The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries, Edited by Alastair Campbell and Richard Stott,
Hutchinson, £25

The ability to shape and influence the mass media has come to be regarded as a key aspect of modern political management. In the days of innocence, the job of handling the media used to be left to good-natured flunkeys who also doubled up as speech-writers. As the media became more intrusive, competitive and less inclined to be part of a gentleman’s club, the job of the media adviser changed to that of an image handler. The new communications responsibilities included every conceivable facet of a politician’s life — beginning with policy and stretching into personal life. Rather than politics dictating the image, it was the image that began shaping politics.

Courtesy the mass-circulation tabloid press that set the agenda for the others, British politics has had an overdose of image management. Hungry for more and more ‘exclusives’, the media have decided that a person in the public eye doesn’t deserve a private life. At first, this intrusiveness was confined to filmstars and the royal family. In time, it embraced every MP and borough councillor. The ignominious demise of the John Major government, for example, can be attributed to the dogged media determination to peep through each and every bedroom keyhole and discover an incredible amount of naughty things.

Tony Blair changed the one-sided tilt in favour of the media bloodhounds. In the 13 years that he dominated British politics, first as leader of the Opposition and then as a three-term prime minister, he successfully ran circles around the media — at least till the Iraq war soured an incredibly long honeymoon and precipitated a messy divorce. The man credited with this successful communications strategy was the talented, foul-mouthed journalist, Alastair Campbell, described by Charles Moore (former editor of The Daily Telegraph) as “the most pointlessly combative person in history”. It was Campbell’s relentless bid to get the most advantageous media coverage of Blair that led to the term, ‘spin doctor’, being reviled by the chattering classes. Indeed, so successful was the ‘spin’ that Campbell himself became the media story, overshadowing Blair and his government. In 2003, just as charges of “sexed up” intelligence reports shook Blair, Mathew Parris, sketch writer for The Times, paid Campbell the ultimate back-handed compliment: “Aware that his emperor had no clothes — no compass, no plan, no new ideas of any sort — this communications director has from day one camouflaged the emptiness with a barrage of noise, colour and movement. Dazzle, distract, dismay.”

If the diaries of Campbell are anything to go by, the praise was well-deserved, except that Blair, far from being an amiable fool with his trademark “Bunsen burner” smile, was an equal partner in a game that reeked of over-cleverness. The New Labour project that led to the party of socialism embracing the market economy with passion and discarding hoary shibboleths such as nationalization was not an expedient Campbell invention. The spin doctor merely gave a Blair conviction the most favourable projection. The idea and initiative was Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s and Peter Mandleson’s. Campbell was the bloodhound that helped clear the path.

There are two ways in which the encyclopaedic Blair Years can be read. First, chroniclers of contemporary history will find a wealth of details of the way the government worked, the conflicts within the cabinet and the Labour Party, and wonderful pen portraits of individual players. Before he joined the Blair team, Campbell was among top-notch journalists blessed with a compelling, contemporary style. The diaries, for example, are replete with anecdotes of President Bill Clinton’s coolness in the face of crisis, Gordon Brown’s wariness of the Blair team, Boris Yeltsin’s extrovert ways, the charming deviousness of Princess Diana, the rarefied world of Prince Charles and the prickliness of Cherie Blair. In between are stray observations such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee had “no fear of silence” and Blair was paranoid about a receding hairline that make the entries compelling reading. I particularly liked Clinton’s description of King Hussein’s funeral in Aman as the “world leader’s day out” and Prince Charles positioning himself as “head of the forces of conservatism”.

However, these asides are eclipsed by the passion with which Campbell writes about his media management. From the initial pages it is quite clear that Campbell regards his erstwhile colleagues as the worst bunch of “shits” and absolutely loathsome. To him, they exist to be manipulated and intimidated because the media personified the worst values known to mankind, particularly a grievance culture that saw nothing good in anyone.

Campbell proceeded to deal with this through a blend of bluster and raw intimidation. What is amazing is how successful he was. He could vet copies of the News of the World before publication, threaten The Sun with pressure from the owner, snarl at the BBC and play off the Daily Mirror and Sun against each other.

How did he acquire such a clout? The diaries don’t suggest an iota of niceness in his character. Campbell was always blowing a fuse and rubbing people the wrong way. Maybe this is why his initial success paved the way for the total ignominy heaped on the ‘spin’ trade. Campbell was done and undone by his own disagreeable brilliance.