The real cynicism that lies behind 'The Project'

I realised that the political party I want to represent me is not one that could ever gain power

The Labour Party, apparently, is troubled by the content of Peter Kosminsky's upcoming three-hour drama, The Project. What certifiable idiots they would be if they weren't. Chronicling the political lives of a group of young activists as they help to recast Labour as an electable force, this two-parter seems calculated to damage the Government as much as is possible.

Ostensibly, The Project has been made as a clarion call against political apathy, allowing voters to see the cynicism that lies behind a political process with which they feel instinctive disillusionment. No doubt the programme makers feel it will inspire politicians to mend their ways, and inspire the electorate to demand that they do so. Actually, this little entertainment can only make matters worse. With its unremitting negativity and pitiless characters, The Project stirs only repugnance in the viewer. In its subject – the Labour Party – it can only stir further paranoia, bitterness, internal strife, and distrust of the media.

And this medium, the drama-documentary, certainly deserves to be distrusted. The Project pushes the format to its limit, grabbing all the immediacy of dealing in "reality", while taking all the liberties conferred by "dramatic licence". All the young people whose dirty, scheming manoeuvres we see in detail don't exist. They are composites of various real-life party activists, the core fictional group living together in a handily tried-and-tested This Life-style drama set-up. From the complex sexual relationships, to the booze, the drugs and the ambition-driven treachery, all This Life life is here.

But the grown-ups in whose name awful deeds are being done by awful people – chiefly Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – are real, seen only on television screens. It may be fun for viewers to speculate on whether there's a bit of Peter Mandelson in this chap, or whether that one is just Philip Gould with a pseudonym. But when it comes down to it, there is no hiding place for the Labour leadership. Undisguised, they are the real villains of this piece, accused by the actors around them, mouthing from a script.

The programme makers are keen to emphasise the authenticity of their screenplay. They boast in their publicity about how Alastair Campbell warned all special advisers, researchers and party employees not to talk to them. His ban came too late, though, as more than 100 insiders had already given their testimony. Mr Kosminsky himself has told the press that every single incident is based on real events revealed by MPs and party workers, whose anonymous evidence has been given to BBC lawyers who needed detailed proofs of each and every example of treachery, falsehood, bad faith and betrayal.

What this means for the fictional characters is that each, over a short period of time on screen, is portrayed as being the perpetrator of the sins of many, perpetrated over years. What a contrast it makes with the real stars of the show, Blair and Brown, shown only in real time, framed by the amoral miasma all around them, but unable to refute it, because it is only based on fact. (One thing you do notice, though, is how they have aged in a few short years. For cynics driven only by the will to power, these men seem to have a lot of sleepless nights.)

Mr Kominsky talks about his own disillusionment, and that of others, with the New Labour project. My own experience has not been quite the same. I didn't need to wait all these years for a muck-racking drama to clue me in. I resigned from the Labour Party in the run-up to the 1997 election, sickened enough by the policies, never mind the machinations.

I know, and realised from that day, that the political party I want to represent me is not one that could gain power. In my admittedly biased view, people are too apathetic and disengaged to make the sacrifices that a functioning left-of-centre society would demand. The Project, though, criticises from the left, even though this sort of criticism only moves the majority rightwards. Mr Kominsky's film ignores such harsh realities, though – reality being a mere hook in drama-doc-land – and tries to suggest that it is New Labour that has created the wider culture of apathy and disengagement. The truth, however, is that apathy and disengagement created New Labour.

The most repulsive thing about The Project is that apathy and disengagement created it, too. Mr Kominsky trained as a documentary maker, but found that only when he spiced up reality with drama did he find an audience. Before New Labour came along, people were already switching off from telly about real life. Likewise, before New Labour came along, people were already switching off from the political process. Just as the soulless, defeatist solution that New Labour came up with was an endless reliance on spin and presentation, this film relies on the same things. The truth is in there somewhere, but gussied up so much by the dramatist's art that it's merely one element in the marketability of the package.

And The Project certainly needs marketability, because it can't sell itself on drama alone. It's confusing, repetitive, meandering and unengaging. For all that it's based on "real people", not one of the characters seems remotely real. I don't know if Mr Kosminsky's movie is more clever and post-modern than I give it credit for being, but the curious thing about The Project is that it is really hard to discern one character from another. One main character, usefully, is female and mixed race. But the men! I finally realised that one sandy guy was Paul, while the other sandy guy wasn't Paul. Until that moment of revelation I couldn't work out at all what the sandy guy was up to or how it was that he managed to hold down so many jobs.

This reminded me of the novels of Bret Easton Ellis, for whom the Doppelgänger is a powerful satirical leitmotiv denoting a terrible alienation from the self and society. In the film, I fear, this is accidental, more a symptom of the programme-maker's desire to cram so much miscreance into each composite that there is no room left for an ounce of mitigating human sympathy.

Yet if there is a lesson in this version of the New Labour story, it truly is that people find it hard nowadays to know who they are, or what they stand for, in relation to a bewilderingly complex wider society. The drama documentary too is an alienating form, adding an insulating layer of artifice to a reality we find too shocking, or simply too boring, to contemplate.

The prospect of newspaper hunts to identify the real people behind the drama in The Project simply adds another stratum of disfunctionality to the whole nasty, distancing affair. Let's hope it's a brisk news'n'trivia week next week, so this doesn't happen.

There's a moment in The Project which feels again like a fiendishly clever comment on the modern condition, but probably isn't. When our anti-heroes first move into their shared house, it's a mess, but with potential. Immediately, the brain leaps to Changing Rooms, and to the thought that seeing a makeover of this potential-filled space would be a more congenial way of passing some time in front of the box than a long portrayal of dressed-up-for-dinner political skullduggery.

By the time the show has run its course, the house is looking very elegant, but with no discernable input from any of its occupants, or even from Carol Smillie. The Victorian pile starts out as a seedy postgraduate crash-pad, and ends up worth a fortune.

This onward march of the voting public's property prices, let's face it, was what the New Labour project was really all about, and why it gained and kept its power. On that measure, the project has been a wonderful success. Poor old Mr Blair, alone among the upper middle classes, has missed out on the bonanza. No wonder he's so desperate to hang on at Downing Street.

d.orr@independent.co.uk