'Full Menu Junket' slated for top BAFTA award

Director Stanley Rubric's uncompromising exposé of New Labour's political machine is widely tipped to take the Best Picture BAFTA at the 19 February awards. His first film since Accounts Wide Shut — the critically acclaimed scrutiny of Tory sleaze in the 1990s — Full Menu Junket revisits the theme with a devastating insider's view of a new MP's induction process.

Set against the background of the looming Iraq war in early 2003, the film stars Matthew Mealticket as Councillor Ernest Poker. The story follows his career after he unexpected wins a formerly safe Tory seat for New Labour. Summoned to the backbencher training school in Millbank Tower, he is subjected to a brainwashing series of Powerpoint presentations and role-playing scenarios, designed to destroy his individuality and ensure total compliance in the forthcoming crucial series of votes on the war. Constantly humiliated and harangued into submission by sadistic chief whip R. Lee Gourmet, Poker is forced to abandon his cherished notions of social equality and become complicit in corrupting the democratic process forever.

His journey to the dark side of public life starts small with inflating meal expense claims, but soon escalates into non-payment of council tax, obtaining a British passport for a fellow MP's Philippine nanny and acting as guarantor for a cabinet minister's mortgage. The final test of his blind obedience and unquestioning loyalty arrives when he is required to compile a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Promised a junior minister's post if he keeps his mouth shut, Poker is sent on his first solo mission: to smear an investigative journalist. Leading his team of special advisers through the battlefield of claim and counter-claim, his moment of truth comes when he is forced to watch helplessly as the journalist brings down the Interior Minister for the second time by revealing the expense account favours granted to his socialite mistress.

Skirting around the danger by pretending to be her friend, Poker successfully outflanks the hated scribbler by enticing her to join a dodgy share scam and then sending a tape of her conversations to a rival news channel. Still naïvely believing Poker to be her friend, the hapless hack desperately appeals for Poker's help live on Newsnight, only for him to finish her career off in front of the nation's chattering classes. An astonished Kirsty Wark can only swoon admiringly: "What a hardcore political operator!"

The final scene of the film is a dreamy sequence of images as, unmourning of his former principles, Poker and his cronies celebrate their success with an extravagant, all-expenses-paid feast, before returning in triumph to the houses of parliament.

Previously

• Oscars promise island of normality in world gone mad
• Academy overcomes prejudice to reward acclaimed director
• Mel Gibson to shoot Finnegan's Wake in Hittite