Python swallows Bush!

Some of your Op-Eds are humorous in a black sort of way, but a few are quite straightforward, as if you were so mad you weren't even going to try to be funny.

When inspiration fails, I just run mad! Sometimes it's all there in itself. The things themselves are so ridiculous you don't need to put it in a funny way. These things just sort of write themselves, to be perfectly frank. I feel that I suddenly see something terribly clearly and I have to sit down and write it.

Are there a lot of British writers doing that right now? Is there much political humor?

The only reasonable stuff that's being written is in Op-Ed pieces by people like George Monbiot and John Pilger. Monbiot had a piece in the Guardian recently suggesting that America attack itself, since if it's intent on attacking those who support and train terrorists, well, the American military trained not only Osama bin Laden but Saddam Hussein. Monbiot's not a comedian, by the way. He's just being slightly satirical.

That reminds me of one of your own essays, where, with a very straight face, you consider how if Britain had decided to adopt the same policy with the supporters of IRA terrorists, you would have had to bomb the U.S., since so much of the IRA's funds came from here.

There's more logic in that than there is in bombing Iraq because of al-Qaida. Iraq has no connections with al-Qaida at all. I'm sure Osama bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein, with his worldly, nonreligious government. Al-Qaida would be dead against that sort of thing. What they should have done was get al-Qaida to attack Saddam Hussein.

In fact, back at the beginning of the first Gulf War, Osama, who labors under the delusion that he and his mujahedin almost single-handedly forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan, tried to persuade the Saudi royal family to let him expel Saddam from Kuwait. He didn't want the American infidels to be called into the Holy Land, but the Saudis said, "Even with God on your side, no way are you and a couple thousand guys with guns going to beat Saddam's army and his tanks in the open desert."

I didn't know that. But it's not surprising because Saddam Hussein represented everything that bin Laden hates as a Wahhabi. Only you're not supposed to call them Wahhabis now. I went to a Web site where they were very vehement that you're supposed to call them something else, only I can't remember what.

Do you think that some political regimes lend themselves better to satire? Monty Python was on the air before the Thatcher years, of course, but it's hard to think of great political humor that came out of her time.

Yes, we did Python in the late '60s, early '70s, and at that time it really did seem like the world was going to change. The establishment was on the back foot. The old establishment was sort of tottering. But what happened was not some new wonderful thing rising up but this awful hybrid.

At least the old establishment [adopts an old-fashioned British ruling class accent] had some decency. They may have been really wealthy and everything, but at least they had a few decent values. They were replaced by people who had no values at all apart from making money. Thatcher's credo was "Does it make money?" There was nothing about human happiness. The old establishment might have been mistaken about what makes for human happiness or have only seen it from their own point of view, but at least they were talking about it. Thatcher was just about money, and how much of it you could get. She vitiated our society by making it answerable only to accountants.

It must be hard to make fun of someone whose ruthlessness is so naked because they make no pretenses, and so they're not especially hypocritical.

I suppose you're right; she wasn't particularly hypocritical. She just doesn't have a clue about decency or human suffering or life. I was asked once if I wanted to give a present to anyone for Christmas, and I said I'd like to give Margaret Thatcher a present: a heart.

How did the recent American elections look from England?

You always knew Bush would get back in, in the end.

Did you really? Because a lot of people here really believed he could be beaten.

We missed that over here. Maybe the race would have seemed closer if I'd been there. I didn't think the people around him could possibly allow him to lose. Of course, there were those untraceable voting machines. You press a button and they say, "Oh yes, we've caught your vote. That's fine." It seems so transparent! They know you can fix those things. I just don't understand it. Of course, we've learned that the religious vote was mobilized, and when I heard that, I thought, well, that's it.

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