Python swallows Bush!

Had you been writing Op-Eds all along, or were these your first?

I'd written some columns for the Guardian's children's page, but that was 15 years ago. I just got so irritated and angry I felt I had to write something. And I just started sending them out. The Observer were the first people to publish them. Then the Observer, curiously enough, stopped printing them after a while. When the invasion of Iraq got under way, the Observer actually rather got behind the government and supported the invasion, and my pieces got sidelined. They'd say, "Yeah, love the new piece, but sorry, Princess Diana's butler's made some announcement and we can't fit it in." It's true they have limited space.

The work you did in Monty Python never seemed particularly political, so was this a whole new thing for you?

That's right. Python wasn't at all political. We deliberately eschewed any overt politicism. The humor was much more abstract. I find that if I try to write something from a political point of view, it can get a bit tedious -- a film or something like that. It can be too much. But at 800 or 900 words, it's all right. But even so, I do get tired of my voice sometimes. I'd like to have a different way of saying something. But yes, it is something a bit new for me.

Yet in some ways it's not, because Monty Python used a lot of absurd humor, and what seems to most set you off are absurd political situations, where people are going about things in exactly the wrong way, or -- I'm remembering one sketch where a guy who's obviously a Scottish gangster goes around claiming to be Louis XVIII of France -- adopting completely transparent disguises that shouldn't fool anyone.

That's it. When you see George Bush and Tony Blair committing these absurd acts and people going along with it, you have to ask, "Wait a minute, which is the real world?" It's only the fact that it has these horrendous consequences is what makes them appalling instead of funny.

I just read a piece in the Guardian this week, in which the writer asked why people were getting so distressed and putting up so much money to help the victims of the tsunami disaster -- which I applaud, by the way -- when the same number of people have been killed in Iraq and nobody's making a fuss about them. No one's running fundraisers or aid programs to help the victims of the West in Iraq, but there have been at least 100,000 killed by U.S. and British bombs and artillery fire, according to the Lancet [a British medical journal], which is the only scientific estimate we've got. That's a huge number of people being killed. You can't say those people are better off than they would have been under Saddam Hussein.

One of the strange manipulations of language you get into is that the war on terror is a war on an abstract noun.

An abstract noun can't surrender; it can't do anything really. How do you know when you've won? When the noun gets kicked out of the Oxford English Dictionary? But that's a very useful tool for politicians, to declare an unwinnable war. They can keep it going as long as they like. They can decide when it's won.

Now, you could say that we declared war against Fascism in World War II, but that was only a pseudonym for Nazi Germany. In this case, we have no idea who we're fighting. It's the first time, I think, that a major country has gone to war and not known who the enemy was. Who are they? We have no idea.

Looking at it that way it really isn't so far off from the kind of humor you did with Monty Python. And, in a way, neither is observing that no one is wringing their hands over the body count in Iraq the way they are over the tsunami victims.

That's partly because the military is refusing to make counts. They're not only refusing to count how many Iraqis are dying, but before the second invasion of Fallujah, they were actually removing anyone who might be able to make a count -- doctors, ambulance drivers, clerics. They hit the hospitals first to make sure that there was nobody who could perform body counts. It's totally cynical, although, from the military view, probably very sensible.

So the only scientific estimate is the one published from Johns Hopkins University in the Lancet a few weeks ago, and immediately the politicians came up saying, "It's an extrapolation technique." Well, what do they mean by "extrapolation"? That's what any survey is, whether it's a political poll or an advertising survey. That's what you do. They say, "It's not a body count," but the American military is not allowing anyone to do a body count. You can't do it! It's rubbish. And the count estimated by Johns Hopkins doesn't even include Fallujah, which has been totally razed.

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