![]() ![]() Conleth Hill plays the Observer’s editor Roger Alton who, despite his pro-government line, comes out of this rather well. ![]() Rhys Ifans plays renowned reporter Ed Vulliamy as a passionately angry critic of the government Matt Smith plays Martin Bright – who wrote the original story – and Hanako Footman plays young journalist Nicole Mowbray, whose chaotic, innocent mistake in transcribing the email, replacing its American spellings with British ones, caused the story to be initially rubbished by online conspiracists in the US. ![]() The working life of the Observer is boisterously and affectionately represented. Gun is still young enough not to have made an ineradicable career investment in GCHQ or formed loyalty links to its upper reaches. Most importantly of all, she is young – like Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning, or Sarah Tisdall, jailed in 1984 for revealing details about American cruise missiles in Britain. She has an idealism, work ethic and professionalism that made her an excellent intelligence operative in the first place, and yet it is precisely these things that made her rebel. Keira Knightley gives a focused, plausible and sympathetic performance as Gun, and the film shows that she is in many ways the classic whistleblower. Gun herself was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. Top stuff.The Observer’s front page on 2 March 2003.Īlthough it did not stop the war, as Gun dreamed of doing, it played an important part in turning press and public opinion. This is what movies should be about, whatever the subject of the story. The tensions rise and ease, the conflicts ebb and flow. And we mere mortals watching the story unfold across the screen reap the benefits. It’s really her film the people playing the other characters make sure that she gets the support that Katharine deserves. Keira Knightley is nothing short of splendid as Katharine. The cast of “Official Secrets” is a showcase for some great British actors. The key to the last of those is what Katharine did was for the best of all possible intentions – to expose illegal official behaviour. The tensions build as the opposing sides gather their options, the accusers obfuscate and put a lot of people under clandestine observation and the defenders call in favours and apply some great forensic minds to the weak points in the accusers’ case. The leak was traced to Katharine who was put through the mangle of investigation, personal anguish when British authorities decided to deport her immigrant husband, political turmoil, legal cover-ups on both sides and Katharine’s day in court when her freedom was under very savage threat. The second was the responses of British security and law-enforcement agencies when GCHQ worker Katharine Gun leaked the cable to somebody who in turn leaked it to the London “Observer” which assigned Martin Bright to write a story about it. But George Bush went to war anyway – leading to the end of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the embarrassing failure to discover any weapons of mass destruction. In the event, the Security Council was outraged and any chance of a UN resolution in favour of war collapsed. The first resulted from a diplomatic cable transmitting a top-secret NSA memo proposing that Britain and the US should run an illegal joint spying operation against members of the proposing that Britain and the US should run an illegal joint spying operation against members of the UN Security Council to blackmail smaller, undecided Council members into voting for a Middle Eastern war. ![]() It didn’t take me long to thank my stars for deciding to swap an American drama and instead see director Gavin Hood’s film with a screenplay by Gregory and Sara Bernstein delineating the stages in a 2003 official cock-up that threatened Britain’s bureaucracy from two directions. I CAME close to seeing a different new movie as I drove in to my regular Thursday gig. Keira Knightley… nothing short of splendid as Katharine in “Official Secrets”. ![]()
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