Official Secrets

Katharine Gun was a translator/analyst at GCHQ in Cheltenham in 2003 when the United States and Great Britain were trying to get a UN Resolution to attack Iraq. She was presented with evidence of this pretext (that was declared legal very late in the game in Britain) and decided to leak it. When the authorities clamped down on everyone in her department, she chose to put her personal wellbeing behind the moral opposition to an unjust war, and she confessed. You might remember Tony Blair’s “calculus of risk”: well Katharine Gun made a similar but ultimately very different decision.

This superb film about Gun, who is played by Keira Knightley in by far her best performance to date, should be a required watch for everyone. It’s tricky to separate the original context from this dramatic retelling, but it’s a film that should be seen with The Post and All The President’s Men and any film that concerns itself with the real life struggle between an individual and the system which they’ve chosen to take on in a David and Goliath fight; films, for example, like Snowden, Belle and Erin Brockovich.

Katharine Gun’s circumstances were further complicated by the fact that she’d married a Turkish Kurd, whose right to be in the country was based on his marital status, but who had to comply with certain conditions in order to maintain his status. This whiff of topicality lends potency to an era in recent history when anger seemed to be pushed to the maximum on both sides of the argument, but today it would almost seem like revisiting a rather quaint period except that it’s obviously still relevant and always will be.

The film is at its best when it shows the normality of Katharine’s life, even as she was dealing with other confidential matters and talking to colleagues about the work. One particular colleague who expresses admiration and remorse for Katharine is told by her: “You didn’t do anything wrong” and the reply is “Yeah, but I didn’t do anything right either.” The depiction of a person departing from everyone else in order to take themselves on a path which they know to be right is the best part of the film, and it’s because she sells it so completely that Keira Knightly is so good. Equally the application of justice on an individual, and it’s justice that’s coming down direct from very top, is shown to be meted out by civil servants who’re exercising their own judgement with disdain.

The media is portrayed in the film in a way that’s probably okay once you’ve seen the whole thing and can consider it entirely, but The Observer sequence is notably less polished and a little more stagey. Matt Smith is the journalist Martin Bright, and it’s a good performance—although it’s very Matt Smith. The memorandum that’s leaked is accidentally spell-checked into British English, so its authenticity is immediately doubted by a media establishment in America that was obviously eager to rubbish the entire story. The newspaper had taken a pro-war stance even though many of its staff held a different view. The leak was supposedly a gamble that could sink the newspaper, but they worked with the story, with the rather unusual help of Ed Vulliami (Rhys Ifans) a crusading reporter who clearly believed that the war was wrong. And Rhys Ifans gives a performance that’s so dialled up that even Nicholas Cage would advise him to chill it.

Fortunately the rest of the film pulls back as the legal team gets behind Katharine Gun’s case. Ralph Feinnes plays the Liberty lawyer Ben Emmerson, and he is so good. The legal force of the pressure group which included Shami Chakrabarti (Indira Varma) brings hope to Katharine and provides the courtroom drama feel of the piece. The film goes from spy drama—the feeling of acting alone at great risk—to journalism movie to courtroom drama, never once forgetting that it’s the story of what can happen when individuals decide that they know better than most other people and turn out to be right. It’s not exactly a film that makes you want to punch the air, and the law doesn’t always look exciting and dramatic when it’s being correctly carried out, but this film is a wonderful reminder of how important individuals can be when they choose to do the right thing.