She responded that she was “not trembling in her shoes”.Mr Blair said he would consider disciplinary action but his advisers believe that removing the Labour whip from Ms Short would merely turn her into a martyr and prolong the party’s divisions over Iraq.Last night, Downing Street announced a review of the Official Secrets Act amid concern that it could be impossible to mount a prosecution of someone who leaked information in the hope of averting military conflict. He struggled to answer Ms Short’s unprecedented allegation and explain the decision to drop the case against the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. Some Labour MPs expressed concern that his failure to give clear answers – which he put down to national security and legal reasons – would add to his “trust problem” with the public.The former international development secretary, who resigned from the Cabinet after the war, stunned the political establishments on both sides of the Atlantic when she claimed on BBC Radio 4 that Britain had spied on the UN chief during the critical period when it was seeking a second UN resolution to give authority for military action.Asked whether British intelligence was involved, she said: “I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan’s conversations. In fact I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to war, thinking: ‘Oh dear. He stressed that he was not confirming that Ms Short’s allegation about the security services was true. “It really is the height of irresponsibility to expose them to this type of public questioning and scrutiny in a way that can do absolutely no good to the security of this country,” he said.Ms Short rejected calls by Labour MPs for her to keep silent by going even further in another interview last night. On Channel 4 News, she dismissed Mr Blair’s criticism of her as a “distraction” and declared that it was the Prime Minister who had brought the security services into disrepute by exaggerating their account of the threat posed by Iraq.”There is no British national security involved in revealing that Kofi Annan’s private phone calls have been improperly revealed and there is no danger to British security services by making this public,” she said.
And Michael Feast’s predatory Fagin is allowed to play the prison scene, omitted from most other versions, where the Jewish fence becomes deranged with terror on the night before he is hanged.Visited by the now gentrified, white-suited Oliver, he has to be dragged away from the boy like a stricken, bereaved parent, re-emphasising how the story is patterned round the succession of ironically contrasted surrogate families (workhouse, thieves’ den, bourgeois heaven) that are proffered to the orphan child.This adaptation retains all the compulsiveness of the original, and even the (musically rather dull) interventions from the chorus are cut-and-paste collages of lines from the book. Would you rather sit an exam than “Consider yerself part of the family”?
If so, help is at hand in the shape of Neil Bartlett’s new stage version of Dickens’ classic novel. It manages to project a potent theatricality at the same time as rescuing the story from the sanitising clutches of Lionel Bart.In this adaptation, for example, Nancy (Kellie Shirley) is no buxom torch singer from musical comedy, but a painted teenage prostitute with a violent boss of a lover. Jordan Metcalfe’s extraordinarily intense and traumatised Oliver looks almost permanently on the point of collapse, communicating the toll on a child’s nervous system of this assault course of ordeals.
Are you one of those people who can’t bear the fake Cockney jauntiness of Oliver! ? Do you think fondly of Herod whenever you hear those workhouse boys launch into “Food, Glorious Food” while dancing with a brio that proclaims a generous, well-balanced diet. Nora Ephron’s solution was a mechanical one: have the couple meet not once but several times over more than a decade, prevented from hitting the sack by being otherwise engaged or by a vow of chaste friendship. When they finally get it on, the event is earth-shattering for Harry because, for once, he is making love to a woman he already knows and likes. The sex breaks the Richter scale for Sally, too, perhaps because of the finesse Harry has acquired from considerable experience: he regularly tells Sally of the many women he loves and leaves – assuring her and us that, in marrying a guy who has been hanging around for years, she is not settling for a loser.
