Campbell leads cavalry charge for Blair

Alastair Campbell's appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry this week was simply designed to lay the ground for the main event in a few week's time when Tony Blair himself takes the stand. But the former Prime Minister's plans to mount a robust defence of the Iraq War mean more bad news for his successor. Here's today's Journal column.

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When I heard on the radio a week or so ago that Alastair Campbell was to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War this week, my first thought was of the Dickensian hero Sydney Carton.

As fans of A Tale of Two Cities will know, it was Carton who, in a supreme act of self-sacrifice at the climax of the novel, uttered the immortal words: “It is a far, far, better thing than I have ever done….”

Would Campbell, a man whose practice of the black arts of spin and smear has done more to degrade British politics in the past 20 years than any other individual, finally be prepared to do a “better thing” than he has ever done in the cause of truth?

Well, in a sense, the answer was yes. Because, although Campbell remains completely unrepentant about the Iraq War, and his role in inveigling the public into supporting it, he has, at least, finally been prepared to be honest about how and why it happened.

Appearing at the inquiry on Tuesday, the former Downing Street director of communications was asked by panel member Sir Roderick Lyne about a series of letters between Tony Blair and President George Bush in the run-up to the conflict.

He replied that the tenor of the letters was: "We are going to be with you in making sure that Saddam Hussein faces up to his obligations and that Iraq is disarmed. If that cannot be done diplomatically and it is to be done militarily, Britain will be there.”

The significance of this revelation is that it provides yet more conclusive evidence that Mr Blair’s determination to remove Saddam over-rode all other political and diplomatic considerations.

As the former Cabinet Secretary Lord Turnbull described it in his own evidence to the inquiry this week, his approach was essentially: “I’m going to do regime change and just talk the disarmament language.”

So what is Mr Campbell up to? Is he somehow intent on further trashing his old boss’s already tarnished historical reputation in the hope of garnering a few cheap headlines?

Not a bit of it. It is, as ever with Campbell, part of a concerted and deliberate strategy by Mr Blair and his inner circle to use the Chilcot inquiry to mount an unapologetic defence of the war.

Mr Campbell has always prided himself on being a loyal party man, but in the context of the forthcoming election, this is, to say the very least, unhelpful stuff for Gordon Brown and Labour.

The prospect of Mr Blair and other senior ex-colleagues loudly defending the war in the run-up to polling day is a nightmare scenario for the Prime Minister - but the truth is there isn’t a damned thing he can do about it.

And it is not just Messrs Blair and Campbell. We learn from a prominent North-East blogger that the Defence Minister, Kevan Jones, is shortly to go into print to explain why he supported the invasion in 2003, and why he still supports it now.

Fair play to Kevan for sticking to his guns, but I respectfully predict it will not win him a single additional vote in Durham North come 6 May - and may well lose him a fair few.

In the months following Mr Blair’s resignation in 2007, Mr Brown had a clear opportunity to distance the government from the Iraq debacle - if not from the actual decision to go to war, at least from the way in which it was done.

Thanks in part to Alastair Campbell, that option now no longer exists.

Smeargate was a car crash waiting to happen

So much for cartoonist Slob's take on "Smeargate." Do I share his sense of nausea at the Adoration of the Guido that has followed the RedRag scandal and the defenestration of Damian McBride? Well, up to a point I guess.

Paul Staines is at least right in his analysis of the Lobby, although the initial diagnosis that it had become part of a client media was not Guido's, but Peter Oborne's, in his brilliant book The Triumph of the Political Class.

I myself watched it happening from close quarters and it became very obvious fairly early in my Lobby career on that you could not expect to receive help and favours from the New Labour machine if you also insisted on telling it like it was for the benefit of the readers who paid your salary.

I made my bed, and although those contemporaries of mine who took the Campbell spin subsequently saw all sorts of exciting career doors opening to them, I have never once regretted the road I took.

That said, there is a central hypocrisy at the heart of the Guido version of history that should not be overlooked. In my relatively limited personal dealings with Paul Staines, I have always found him to be an okay bloke - he even bought me a drink once - but when it comes to smear campaigns against rival politicians, his blog is the last word.

Back in 2007, Guido spent months attempting to convince his blog's many readers that Gordon Brown had been photographed on a rocking horse wearing a nappy, and to utilise the power of search engine optimisation and Google to spread this ridiculous tale across the entire internet. It even made it onto Wikipedia, and when I tried to remove it, some patsy came along and reverted my edit.

He also gave house-room to a sock puppet called "Stanislav" who suggested, in one particularly disgusting post, that the Prime Minister had been steadily driven mad by the strain of repressing his "homosexuality" over many years - part of a deadly serious attempt by the right to fix the idea of Gordon as a "weirdo" in the public's mind.

None of this in any way excuses the suggestion that David Cameron is suffering from some embarassing health complaint. But it does put it into perspective, and should serve as a corrective to those tempted to hail Guido as the new conscience of British public life.

Labour of course should have risen above all this. Instead, it set up LabourList, bringing in Derek Draper as editor despite the fact that his previous spell as a NuLab adviser had ended in embarrassing circumstances for the government. It was, in short, a car crash waiting to happen.

I disliked the idea of LabourList from the start. I was in fact invited to attend one of the breakfast sessions, and would have gone if I had been in London and at a loose end, but the whole thing seemed to me to be built on two false premises - firstly, the Dale Hypothesis that all left-wing blogs are basically crap, and secondly the Guido Hypothesis that smearing one's political opponents is a legitimate purpose of political blogging.

In other words, Labour thought they needed a Guido-style "attack blog" to take the fight to the Tories, and they concluded that none of the existing left-of-centre blogs was up to the job.

Had the party not got the first of these questions so catastrophically wrong, it would have realised that instead of trying to impose its command-and-control approach on the blogosphere, it would have been better off discreetly encouraging some of the excellent, well-established left-of-centre blogs that were already out there.

In short, instead of listening to Dolly Draper, they should have listened to Sunny Hundal. His post on Liberal Conspiracy is the best defence I have thus far read of the left-of-centre blogosphere and why Labour would have been better tapping into that rather than attempting to out-Fawkes the Tories.

Then again, New Labour has been ignoring its own natural supporters and trying to mimic the Conservatives ever since it was invented, so we should probably not be that surprised.

Meanwhile the issue of "spin" has once again become the issue that defines New Labour, the single word that I suspect will be associated with the Blair-Brown government long after everything else it did has been forgotten.

And those of us who thought Gordon would put a stop to all this nonsense have suffered another, perhaps terminal, disillusionment.

An old debate rears its head again

Today's call by the House of Lords' Communications Committee for the introduction of televised lobby briefings inevitably gave me a certain sense of deja vu. They were talking about this back in 2004 when I left the Lobby and, given the usual pace at which things tended to change in that august place, I'm not entirely surprised to find they are still talking about it now.

I suppose that now I am a website editor I ought to be instinctively in favour of the committee's proposal for video-streaming the briefings on the No10 site, but the regional press print journalist in me still suspects that it would be bad news for the sector.

To me, what was so remarkable about the lobby briefings was how incredibly democratic they were, in the sense that a regional political reporter like myself had as much opportunity to ask a question as the political editor of the BBC. That would no longer be the case if they were televised, as the broadcasters would invariably fight to get their questions in first for the requisite news footage.

I was surprised to find that my written contribution to the original Phillis Review on government comunications in 2003 in which this issue was also raised is still available online at the Cabinet Office archive. You can read it in full HERE.

The day Downing Street "lost it"

Most journalists have a favourite story, and most people who knew me in my Lobby days would probably assume mine was the infamous Eddie George gaffe - in which the then Bank of England Governor told me that lost North-East jobs were an acceptable price to pay to curb inflation in London and the South.

But they would be wrong. The story I enjoyed the most was actually written a year earlier in October 1997 and concerned the then Labour Cabinet Minister and South Shields MP, Dr David Clark.

A Downing Street press officer, perhaps mistaking me for someone who could be relied on to unthinkingly recycle the New Labour spin, told me that Dr Clark had "lost it" and would shortly be sacked in a reshuffle. We duly turned the story round, reporting that far from having "lost it," Clark was actually the victim of a smear campaign, and splashed it all over the front page.

But what was No 10 up to, exactly? You can read the full story in my "Where Are They Now" column this month's edition of Total Politics which focuses on the Good Doctor's short but fascinating Cabinet career.

Fear of the fear of crime

I don't often use this blog to promote my current day-time interest HoldtheFrontPage but this story which we ran today courtesy of the Oxford Mail really touched a nerve with me, as well as raising a wider political question.

I too was one of that generation of local newspaper reporters who would spend literally hours each week talking to local police sergeants and inspectors on the phone or sometimes even in person as they reeled off scores of local misdemeanours for use in the paper.

Since the "professionalisation" of police press offices began in the mid-90s, that source of information has dried up, with the Mail's investigation revealing that just 22 out of more than 6,000 reported crimes during July were being passed on to reporters.

At first, I assumed this was sheer laziness on the part of police PROs who thought they had bigger fish to fry. In fact it seems it's part of a deliberate police spin operation to reduce the fear of crime by not telling the public it is happening.

This of course has wider political implications. If all the crime that takes place in any local area was reported in the local paper, as it used to be, would not the government be coming under greater pressure to do something about it than is currently the case?

It's probably beyond the scope of the Oxford Mail's investigation, but it does beg the question whether in this case the police were acting on their own initiative, or whether they were themselves under pressure to reduce the fear of crime for political reasons.

Milburn for Chancellor? Absolute b****cks

Those were the words apparently used by Alan Milburn to describe Rosa Prince's now-infamous Telegraph story that he had been offered the Treasury in a David Miliband administration, should one come about.

Well, he would, wouldn't he? But you know, I think Alan is telling the truth on this one and for once I agree with Guido. This was not hubris on the part of an increasingly over-confident Blair/Miliband camp, it was a piece of black propaganda by the Brownites designed to discredit the Foreign Secretary in the eyes of the Milburn-hating party selectorate.

Indeed, so successful does it appear to have been in this regard that I wonder if that grandmaster of the dark arts Charlie Whelan is back at Gordon's side?

Andrew Sparrow on the Guardian Politics Blog said charitably that even the flakiest stories usually contain "some slither of truth," and I agree. The slither in this case is that Milburn will play a role in a Miliband government, if it happens - but not at the Treasury.

Although Milburn was briefly Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1998-99, figures and grasp of detail are not really his strong points. He is much more of a Blair than a Brown, a broad-brush man whose real political talents lie in blue-sky thinking and communicating a vision. That is the kind of skillset that is required for No 10, not No 11, which is one of the reasons I have previously advocated Milburn as a leadership contender.

My tip for the Treasury is either James Purnell or, more likely, John Hutton. As for Milburn, I can see him being offered a Cabinet Office cross-cutting role to "think the unthinkable," possibly looking at policies across the piece to kick-start social mobility or tackle inequality. Indeed, Brown should have offered him this last year in my view.

The irony is that, had "Gypsy Rosa" written that Milburn's old flatmate Hutton was going to be offered the Treasury in a Miliband government, it would have proved even more damaging to the would-be young pretender, given the Business and Enterprise Secretary's current lower-than-zero standing with the union brothers.

It might also have had the merit of being - no doubt inadvertently - accurate.

Gordon's paper anniversary

In today's column in the Newcastle Journal, I concede that I got it wrong about Gordon Brown. Well, sort of. You'll have to read to the end to find out what I mean!

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This Friday, June 27, Gordon Brown will mark what, in usual circumstances, would be a significant political milestone – the first anniversary of his succession to the premiership.

When 12 months ago the newly-elected Prime Minister addressed the nation outside No 10 Downing Street, little could he have imagined how quickly his fortunes would turn around.

He spoke then of his old school motto: “I will try my utmost.” Later, in his first Labour Party conference speech as premier, he promised: “I will not let you down.”

But sadly, that is exactly what he has done. Indeed for many people, to describe the Brown premiership as a let-down would be the understatement of the century.

Over the years leading up to Mr Brown’s accession to the top job, there was a widespread view among centre-left commentators that he would be an improvement on what had gone before.

Since I was one of those who shared that analysis, this column amounts to something of a mea culpa.

We thought that Mr Brown would cast off his customary dourness once he got to No 10. We thought he would put an end to spin. We thought he would lead the Labour Party in a fresh and radical new direction.

And on all of those scores, the truth of the matter is that we got him wrong.

Part of my optimism about Mr Brown as a putative Prime Minister was based on my knowledge of him as a private man, and the hope and expectation that his personal qualities would shine through once he assumed the top job.

In all my admittedly limited dealings with them, I found he and Tony Blair to be an almost exact reversal of their public personas.

On the three occasions I interviewed Mr Blair for this newspaper, I found him shy, ill-at-ease and totally unable to make even the most rudimentary small-talk.

Mr Brown, by contrast, I found charming, witty, eager to engage in conversation - in short, nothing like the grim Stalinist control-freak he is now widely perceived as.

There were other grounds for optimism. Mr Brown had always portrayed himself as the serious one in the Blair-Brown partnership, and after a decade of showmanship from Mr Blair, the public seemed ready for that.

Allied to this was a feeling that the new man would eschew then reliance on spin that tarnished the Blair era - “not Flash, just Gordon” as the slogan put it.

It could have been a winner, but as the commentator Jonathan Freedland pointed out this week, Brown himself put paid to it by his behaviour over the election-that-never-was last autumn.

“The effect was to show that Brown was as much a calculating schemer as anyone else in the trade – he just wasn’t very skilful or subtle at it. Not flash, just a politician,” he wrote.

But above all, our optimism about Gordon Brown was based on his long record of championing the social justice agenda within a government that often seemed careless of traditional Labour values.

He, after all, was the Chancellor who quietly redistributed billions of pounds to the worst-off in society via his system of tax credits.

He was the man whose successive comprehensive spending reviews pumped billions more into the vital public services on which the worst-off in society most depended.

And he was the man who, each September, would stand up and reassure the party faithful that real Labour “var-lews” as he called them had not been forgotten despite all appearances to the contrary.

Was he just playing to the left-wing gallery all that time? Well, it would seem so.

When Mr Brown took over, the expectation was that he would “hit the ground running” with a blitz of an announcements designed to signal a clean break with the Blair era.

In his statement outside No 10, he appeared to encourage that view, declaring that this would be a “new government with new priorities” and concluding with the words: “Now let the work of change begin.”

But to paraphrase an old political joke, while he may have been elected as New Brown, but he has governed very much as Old Blair.

So there has been no attempt, for instance, to tackle the widening inequalities in our society, or address the decline in social mobility that occurred throughout the Thatcher-Major-Blair years.

And far from drawing a line under Mr Blair’s foreign policy disasters, if anything last week’s press conference with President Bush showed him in full Blair mode.

Our expectations of Mr Brown weren’t purely based on wishful thinking. Radical plans for his premiership were indeed drawn up before he took over, some of which were briefed in advance to journalists.

But when it came to the crunch, Mr Brown bottled it, just as he bottled out of the election and just as he has now bottled out of taking on David Davis over 42-day detention – a decision he may well come to regret.

The real tragedy, though, is that we didn’t really get Mr Brown wrong at all. He is indeed all those things we always thought he was.

He is a decent, serious man with a passion for social justice and an overriding concern for the underdog. What he lacked was simply the political courage to be himself once he got to No 10.

That fatal loss of nerve is the single biggest reason why Gordon won’t be hanging out the bunting as he marks his first anniversary this Friday, and why his primary emotion will be one of relief at having lasted even a year.

I for one would currently lay reasonably long odds against him making it to two

White on Brown

Donnish Times commentator Tim Hames caused a stir earlier this week by nominating the Guardian's Michael White for a political fixer's job at No 10.

White's response to this remarkable suggestion is contained in a Guardian podcast on today's local elections and is well worth hearing.

Fellow UCL alumnus Michael reveals: "Gordon has barely exchanged six words with me for several years. I don't know what I did to upset him."

The dangers of employing SpAds

Excellent and disarmingly honest post from Guido earlier today in which he admits that the unhelpful and hostile attitude of Peter Hain's special adviser had spurred him on in his attempts to get the bottom of the permatanned one's financial affairs.

I think if we are all equally frank about it, this is a fairly common occurence in journalism. Most journalists would agree that if an official or press officer is being obstructive or difficult about something, it makes them all the more convinced there's a good story there, and hence all the more determined to get it.

Since train stories are all the rage in the blogosphere at the moment, I will relate an incident that occurred some years ago on a train journey from Newcastle to London in which I found myself sat opposite the special adviser to the then local government minister, Hilary Armstrong.

The man in question - I won't bother to name him as he no longer works for the government - sat in front of me with a briefcase on his lap and said words to the effect of: "There's something in here you'd really like to know about but which I'm not going to show you," and then preceded to spend the rest of the journey taunting me about it.

It was stupid behaviour on two counts. First, it was hardly calculated to endear me to his then boss, Ms Armstrong, and second, it alerted me to the existence of a report which I would not otherwise have known about, and which I eventually obtained by other means.

Only a few years earlier, the adviser in question had been a local councillor who was happy to use the regional press as a platform. It was clear that as soon as he graduated to national politics, the power went straight to his head.

Alastair Campbell aside, the very worst example of all of a spAd who did huge damage to her boss's cause was of course Jo "bury bad news" Moore, although this was not something particular to me.

Long before that shameful incident on the afternoon of 9/11, the woman brought in to soften Steve Byers' media profile in the hope of making him the next Labour Prime Minister had managed to alienate most of the Lobby, and there were very few tears shed over her spectacular fall from grace.

Less than bostin Austin

Ian Austin was not someone who endeared himself to the Lobby during my time there. He took over from the great Charlie Whelan but entirely lacked his illustrious predecessor's wit, roguish charm or indeed ability to tell you anything useful, so I naturally enjoyed this piece from the inimitable Simon Hoggart Bill Blanko.

The Stab in the Back

If you think I have been a bit hard on Alastair Campbell, you should read this piece by the former Mirror Group political editor David Seymour in this week's Press Gazette. Apart from being the most comprehensive hatchet-job I have ever seen on the former spinmeister, it also contains the sensational allegation that Campbell described Gordon Brown as "psychologically flawed" in conversation with another Mirror journalist, the week before Andrew Rawnsley's famous scoop.

The Stab in the Back, by the way, was the colloquial name for a famous Mirror watering hole frequented by Campbell in his drinking days.

The Great Polluter

And so, at last, to Alastair Campbell's Diaries. Gordon Brown said he didn't know why they were being published, a pretence at incomprehension which is a well-known and very effective political technique. Campbell himself said in the course of a 30-minute interview on the Today Programme of the type ususally reserved for serving Prime Ministers that he hoped the diaries would provide "the first chapter of a record that I intend to put into the public domain about an amazing prime minister, a great leader in my view, who was responsible for taking Labour into power and taking Britain forward."

To which I have only two words to say. My Arse.

The reason Alastair Campbell is publishing his diaries now is not the desire to write the rough first draft of history of the Blair Years. It is filthy lucre, and the fact that he knows that had he waited a couple of years, we would all have forgotten about him and no-one would buy them. That is also why he has taken out the references to Gordon Brown - so he can make another fortune in a few years' time by publishing those bits once Brown has left office.

Then again, what more should we expect? As Michael Howard said on
Newsnight, Alastair Campbell has done more than anyone else to pollute the political process and destroy public trust in our democracy over the past few years, so why should we expect him now to be driven by any higher motive than selfish greed?

As to the book's contents, I have already said my piece in the latest edition of the Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze about his self-justificatory and disingenuous account of the David Kelly affair. I still cannot believe that Campbell can say, in the same breath, that he briefly considered topping himself over the episode, while continuing to maintain he did absolutely nothing wrong.

It goes without saying that I am not going to buy the book. I would recommend instead the excellent biography Alastair Campbell: New Labour and the Rise of the Media Class by Peter Oborne, which will tell you all you need to know about Campbell's media management techniques and the reign of terror he exerted over Whitehall press departments and the Parliamentary Lobby between 1997 and 2003.

The publication of the Campbell Diaries, and the extraordinary way in which the BBC has allowed itself to become his publicity machine, has already produced some superb blogging and commentary elsewhere, notably from Martin Kettle who is puzzled by the absence of references to Campbell's media collaborators Tom Baldwin and Trevor Kavanagh, and Chicken Yoghurt, who likens the book to another featuring "fantastical plots requiring a massive suspension of disbelief from the reader" - Harry Potter.

Top biscuit however goes to Septic Isle for this post on Obsolete which deserves to be read in full, not least for the full impact of some ace swearblogging. "As any psychologist will tell you, a pathological liar not only lies to everyone around him, they lie the most to themselves....They say cheats never prosper, but liars it seems will inherit the earth."

No spin is the new spin?

Plenty of lively debate over at Iain Dale's place over whether Gordon Brown attempted to strongarm the Sunday lobby into carrying the line about his terror crackdown without balancing comment from Nick Clegg and David Davis. Three experienced Sunday pol eds, Paddy Hennessy, Ian Kirby and Nick Watt, have vehemently denied the claims but the thread is well worth a read.

Whether it's true or not, I was equally concerned to read this story in the UK Press Gazette about a local reporter who was allegedly subjected to bully-boy tactics from one of Brown's minders.

I do hope that this isn't going to be the shape of things to come under Gordon. He has made very clear that it is his intention to lead a new style of government and, as I made clear in this post, if this is to mean anything it must entail an end to the spin culture.

The row over David Maclean's bid to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act, which was enthusiastically backed by Nick "Newcastle" Brown and other high-profile Brown cronies, was not a good start on this score. Neither, if true, are the examples highlighted by Dale and the UKPG.

Howard nails the real culprit

Probably only political obsessives managed to stick with yesterday's extended edition of Newsnight to the bitter end, but for those that did, there was a real treat in store.

Jeremy Paxman was chairing a studio discussion featuring Howard, Polly Toynbee, Charles Kennedy, Alan Milburn, David Hare and Alastair Campbell. Towards the end, the talk turned to Tony Blair's style of government and the impact of spin and sleaze.

Howard recalled that in the days when the young Tony Blair used to shadow him at Employment and the Home Office, he found him at all times to be absolutely straight and honest.

Then, looking across at Campbell, he declared: "I believe the man sitting there is who's responsible for what changed." Campbell had no response to it other than to accuse Howard of being a sore loser.

Howard's right, of course. Blair must bear the final responsibility as the man who employed him, but it was Campbell whose bullying of journalists and civil servants in the cause of news management did more than anything else to demean our political culture during the Blair years.

And of course, it was Campbell who wanted to get Dr David Kelly's name out in the open in order to "fuck Gilligan," part of the chain of events that ultimately destroyed the public's trust in Mr Blair.

The Guardian's Will Woodward has written a piece in today's Blair Resignation Supplement (not online as far as I can see) the gist of which is that Tony Blair would not have been the same force without Alastair Campbell.

Will is a nice guy who has already gone far in the Lobby and will go further, but he's wrong on this one. Without the baleful influence of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair might have been a great Prime Minister.

Update: The Newsnight clip is now on YouTube, courtesy of Chicken Yoghurt.

Major tells it like it is

As is probably obvious from the last but one post, I always had a sneaking admiration for Sir John Major, and certainly nothing became him in the office of Prime Minister like the leaving of it ten years ago today. He has been as good as his word too - unlike his own predecessor he has resisted the temptation to meddle and has genuinely "left the stage."

That said, he has never been afraid to express his view that New Labour has demeaned politics far beneath the level achieved by his own administration and that, in this respect, his treatment at the hands of the spin machine in the run up to May 1997 constituted a fairly major personal injustice.

Sir John's views on spin are worth listening to because he correctly identifies this as the defining characteristic of the Blair government - and the main reason why the hope and expectation that marked that bright morning a decade ago has turned to cynicism and loss of trust.

His article in today's Times is pretty much on the money, and I will quote part of it here - my italics.

"I view politics now through the eyes of an outsider. And much of what I see is uncomfortable. Political promises ring hollow. The political parties seem isolated and remote. In the last two general elections the turnout dropped from a healthy 80 per cent to a modest 60 per cent. Public disaffection is widespread.

"All parties bear some blame but the culpability of the present Government is clear. When Labour came to power, they brought with them all the black arts of sharp practice and spin that they had perfected in opposition. One of the most dismal legacies of the new Labour mission has been to turn government into a marketing exercise. The electorate now know they were sold a pup.

"I am not naive about politics. Spin – putting a gloss on events – is as old as politics itself...but it’s gone too far. Spin today is often downright deceit. For all its faults, old Labour had a soul; new Labour only has sound-bites and apparatchiks, careless of constitutional proprieties, who will use any unscrupulous trick to benefit the Government.

"This downward spiral began when Labour trashed the Government Information Service and politicised news management. Until then, no one doubted the No 10 spokesman. Now, if No 10 tells you Friday follows Thursday, wise men check the calendar. The consequence of this sophistry is profound and damaging. If, tomorrow, this Government told Parliament that our nation was under threat and we must go to war, would Parliament or the public rally behind it without independent corroboration? I think not – and that is unprecedented."

All this must end, Gordon

There is a commonly held view in politics that, for all Tony Blair's frantic search for a legacy, he will, in the end, only be remembered for the Iraq War. The results of my current poll suggest that is indeed how around 29pc of people will remember him.

But that figure was narrowly trumped by the 30pc who believe that Mr Blair's biggest legacy will not be the war, but the loss of trust in government engendered by his addiction to spin.

Of course, there is a fairly strong interrelationship between the two. I have always believed that what the public objected to most was not the war itself, but the way we were spun into it by Alastair Campbell and Co on the basis of dodgy dossiers and false prospecti.

But that only goes to demonstrate my main point - that the big, big problem with the Blair government - the one that has above all been responsible for its descent into public obloquy - has been spin.

There is no point rehashing it all again here. Blair will be gone in a few weeks, thank God, and to coin a phrase, now is the time to look forward, not back.

There now seems little doubt that Gordon Brown has the Prime Minsistership in the bag - but is he above the use of mendacious and misleading spin? For all that I admire the man, I'm afraid the answer to that is no.

Seven years ago, I covered a story for the Newcastle Journal in which Mr Brown attempted to spin away the existence of the North-South jobs divide.

Pointing to the fact that there were 75,000 people in the region claiming Jobseeker's Allowance and 61,000 Jobcentre vacancies, he argued that there were almost enough jobs to go round.

What the Chancellor was conveniently ignoring was the fact that his own Government had stopped using the JSA claimant count as the official measure of unemployment in 1998, and that the new ILO measure showed there were 103,000 people without jobs in the region.

Only The Journal and one other newspaper spotted this statistical sleight-of-hand, allowing Mr Brown's claim to go unchallenged in most of the national media.

Okay, so it's seven years ago now - fairly ancient history in political terms. So old in fact that no online version of the story now exists.

But if Mr Brown has become a changed character since then, it was not greatly in evidence during last month's Budget, when he foolishly attempted to present the 2p income tax reduction as a tax cut, which it wasn't, as opposed to a simplification of the tax system, which it undoubtedly is.

My view, and I suspect that of the millions of ordinary voters who have become disillusioned with New Labour over the past decade, is that all this must now end.

Whatever fresh policy directions Mr Brown intends to lead Labour in when he finally takes over, the biggest task facing the new premier is to restore public trust in government.

I don't believe that Gordon Brown will credibly be able to do that unless, like a recovering alcoholic, he can first acknowledge his own past dependence on spin and move on.

Can he do it? It may seem an extravagant claim, but I believe that on the answer to that question may well depend the result of the next general election.

This post was featured on "Best of the Web" on Comment is Free.

Blair is just making things worse for Labour

Writing in this morning's Guardian, Jackie Ashley makes the point that the longer Tony Blair tries to drag out his increasingly discredited premiership, the worse it gets both for him and for the Labour Party.

Following the shameful events of last Thursday, I came to a similar conclusion in my weekend columns and podcast which has gone live today.

"The man who promised to clean up politics continues to sully it beyond anything achieved by John Major’s administration. Until the day he finally goes, his capacity to damage both the Labour Party and the reputation of British politics in general will remain unhindered."

The full text is available HERE.

No coincidence

I must be getting less cynical in my old age, but in retrospect I was far too kind to New Labour in yesterday's post on whether the Government might have been guilty of burying bad news under the cover of the Ipswich murders and Lord Stevens' inquiry in the death of Diana. It's now absolutely bleeding obvious that this is exactly what they were doing.

According to the Daily Tel's George Jones and others, Scotland Yard has made it clear that the timing of yesterday's interview of the Prime Minister over the cash-for-honours affair was determined by Downing Street, not by the police.

Another Lobby doyen, Trevor Kavanagh, writes in his Sun column: "We all guessed weeks ago that this would be the perfect day for Mr Blair to invite the police in – the day the world would be transfixed by the [Diana] report."

Somehow, though, I don't think even a gnarled old cynic like Trevor really thought they would actually do it. And neither, I confess, did I.

Spin cycle

One of the best blogs around at the moment is Dizzy Thinks, which today features this little tale about the announcement of some Government funding for the nine English regions "to tackle local congestion and inform the debate on a national road pricing scheme."

As Dizzy rightly points out, the sum of money in question - £7.5m - actually only works out at around £800,000 per region, a figure which "wouldn't pay for much more than the hot air consultancy fees" and which compares with the £200m cost of introducing congestion charging in London.

"However, the real killer comes in the second paragraph of the press release. It says the "money comes from the second round of an £18 million fund, set up in July 2005". So errr. hang on second... it's not a further £7.5 million at all, it's the same money from a lump sum already agreed and announced."

A story of little consequence in itself, then, but one which illustrates a wider truth about the Blair Government and its use of the technique of "repeat messaging."

This was an idea originally developed by New Labour in opposition which they have carried with them all the way though government. It works on the Orwellian premise that if you repeat something often enough, the people will have no alternative but to believe it.

Thus the life-cycle of a typical Government announcement would look something like this:

1. A forthcoming Government initiative is leaked to a friendly newspaper. The story is neither officially denied nor confirmed, but by giving someone an exclusive, it guarantees big headlines for the story in at least one newspaper and guaranteed follow-ups in all the rest.

2. A few weeks later, the story is confirmed in a ministerial press release, which receives little coverage other than perhaps a few pars in the Guardian's Society supplement.

3. Gordon Brown reannounces it in the Budget. Close analysis of Gordon's Budget speeches show that most of the contents, especially those relating to spending announcements rather than taxation, have already been announced.

4. The relevant Government department then produces its own separate release setting out further details of the Budget "announcement," followed by

5. Nine separate regional press releases setting out what the Budget "announcement" will mean for each region, which are usually identical apart from the insertion of the words North-East/North-West/East Midlands etc.

6. The money finally comes on stream, enabling the relevant department to announce it yet again.

7. Regional ministerial visits are organised around the announcement, showing how it is being spent in a particular region with acompanying photo-ops. Theoretically, there could be as many as nine of these.

8. The second round of funding comes on stream, as in Dizzy's example above, potentially kicking off the whole process again.

Of course, like much else about New Labour's news management techniques, the whole policy of repeat messaging has backfired spectacularly. The one question journalists always ask about these kind of announcements is: "Is it new money?"

When, nine times out of 10, the answer to that question turns out to be no, it becomes very easy to conclude that nothing the Government announces is funded from new money, with the result that even genuinely new announcements are then routinely ignored.

I think the record for Government reannouncements is held by the launch of the Regional Venture Capital Fund, which began life in the Department of Environment, Transport and Regions, and was then transferred after the 2001 election to the DTI which decided to reannounce it all over again.

Even though it was an initiative designed to help poorer regions like the North-East, I must confess that, after the first five times, I simply gave up on it.

Did I do Stephen Byers a disservice?

David Blunkett's tape-recorded diaries The Blunkett Tapes are published today having been serialised in the Grauniad last week. I have already made clear my view that the content should be viewed primarily as entertainment rather than enlightenment, in particular the assertion that Tony Blair was ready to sack Gordon Brown unless he backed the Iraq War in 2003.

One little gem did catch my eye though in Friday's final instalment. Had I not been in a very important meeting for most of that day, and had my home dial-up connection not been buggered for most of the weekend, I would have blogged on it before now.

Anyway....I refer to a passage in which Mr Blunkett gives his take on one of the infamous episodes in the entire history of the Blair administration, the email sent by Stephen Byers' special adviser Jo Moore on the afternoon of 9/11 stating that it was now "a very good day to get out anything we want to bury."

Blunkett's account casts a completely new light on the episode, and therefore merits reproduction in full:

October 2001

[Leak of email sent by Jo Moore, special adviser to Stephen Byers, to Department of Transport press office on September 11 saying it would be a "very good day" to "bury" bad news]

The world has gone crackers, and the cause célèbre of the week has been the débâcle over Jo Moore, which is going on and on. Steve was intending to sack Jo Moore, but by early afternoon it had all changed and apparently it was because, quite rightly, Tony had perceived that this was a try-on by the civil service. It was felt that they were the ones who had received the email and leaked it, and no matter how appalling the email, the declaration of war by the civil service and their ability to leak emails and thereby bring down special advisers had to be countered. Unfortunately life is not as simple as that. Tony's interpretation of the situation is right, but Steve's initial decision to sack Jo Moore for the content of the email was also right because this story has run and run and run.

In dictating this I had no idea just how catastrophic it was going to be for Steve Byers. I think those advising really did mean well, and it was a difficult situation to call. There is no doubt that Jo Moore paid the price, but what price.

Now this, to my knowledge, is the first time anyone has claimed that the decision not to sack Moore after her initial, appalling misdemeanour was not Byers's, but Blair's.

I was of course working in the Lobby at the time as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal, and since Byers is a Tyneside MP, it is fair to say I took a keen interest in the story. It was common knowledge within the Lobby that Alastair Campbell, then at the very height of his powers, wanted Moore out, and the supposition was that it was Byers - not Blair - who was resisting this.

I have myself written on a number of occasions in my Journal column and elsewhere that not sacking Moore was the mistake that wrecked Byers' career. Yet it now turns out that it might not have been his decision at all.

It would be too much to expect a loyal Blairite such as Byers to now confirm the truth of Blunkett's account at the cost of dropping the Prime Minister in it. But once Mr Blair has left office, it will be interesting to see if Byers chooses to set the record straight.