/ 1 August 2003

When spin comes unspun

The spin doctor is in crisis. Long Live the Spin! From afar, British politics resembles a tragi-farce. But there is also fable. The BBC claims that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, is behind the “sexing up” of the case for invading Iraq. The unelected Campbell appears before the House of Commons’s select committee on foreign affairs and berates and bullies the hapless MPs into submission.

But that is not enough for Blair. Already one of their “dossiers of evidence” against Saddam Hussein has been exposed as having been copied from a 12-year-old student dissertation — an act of plagiarism that would make even Darrel Bristow-Bovey blush. So the credibility of the other, earlier dossier, with its dramatic claim that Saddam could muster the force of his weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes, becomes essential to Blair’s integrity. The underlying insinuation of the BBC reports is that Campbell added the 45-minute sound bite for presentational purposes — which may have been decisive in winning public support for Britain’s military intervention.

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So the “mole” must be found, outed and savaged. Which is exactly what happened. Though exactly how government weapons inspector David Kelly’s identity became public remains a central question for the judicial inquiry that Blair appointed in time-honoured fashion to buy himself time.

Stung by criticism that they are pathetic pro-government patsies, after their humiliation by Campbell, the select committee MPs take it out on Kelly. One MP accuses him of being served up as “chaff” on behalf of the government.

On a warm summer’s afternoon, under the pressure of what he calls “dark forces”, Kelly does the decent thing and falls on his sword. Another miserable demise to add to the pantheon of whistle-blower victims.

British prime ministers have a long history of being overseas at their worst moments of political crisis. Who can forget the last Labour MP Jim Callaghan arriving home during the 1978 winter of discontent to ask, “crisis, what crisis?” Margaret Thatcher found herself in Paris the night that her back-benchers turned against her in the leadership challenge of 1990.

Blair arrives in Japan ashen-faced. At a press conference last Saturday, a journalist asks him if he is going to resign. It is always a Rubicon moment for a politician. Even if you survive the crisis, you are diminished forever.

Digesting the significance leaves Blair speechless, somehow his face greys further, and he scurries from the room.

Then, overnight, the BBC decides to announce that Kelly was in fact the single source. This puts them in the dock and diffuses the searching heat against the government. Single- source stories are always inherently precarious — the more so when the story accuses a government of exaggerating the evidence for declaring war.

The British establishment is in a confused frenzy. The Tories have always regarded the BBC as full of dangerous pinkos. So has New Labour. With scores to settle, Blair’s former right-hand man, Peter Mandelson, leads the attack, while his close friend Robert Harris uses his Daily Telegraph column on Monday to launch a witheringly brilliant assault on Campbell.

To support his central argument that Campbell is too powerful, Harris reports that Campbell has called the prime minister a “prat” in front of one witness and has told him to “get a fucking move on” during a meeting. “Not since the days of the Wars of the Roses has there been such an over-mighty subject at court,” claims Harris. His call — “Who will rid us of the over-mighty Campbell?” — echoes that of the respected commentator on the liberal left, Hugo Young, whose own column was headed “Kelly didn’t stand a chance against the frenzy of No 10”.

Young’s conclusion is the essence of the fable: “That’s how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man’s life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own ¤reputation to be the core value his country must defend.”

On one level it is all so terribly English — the whiff of Profumo, the pathetic yet genteel suicide in the gentle Oxfordshire woodland, the self-serving accusations among the chattering classes — yet the diagnostic morality of the fable deserves far wider consideration.

First, the occupation of Iraq. The contest over the legitimacy of the war will not yield to spin. It was an unlawful war. The case for the invasion made out by George W Bush and Blair was flimsy at the time. Now the “evidence” that was presented is being exposed for the tissue of lies that it was. No weapons of mass destruction have been found.

Second, those responsible for the deception and the loss of life that ensued are slowly being held accountable. Unfortunately, neither the British nor United States’s democratic model is efficient when it comes to accountability of this sort. Which is why the media and pressure groups are forced to play such a significant role. Besides, one of the greatest cover-ups of all time is under way in Washington as well as London — whistle-blowers on both sides of the Atlantic are being viciously targeted by both governments.

Hence, regrettably, I can not say with the confidence that more healthy political systems would permit that either Bush or Blair will be forced from power. Both happen to be well endowed in terms of both simple luck and tactical wit. But trust in Blair has plummeted and he has thus contrived to make the insipid Conservative Party leader, Iain Duncan-Smith, appear electable; there are now just two percentage points between the Tories and New Labour.

So a third lesson is obvious: over-do the spin and you will come unstuck. New Labour has been obsessed with form over content ever since it came into office in 1997. This obsession has become a cancer at the heart of the administration. If Blair and Campbell are found to have spun the evidence on Iraq and tried to cover it up by threatening Kelly, which is the rebuttable presumption for the judicial inquiry, then New Labour will deserve the demise that must surely follow.

The problem is that one of the laws of politics is that the less substance you have to offer, the more spin you are impelled to add. But the counter-law is that the weaker the product the harder it is to spin. As the South African spin doctor Tony Heard once said: “You can’t surf if there’s no wave.”

So to the last point. A week before Kelly’s death, as the controversy over the “dodgy dossiers” grew, Mandelson’s think tank hosted a Third Way seminar, in which Thabo Mbeki was invited to participate for the first time. Listening to Bill Clinton address the gathering surely made Mbeki ask himself whether he is a true disciple and reflect on how vacuous the so-called Third Way really is. Which is why it needs the charm of Bill Clinton, the baloney of Blair and finds itself so dependent on spin doctory.

All leaders want to leave a firm imprint in the sand and so it is also what drives history-craving heads of state to wage unnecessary war. The Third Way can never deliver decisive, progressive change at home, so a legacy must be carved internationally. Blair has the war; Mbeki has Nepad. It is a common thread in politics. Blair is not the first; Mbeki will not be the last.

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