Mediaocracy
In the eighties and early nineties, Labour had been savaged by much of the press. Neil Kinnock had a terrible time. When Blair became leader the people immediately around Kinnock at the time, Mandelson and Campbell, remembered it well. Campbell had worked for the Daily Mirror in the dirtiest, most cynical end of the newspaper market and came away thinking that most journalists were idle liars, as well as biased against Labour. He was tribal and assumed the rest of the world was too. Mandelson, with a background in television, was a master of image, and later of the killer briefing. So it is hardly surprising that New Labour became the most media-obsessed political party in British history. We have seen how Blair opened out to Labour’s traditional enemies in the press after becoming leader, and how he exploited ‘sleaze’ to destroy John Major’s reputation. On the way to winning power, New Labour turned itself into a kind of perpetual media news-desk, with a plan for what every political headline should say every day, an endless ‘grid’ of announcements, images, soundbites and rebuttals, constantly pressing down on journalists, their editors and owners, fighting for every adjective and exclamation mark.
It is now incontestable that the same way of thinking was brought into power and did terrible damage to the government’s reputation and that of politics generally. Bizarrely, it was assumed that rival newspaper groups with different views about say, law and order, could be kept friendly by Blair telling them what they wanted to hear – even though they would later confer. The attempted bullying of journalists, which grew much worse when some of the scandals described above began to break, was met with increasing resistance. Number Ten’s news machine began to be widely disbelieved. The word ‘spin’ was attached to almost everything it said. Diaries published by one of the former Downing Street spin-doctors, Lance Price, show how justified this suspicion was. On the first Mandelson resignation, he notes: ‘We said (quite falsely) that Peter had rung TB last night and said he wanted to resign.’ Of a Sunday newspaper interview which Blair had given calling for a new ‘moral purpose’, Price says: ‘It was totally vacuous and was made up just to give us a good story after two twelve-year-old girls were found to have got themselves pregnant. But it worked…’
There are many other examples. Some, collected by the journalist Peter Oborne, include the smearing of Chris Patten, the former Tory chairman and Hong Kong governor for leaking intelligence reports, a false trail to deflect attention from the breakup of Robin Cook’s marriage; the assertion by Peter Mandelson that the Dome would feature an exciting new game called ‘surf-ball’ (which never existed); and Blair’s own deceptions, such as over Mandelson’s own plans to become an MP. While there are exceptional circumstances in which political leaders have to deceive, such as when soldiers’ lives would be at risk from disclosure, or when a currency was about to be devalued, journalists came to believe the currency of truth was now devalued. Anything asserted by Number Ten, and later Blair himself, was picked over in minute semantic detail. Worryingly often, the picking-over turned out to be justified. The ‘non-denial denial’ became an essential phrase in reporting New Labour. At election time statistics were twisted even beyond the normal elastic rules of political debate. There was a spiral downwards. Journalists grew more aggressive in their assertions and began consigning the (disbelieved) official denials to the final paragraph of their stories. Some ministers drew the conclusion that the press was so hostile it was legitimate to use any trick or form of words to mislead them. Others complained that every time they were frank, their words were twisted and used against them: why bother? Before long a government which had arrived in office supported by almost all the national papers, was being attacked daily by almost all of them. And the papers themselves were selling fewer copies. Ultimately, cynicism is boring.
The most infamous confrontation between New Labour and the media, however, was not with a newspaper but with a broadcaster. One of the domestic consequences of the Iraq war was the worst falling out between the BBC and the government since the Suez crisis. At issue was whether or not officials in Number Ten had ‘sexed up’ that dossier about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. As previously described, the dossier blended two cultures, the cautious, secretive, nuanced culture of intelligence gathering for internal government purposes, and the spin-doctors’ culture of opinion-forming, in this case to win more of the public over to back a coming war. But the cultures did not blend, they curdled. At seven minutes after six one morning at the end of May 2003, Radio Four’s Today programme broadcast an interview between its presenter John Humphrys and its defence correspondent, a dishevelled digger of a journalist called Andrew Gilligan. He alleged that Downing Street had ‘sexed up’ the dossier beyond what intelligence sources thought was reasonable, particularly in saying that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within forty-five minutes. Campbell quickly and unequivocally denied the truth of Gilligan’s assertion and demanded an apology. Gilligan went further, in an article for a newspaper in which he named Campbell. As Iraq burned, Number Ten and the BBC began a war of their own.
In general battles between journalists and politicians do not spill real blood. There is bitterness. There may be resignations. But when the smoke clears, everyone gets up again and goes back to work. When Campbell widened his criticism of the BBC to attack it for having an anti-war agenda, he had no idea quite what he was setting off. Yet there was a certain recklessness in his mood. He confided to his diary that he wanted to ‘fuck Gilligan’ and wanted ‘a clear win’ against the corporation. On the BBC side, it would turn out that Gilligan had been loose with his words, claiming rather more than he knew for sure, so opening a flank to Campbell; nor was Gilligan frank with his colleagues. The BBC’s Director General, Greg Dyke, who had been hounded in the press as a Blair crony, was ferociously robust in defending the corporation against Campbell and was strongly supported by his Chairman, Gavyn Davies, whose wife was Gordon Brown’s senior aide. He too was determined to demonstrate his independence.
Neither side gave way until eventually it was revealed that a government scientist with a high reputation as an arms inspector, Dr David Kelly, was probably the source of Gilligan’s information. Downing Street did not name him but allowed journalists to keep throwing names at them until they confirmed who he was; a bizarre game. Because he was not involved directly in the joint intelligence committee or its work, ‘outing’ Kelly as the secret mole would, in the government’s eyes, discredit the BBC story. Suddenly thrown into the cauldron of a media row, Kelly himself was evasive when aggressively questioned by a committee of MPs. Visibly nervous, he denied that he could have been Gilligan’s informant. Yet he was. A fastidious, serious-minded man who had supported the toppling of Saddam and had served his country honourably as a weapons inspector, Kelly seems to have cracked under the strain. On a quiet July morning in 2003 he walked five miles to the edge of a wood near his Oxfordshire home where he took painkillers, opened up a pen-knife, and killed himself. This media battle had drawn blood in the most awful way. Blair, arriving in Tokyo after triumphantly addressing both houses of Congress about the fall of Saddam, was asked: ‘Prime Minister, do you have blood on your hands?’ He looked as if he was about to be sick.
Back home, he ordered an inquiry under a judge, Lord Hutton, which engaged the minute attention of the world of politics through the autumn of 2003. Much was revealed about Blair’s informal, sloppily recorded and cliquish style of governing, and the involvement of his political staff in discussion which led to the final dossier. But with the head of the JIC and other officials insisting they had not been leant on, or obliged to say anything they did not believe, and a very strong public performance by Blair, Lord Hutton concluded Gilligan’s assertion that the government knew its forty-five-minute claim was wrong, was unfounded. The intelligence committee might have ‘subconsciously’ been persuaded to strengthen its language because they knew what the Prime Minister wished the effect of the dossier to be; but it was consistent with the intelligence at the time. Hutton decided that Kelly had probably killed himself because of a loss of self-esteem and the threat to his reputation, but that nobody else was to blame. (There was a strongly held private belief among some doctors and journalists that Kelly had been murdered but so far, not a shred of hard evidence has come to light.) Hutton attacked the BBC’s editorial controls. His findings had been leaked a day early to Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, which robustly set the political mood: victory for Blair, humiliation for the BBC. With Blair defiant and claiming complete vindication in the Commons both Dyke and Davies resigned almost immediately. Distraught employees walked out from their offices to cheer them as they left. The corporation had suffered its worst day ever. Yet the stakes were high on both sides. Had Hutton found against the Prime Minister, it would have been Blair being applauded by his tearful staff as he walked into retirement.
Feeling vindicated and as aggressive as ever about the quality of journalism, Campbell then left Downing Street. Blair had concluded that the age of spin had done them all far more harm than good. It was time, despite his personal debt to Campbell, for a new broom. A widely trusted and traditionalist press officer who had worked for Roy Hattersley, called David Hill, was appointed. Slowly, painfully, both the BBC and Number Ten moved on – although there was plenty of trouble still ahead. By his last couple of years in office, Blair had come to realize that the frantic headline-chasing and rebuttal of the early years had merely helped stoke a mood of cynicism in the press. The habits of truth-shaving, subtle deception and syntactical evasion, which had once seemed magnificently clever, had done more harm than any brief newspaper victories they might have achieved. After Iraq, one of the most common jibes made about him was simply ‘Bliar’. For a Prime Minister who in his early days had been able to say that most people thought him ‘a pretty straight kind of guy’, it was a terrible come-down.