David Cameron himself who complained about BBC's calling ISIS 'Islamic State' on the grounds it gave them 'credibility'. It was on his command to jump, not some secret left-wing strategy, that the BBC rebranded ISIS 'so-called' Islamic state.

Extremism in the defense of Israel knows no limits. Using the anti-semitic slur with reckless abandon cheapens it, dilutes it, and renders it harder to deal with real anti-semitism, and with other forms of real racism. Another internet meme went around last week, quoting Dr. Hajo Meyer, a physicist and Holocaust survivor who died in 2014, around the time Naz Shah was retweeting that now-notorious meme. He said 'an anti-Semite used to be a person who disliked Jews. Now it is a person who Jews dislike'. In this context, Dr. Meyer doesn't seem to have anticipated the British right.