Campbell's Soup Oct 26, '07 2:20 AM
I had rather dismissed the Campbell Diaries as yet another
retiree capitalising on his former position. I mean - who keeps detailed
diaries except someone going to sell up when they retire? And it'll presumably
be a best seller, because it's him writing the book.
For those who don't know, Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair's
right hand man, hated by the media. The man who invented spin. The man who was
so obsessed with presentation, he was probably responsible for the Iraq war and
the death of David Kelly. He was so powerful that when Development Minister
Clare Short resigned, the first person she rang was him. 'Don't you think you
should be speaking to Tony?' He suggested. 'Oh, I thought you'd be angry,' she replied. I thought
I'd better get it over with . . .!'
He resigned in 2003 but came back to help with the election
in 2005. So he's written his memoirs, clearly an insight into the Blair years.
Or is it? My ears first pricked up when he was interviewed
on the Today programme. His 2.5m word diaries, he claimed, have been edited to
350,000 words for publication. So what has he cut out, I immediately thought?
Well, of course he's filtered out anything about Gordon Brown and anything that
might affect his chances in the next election. He has also made sure that there
is nothing there that can harm Blair. What can that leave in the soup I wonder?
I also wondered how a man who runs the PM's office managed
to find time to write 2.5m words while he was working. Well, of course he
didn't. He has said in his press publicity that he wrote his diary most nights
after retiring for the night. I'm not saying he's been economical with the
truth - God forbid that the King of Spin should not be as open as possible in
his book, but I wonder simply how much detail he did remember when he got round
to writing it all down. Can we rely on his account of the truth? How has he
subsequently edited this account of the Blair years? How has he thickened this
thinned out soup?
I have only read published extracts of course, but in
conversation he is apparently unable to recall names and dates and sequences of
events; it’s not clear whether this is deliberate. And I have to say, for
a man reviled by the press, the newspapers have found curiously little to get
their teeth into in the content of the book.
But the key point about his reign, that I'm sure colours his
writing, is that the more he tried to get his version of events across to the
media, the more sceptical they became. 'I was determined we were going to set
the agenda,' he is supposed to have said, 'not the media . . .' But the media
gradually came to mistrust anything he said and report accordingly.
And this is what spurred me to write something. We all
accept what is now called spin. It is simply what used to be called
'presentation'. If you want to put taxes up, you don't say 'I'm going to take
more money away from you, people of Britain. Sorry. Please still vote for me.' You might explain how Britain is beleaguered and everyone
needs to play their part in boosting the economy, or you might explain that the
rest of world has higher taxes than Britain, so our taxes are being brought
more into line, you might even just blame it directly on the EU, or you might
'leak' to the press that taxes have to go up 10% and then the following week
announce that you've managed to keep tax increases to 2 ½ %, or whatever. What
I mean is that all this is normal and understandable. People have generally to
accept your policies and they will accept this kind of persuasion.
But I have a great respect for the media and, if they are
not able to explain what is happening in Government because of some dubious
press release or threat from No 10, and if information emanating from the Press
Secretary is always taken as gospel, and if the media's efforts to probe the
truth are also finessed, then democracy begins to be overridden. We vote our
government in and have to accept a certain amount of devolution of authority to
it. But I reserve the right to question and challenge all they do. If our press
are only able to present us with No 10 controlled news, how can I exercise that
right?
Campbell admitted in the radio interview that his aim was to
ensure that the labour government won at all costs. This implies to me that
government policies were not as important as the popularity of the party. What
does that mean for me? Are the policies aimed at me or is No 10 simply trying
to deceive me about the aims of the party and its policies? I used to think the
term 'spin' was a media-invented word to denigrate what Campbell was doing and
that what he was doing was only what diplomats and indeed sections of the press
do - present the news from their perspective. But, maybe the press were right;
maybe there was something more sinister there. Whatever - I will consume this
soup with a pinch of salt.
Not a flavour of soup I'd like.....can I have the broccoli and stilton, please?
ReplyDeleteMilliband could do with a slick operator like Campbell to improve his "Grommit" image.
ReplyDelete