The Special Relationship

Michael Sheen seems to have made a career out of playing Tony Blair, first in The Deal in 2003 about his relationship with Gordon Brown, then in The Queen with Helen Mirren and most recently in The Special Relationship, studying Blair and President Clinton’s relationship in the years of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the war in Kosovo.

The film shows how Blair and his team re-imagined the Labour party, seeking advice from Clinton’s advisors, to make it less dangerously liberal, but more a viable option for change-the building blocks for the idea of New Labour.

It moves on to see Blair meeting with Clinton (Dennis Quaid) a couple of years later, as the President and his team become certain that Blair will win the General Election. When he does, the two men seem united in both policy, as centre left politicians, and in friendship-especially in the eyes of Blair.

Yet the relationship becomes gradually more and more strained as the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaks on the eve of Blair’s visit to Washington, where he swears allegiance to Clinton, only to have the man later admit to having had inappropriate relations with Miss Lewinsky. The outbreak of war in Kosovo, and Clinton’s reluctance to commit to ground troops until the very last minute, leads to Blair finally severing the ties they might have had, by using the right-wing American media to help put pressure on the president to place his troops into Kosovo.

Peter Morgan applies enough dramatic tension to make the story gripping, and, as with Frost/Nixon, I had little real awareness of the problems with NATO at the time of the Kosovo war, nor much knowledge of the relationship between Blair and Clinton-‘The Special Relationship’ is a term now almost indefinitely linked to Blair’s relationship with the man who followed Clinton-George W. Bush. Morgan also manages to keep the story intresting with a cast of few main characters; it is really just Blair, Clinton, Cherie Blair (Helen McCrory), Hillary Clinton (Hope Davis) and Blair’s advisors Alistair Campbell (Mark Bazeley) and Jonathan Powell (Adam Godley).

This is in part due to the great performances given by the cast. There is a reason that Sheen is cast again and again as Blair, and that is because he gets the mannerisms so very right, and he is supported well by Quaid as Clinton, who is brilliant as a man desperately trying to cling on to power and the respect of the American public. My favourite performance of the film however, was that of Hope Davis as Hillary Clinton, she stood out throughout as a woman who keeps her dignity, despite coming up against horrible circumstances. McCrory was also good as Cherie Blair, a woman who was constantly made fun of in the press during her husband’s time as leader of the country, even if she is the subject of one of the films funnier jibs from Clinton; ‘She’s from Liverpool, its like the Arkansas of England’.

The best aspects of the film also came in the foreshadowing of events to come. In Blair’s passionate speech to the House of Commons on how we can never deny war on humanitarian grounds-an argument that would resurface in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. There is the conversation between Blair and Clinton in the kitchen of Chequers on the day of George W Bush’s election, where Clinton accuses Blair of having never been a ‘centre left’ politician, again, another criticism that has been levied at Blair in the past few years as he moved the Labour party closer and closer to the more ‘centre right’ Conservative party-an action that the new leader of Labour, Ed Miliband, has said that he wants to reverse.

The Special Relationship was a fine television movie, it was perhaps too small for the big screen (a criticism also levied at Frost/Nixon and The Queen by some), but it was a perfect piece of docu-drama, about some of the most important moments in recent political history, about the failure of a dream of widespread centre left politics and about the importance of legacy. It is interesting to note that despite their respective good works, both Clinton and Blair are finally tied by their respective tainted legacies, one for sexual misconduct, the other for a hugely unpopular war.