By way of exhilarating coincidence I experienced a surreal double take yesterday. Having spent the morning following Tony Blair on the campaign trail in County Durham, I came back to London to see Pierce Brosnan playing a thinly-disguised version of the former prime minister on the big screen.
Compare and contrast, eh? The real Blair is sleek and polished, much more so than the Milky Bar Kid – his own description – who first fought Sedgefield in 1983. How much more so was the former James Bond who plays Adam Lang in Roman Polanski's gripping new film of Robert Harris's thriller The Ghost?
At one level the comparison is silly, of course. As Harris routinely tells interviewers – and did again at last night's pre-premiere screening in a Soho viewing theatre – his story of a former British prime minister holed up on Martha's Vineyard to write his memoirs – is mere fiction.
But anyone who read the novel or may see the movie – which will be out on 16 April – is struck by the very obvious truth that a tall, smooth PM who took his country into a controversial war in Iraq and is now harried by allegations of war crimes is a character likely to have been inspired by Blair.
Indeed, Harris – a former BBC Newsnight reporter, briefly political editor of the Observer before he hit the big-time with Fatherland – was quite close to Blair at one stage, but fell out over Iraq and civil liberties. He remains good friends with Peter Mandelson, who made an appearance at last night's event.
So viewers will easily conclude that Olivia Williams's Ruth Lang is a more hard-edged version of Cherie Blair, that Richard Rycart, the bearded, vengeful ex-foreign secretary sacked by Lang just might be a ringer for Robin Cook.
And so on. Actually, some self-deprecating aspects of Ewan McGregor's charming performance as the let's-not-get-involved ghostwriter, the film's anti-hero, reminded me more of the real Blair. Brosnan looks too BIG, too well-fed, too American to be a post-imperial Brit. We've shrunk. But we'll let that pass.
Kim Cattrall plays Amelia, Lang's PA and mistress, a kind of Anji Hunter figure, except that Hunter – also present at the viewing – is one of Blair's oldest teenage friends, never a girlfriend, so both parties have always insisted. What is true – as in the movie – is that Cherie and Anji did not get on.
Brosnan's mannerisms are Blair-like: the cheesy grin, the switched-on charm and self-regarding fluency, the air of a hollow centre, the implied cynicism; all exaggerated to be sure, but, hey, this is a movie. They need to put bums on seats.
So everything else is exaggerated too: the grainy, windswept isolation of Martha's Vineyard in winter, bleak and wet; the paranoia, the planes and helicopters; the enveloping air of security-and-menace; the size of the anti-war crowds that seem to follow Lang everywhere; even the prominence he seems to command on CNN.
To that extent it's a "special relationship" movie, perhaps already dated in the "Pacific presidency" of Barack Obama, who is less in hock to the enfeebled Europeans, even the friendly ones.
Some critics have latched upon this aspect of the film to suggest that it cannot outlast memory of the Bush-Blair relationship and feelings aroused by the Iraq war.
Ronald Bergan wrote as much in last month's Guardian.
He compares it with Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, a not-so-coded critique of Stalin that lives on out-of-time as a great film. Well, I can see what he means. But Polanksi is a very considerable filmmaker too and the relentless pace of The Ghost keeps you engrossed.
From my private point of view the events I had just witnessed in the ex-pit village of Trimdon were constantly in my mind, the comparisons between the real Blair and the Brosnan Blair unavoidable.
There is less adrenalin pumped in real life – though more than appears on the surface – fewer coppers, five gentle anti-war demonstrators not 100 angry ones, and so on. Blair's security detail is business-like, but not so menacing. The convoy was the same though: three vehicles, with the VIP in the middle one. They do drive fast. And in both film and real life it rained a lot.
All in all, it leaves one thinking about the high-maintainance life Blair has elected to live: less glossy, less persecuted than Lang's but troubling all the same. He seeks to do good as well as make money – needs money to do good, he would say.
Unlike many, I don't doubt his sincerity, but I do doubt his wisdom. He is not a deeply reflective man, though he remains a very effective political operator. That critique of the Cameroons – that they keep changing the change they stand for – which he delivered to Trimdon and the TV cameras – is unlikely to be bettered soon.
And what of the film? Some critics have complained that it skims across the surface of great issues and fails to pack a climactic punch. I can see what they mean, but it had me hooked – and I'm hard to please.
Writing his first screenplay – as distinct from novel – Harris comes up with a deft script that made us all laugh out loud, but also wince. And Polanski still knows how to make thrillers. Let's borrow four of Peter Bradshaw's stars.
And Polanski? There is poignancy in a film about a famous man on the run made by a famous man still on the run for a serious offence half a life time ago. The viewer is aware of it.
No, Polanski was not at the viewing; Britain is one of the many places he can't visit for fear of arrest. And no, it wasn't shot in and around Martha's Vineyard, the resort island off Massachusetts; Polanski can't go there either. It was filmed on the dunes of north Denmark.
Introducing the film, Harris, a very grounded man whom I have known slightly for years, recalled how thrilled he was to take a call from his agent saying that Polanski wanted his phone number with a view to making a film of Pompeii, an earlier novel. Would he mind?
Mind? Of course not! But when the celebrated on-the-run filmmaker rang, Harris was out. His wife, Gill, reported that some foreigner had rung but she'd shaken him off. In the event Pompeii never made it, as happens in movies.
Harris had interrupted writing his Roman series ("Cicero is just Mandelson in a toga," one friend complains) to dash off The Ghost – and offered it as an alternative to Polanski, who is not interested in politics. "This Gordon Brown, he's schmuck, yes?" was the limit of his conversation, the author recalled last night.
The film got made all the same.
