Tony Blair’s one-time press officer Alastair Campbell’s confessions of a Svengali at the court of King Blair are mind-bogglingly tedious. A great diary should be true to its moment. Censor it into a work of political propaganda and it ceases to be a first rough draft of history, and becomes a first rough distortion. As for the ”Blair years”, it is hard to believe that they were one long jeer against the media. Blair’s Cheshire cat has clearly eaten a rotten mouse.
The Blairs never did dignity. We have had Cherie’s abusive ”We won’t miss you” shouted at the press. Now we have Campbell’s macho obscenities and complaints of ”a culture of press negativity”, and this from a former columnist whose collusion with the Labour leadership to sabotage the previous Conservative government made old-fashioned press bias seem like driven snow. The book has been launched as if it were a royal wedding dress, with leaked extracts, blogs and gossipy titbits about ”Diana”. No reviewers were allowed advance copies lest they dent Campbell’s massive sensitivity and self-importance. Publishers have a lot to answer for these days: bribing all political eras to end not with a bang but a whinger.
The truth is that Campbell was a first-class press officer and his book is at its best as an account of derring-do in the Westminster lobby. He transformed the game of political propaganda, making it proactive and aggressive rather than reactive and defensive. He understood the need ”to change the terms of trade” in media relations, to ensure uncluttered news management and keep presentation on top of events. He must have read Goebbels. A modern political movement needs more than a press officer. It needs a cheerleader with only one loyalty, to the boss.
From his assumption of the leadership of the Labour Party in 1994, Blair worked solidly to eradicate checks on his office, first from the Labour Party and then from the Constitution. This left the press as the one critic beyond his control, a daily mirror held up by Campbell and Peter Mandelson, with a running commentary on his performance. Campbell’s shielding of his weak and gullible boss from the world’s most reptilian press was easy to ridicule. But after Labour’s experience at the media’s hands, he was right to take no prisoners. As Team Blair stripped Labour of its residual socialism and prepared for the great Thatcherite U-turn, Campbell’s keeping the lid on what was happening was masterly.
Conventional wisdom holds that Blair should never have brought Campbell into Downing Street. His ego was too big and his responses too oppositional. He treated government as if it were a football team that needed only a foul-mouthed manager to win a match. But Blair craved Campbell and kept him on to wrestle with an outdated government information machine that Campbell expertly reformed even as it tore him apart emotionally.
Campbell’s failing was the opposite of the one usually laid at his door, that he used the power of government to corrupt the press. From the moment he entered Downing Street he used the power of the press to corrupt government. To him a good decision was anything that next day’s (right-wing newspaper) editors would applaud. If Campbell declared a policy unacceptable to the media, it was dead. Since he operated with the authority of the prime minister, ministers had to take his word as gospel. Soon government was operating on a strict 24-hour cycle, measured not in policy outcomes but in headlines, news snatches, soundbites.
The removal of (most of) Gordon Brown and the Treasury from the diaries unbalances the central tension in all governments and thus leaves the play without a villain. The memoirs of the Downing Street adviser Derek Scott, even David Blunkett, are more revealing. But when Campbell starts playing the politician as propagandist for the war in Iraq, he flies too close to the sun.
The hundred or so pages on ”why I was right [and the BBC wrong] on weapons of mass destruction” now read as fantasy, given the frantic doctoring that we know was done under Campbell’s aegis. As for the great defence, that everyone in Downing Street ”thought we were doing the right thing at the time”, I am sure Chamberlain thought the same at Munich, and Eden at Suez. We pay our masters not to think the right things but to do them.
The real casualty of this overblown saga is not Campbell but the man who overpromoted him. It was Blair who, on coming to office, ordered the Cabinet secretary, Robin Butler, to replace civil servants with his courtiers. It was Blair who moved Campbell into the old chief whip’s office and gave media strategy primacy over government strategy. It was Blair who wanted presentation wherever he went, like a film star with a hairdresser in tow.
Blair should have seen the damage that Campbell’s ubiquity and management style were doing to the workings of his government. How could there be open Cabinet discussion when the prime minister’s henchman was in the room jotting down every word of dissent, with added bile, for leaking to the press if need be? It made ministers unwilling to take risks. It fed the publicity machine with cod statistics while turning every internal debate into a flaming row. It snapped the links between policy and delivery and left Blair after 2003 miserable and floundering.
The cruel photograph chosen for the cover says it all. Blair gazes up into Campbell’s eyes like an obedient labrador. The penultimate line in the book is equally bathetic: ”As I left, TB had said, ‘You do realise that I will phone you every day, don’t you,” True or false? Spin or substance? Who cares? — Â