Did we like it?

Oddly, this satirical speculation was too good. It was far too well-acted and scripted to deliver a crippling kick to the bollocks of Tony Blair, based on our glorious PM’s actions over the past five years becoming an entertaining drama in its own right rather than a sanctimonious savaging.

What was good about it?

• Robert Lindsay as Tony Blair. This recalled his tour-de-force as corrupt politician Michael Murray in Alan Bleasdale’s classic GBH, but the portrayal was both distinctive and well-observed yet retained both the creeping mania and the delusions of grandeur that were slowly dispelled by unfolding events.

• There are many little gems littered about the script that show a real insight into how you would like to think Tony Blair’s mind works. He debates if he should cry, like Margaret Thatcher on his No 10 exit, and frets that Gordon Brown might secure a larger majority in the snap election than he had. And the publisher of his memoirs sneers that Blair has used the phrase “the hand of history on my shoulder” 29 times.

• Once he has quit, Blair wrongly assumes the world and his wife will soon be phoning him to offer him a regal position. “I assume people will want to snap me up now I’m on the market! I’ve outgrown Britain, I need a bigger stage!” Will US president Hillary Clinton be in contact to make him the White House’s special adviser? “Has Bill Gates rang yet?”

• And Blair’s global impotence was illustrated by his new plush offices that stretched across an entire floor of a London office block yet were populated by a meagre scattering of desks and some over-opulent sofas.

• But Blair is primarily driven by a yearning to secure his legacy in British history. Whenever anyone suggests that his legacy will be Iraq he angrily snaps at them, and keeps a Bible by his bed as if this alone will absolve his sins, yet is haunted by hallucinations of a ravaged Iraq.

• The gallery of supporting characters were drawn to fit, perhaps too perfectly, the viewers’ ingrained perceptions.

• Cherie Blair was a harried harridan who was more concerned about getting a new home than the worries of her husband. And even she seemed prepared to abandon him to his fate when she snapped at photographers that: “It’s Cherie Booth.” And this was just once example of his former allies abandoning him when it was expedient to do so, ultimately giving the whole drama an atmosphere of a political High Noon. The Americans cast him to the wolves; Brown gave tacit permission for the UN to bring about the Iraq tribunal; while even a common police officer felt confident enough to lambaste his conduct over Iraq.

• Blair’s sycophantic major-domo was an oily reptile called Simon who lauded his boss with all kinds of ostentatious praise, implying that upon leaving office rather than falling down to the level of the proletariat he has ascended to the “Olympian” heights of godhood.

• But the person who, in reality, will suffer most from this drama is not actually Blair. Peter Mullen’s petrifyingly dour Gordon Brown gives an electorate largely ignorant our Chancellor’s persona an unedifying glimpse of how crushingly dull he might really be. One moment comes when he tries to make small talk with a classroom of children but ends up laughing nervously and patronisingly at their bored queries.

• Alexander Armstrong makes a cameo as David Cameron, but he really only provides some light relief. Cycling into Tory head office he complains that riding a bike gives him “a sore arse”. And his image is chosen for him each day by a pair of whining Trinny and Susannah clones, while he is obsessed with snaring minority votes through rash flash-in-the-pan initiatives, “Are there any vegetarian Muslims?”

• Brian Haw, the protestor who was resident outside Parliament until recently, pitching up outside the Blairs’ new home and according to Cherie “reducing house prices by 10%”.

• The plague of politicians being guided by image and contemporary events rather than policies and truth is shown to spread way beyond the parochial duchies of Blair and Cameron. Hillary Clinton agrees that a tribunal into the Iraq invasion can be set up, which could mean Blair standing trial. The US ambassador comforts the dumbstruck Blair with: “We’ve got to say some negative things about you in public – but we don’t mean them.”

• Other funny bits included: Cherie suggesting after her husband had been charged: “Tony, you need a good legal team. How about the people who defended Pinochet?”; and Arnold Shwarzenegger’s photograph in a line up of UN secretary-generals.

What was bad about it?

• An inherent problem with satire, especially satire as superficially satisfying as this, is that it soaks up the viewer’s rage towards the protagonist, in this instance Tony Blair, siphoning off the bristling sense of injustice and replacing it with a pious complacency. A sensation of revenge by proxy as if to say: “Ha! Ha! Haaa! You may be responsible for a succession of amoral foreign policy decisions that make a mockery of both yours and your party’s fundamental ethics, but I’ve seen a drama that ended with you in the back of a police van on the way to The Hague to be tried for war crimes!”

• Occasionally, the rabid urge to crucify Blair and his legacy did mean a few instances of lumpen clumsiness. In his resignation speech, Blair comments on the assault by the US, the UK and Israel on Iran’s nuclear power plants and the wave of London bombings that followed that were “in no way linked”. It still seems to be a little raw to use the obvious parallel of Iraq and the 2005 Tube bombings as a comedic prop, no matter how truthful the observation.

• And some plotlines seem to have been concocted as a way for people to enjoy revenge by proxy, smirking at imagined events that may never come to pass, such as Labour catapulting seven points up in the polls when he accedes the throne. And the wholly unnecessary scene when Blair was in casualty having suffered problems with his heart, where he found that the ward was soiled with excrement and blood.

• Where was Leo Blair? He would only have been 10 years old at the time.