marina hyde on cameron's 'west wing' →
‘Certainly in the British imagination, the fictional ideal of The West Wing had long since supplanted any dim awareness of the organisational layout of that area of the actual White House. “The West Wing” has become shorthand for being on the side of right, a sublimely intelligent iteration of the struggle between idealism and realism in power. The Blair inner circle were West Wing nuts almost without exception, and we shall come to their borderline certifiable blurring of fact and fiction later. Suffice it for now to say that Tony Blair’s chief of staff, as Jonathan Powell liked to be known, once set up a Downing Street meeting with President Bartlett’s chief of staff — or, rather, the late John Spencer, the actor who played him, and with whom Powell was naturally overexcited to hold opposite-number talks.’
Good grief. Though to be fair, I would have been quite excited too.
