The Trial of Tony Blair

Television puts Tony Blair on trial

In a new TV drama, the Prime Minister is brought to account over the war in Iraq. James Rampton meets its creators

Tony Blair is hunched over the basin at his posh new home in Connaught Square, central London. He is cleaning his hands with soap – at first gently, then more and more furiously. His wife, Cherie, appears at the bathroom door and watches her husband's actions with increasing horror.

Like a man possessed, he is now scrubbing with a scarily obsessive vigour. Two words spring to mind: Lady Macbeth.

Set in 2010, Alistair Beaton's drama envisages a Britain in which Blair (played with a messianic glint in the eye by Robert Lindsay, who also incarnated the Prime Minister in A Very Social Secretary) has finally and very reluctantly ceded power to his arch-rival, Gordon Brown (Peter Mullan).

This Blair is fixated on securing his legacy, declaring that "The world needs me, as Britain once needed me. But I've done Britain, Britain's sorted. I've outgrown Britain. I need a bigger stage now."

But his obsession with establishing his place in history blinds the former prime minister to something much more serious: the imminent threat of being indicted on war crimes charges in the Hague for leading his country into an illegal conflict in Iraq.

As Blair tries frantically to shut out the increasingly disastrous news from Iraq, he begins to be haunted by victims of the seemingly endless war there. In one particularly chilling scene, he has a nightmare that he is carrying the corpse of a young Iraqi boy killed in the fighting. As the aforementioned "Lady Macbeth" scene demonstrates, this is a man with a lot on his conscience.

The Trial of Tony Blair taps into the deep vein of public dissatisfaction with the war. Whatever the Prime Minister's protestations to the contrary, it is the catastrophe in Iraq that will be his legacy.

I am on the set of The Trial of Tony Blair at Loseley House, a splendid 1562 country pile outside Guildford, which is doubling for Chequers. I am watching a tense scene in which Brown agonises over whether or not to block the indictment of Blair. Extras dressed as police patrol the grounds, and a props van on the driveway is filled with protestors' placards proclaiming: "Tony Blair: war criminal, no matter where he lives." Google vids.