The scars on my back

POLITICS AND THE MEDIA
Nicholas Jones, former BBC political correspondent, exposes the dark trade of the
spin doctors – and how it affected his career

Part II

Alastair Campbell

There is no doubt that it was the incoming Labour government of Tony Blair in 1997 which created the wheeler-dealing, shoot-from-the-hip political spin doctor of today, a party activist paid for by the taxpayer, pulling the strings in Downing Street and Whitehall.
     Crucially, as special advisers, they acquired the authority to give instructions to civil servants and it was this unbridled power which has sowed the seeds of their downfall. Tony Blair changed the balance of power within Downing Street; it was Blair who ensured that Alastair Campbell's writ would run through Whitehall; and it was Blair who doubled and nearly trebled the size of this elite group under Campbell's control, a network of spin doctors who had free rein – on behalf of their ministers – to manipulate the flow of information from state to public.
     Right from the start I made the point in my articles and books that I believed the spin doctors would become New Labour's Achilles heel. I sensed that Campbell and his acolytes – as with Peter Mandelson before him – were so obsessed with spinning, and so addicted to the manipulation of the news media, that at some point it would inevitably end in tears for the Labour Party. I remember how I was ridiculed at the time. When Campbell spied me taking a shorthand note of a particularly telling aside, he would accuse me of having an orgasm on spin, of being obsessed by the process of politics rather than concentrating on what the Labour Party's policies could achieve. I was the one who was said to be out of step, nothing more than a sad anorak on spin.
     But even I never thought Campbell's successors would stoop as low as Damian McBride and Derek Draper in concocting lurid and offensive stories intended to smear senior conservatives and their wives. McBride's ability to sit unchallenged at a computer screen in a corner of the prime minister's war room – and write an email containing fabricated allegations about the leader of the opposition, the shadow chancellor and their families – was an inevitable consequence of Gordon Brown's failure, perhaps his inability, to honour his own promise to turn his back on spin and to clean up his act by ordering his closest advisers to stop the unattributable briefings which have been so corrosive of comradeship among his colleagues in the cabinet and the upper echelons of the party.
     I am afraid to say that character assassination is in the DNA of Labour's spin doctors and despite whatever might be said now, successive cabinet secretaries have proved powerless to force advisers like McBride to honour the code of conduct for temporary civil servants. To his credit the current cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, has moved swiftly to implement Brown's request that the code of conduct should be strengthened to require all special advisers to sign an undertaking that they understand that they will be sacked automatically if they are found 'disseminating inappropriate material'. But like his predecessors O'Donnell knows full well that if the code had ever been taken seriously in the past, either by the prime minister or his cabinet colleagues, then Campbell & Co would have lost their jobs within weeks of Tony Blair taking office.
     Don't forget that it was only last October that Brown failed to act decisively when Damian McBride was caught in the act, leaking to journalists that the then transport secretary, Ruth Kelly, intended to resign. Tony Blair, with Alastair Campbell's help, unleashed forces they could not control: the government's information service became subservient to spin doctors whose utter contempt for the impartiality of the civil service culminated in epic, grisly moments like the resignation of Brown's first spinner, Charlie Whelan, for briefing against Peter Mandelson over his secret home loan, and the infamous Jo Moore email in 2001 telling civil servants in the Department of Transport that the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre was 'a very good day to get out anything we want to bury'.
    
I consider it was Blair who opened the door to the blatant politicisation of the government's information service in November 1997. He allowed Campbell to rewrite the rule book for civil service information officers instructing them to 'grab the agenda' and ignore the confidentiality of ministerial announcements. Campbell's stint in Downing Street culminated in the despicable witch-hunt which ended in the death of the weapons inspector Dr David Kelly but as Blair's former press secretary has subsequently never tired of telling his admirers, his accomplishments in Downing Street always had the full backing of the then prime minister. My early confrontations with Blair's spin master only served to reinforce my determination to continue chronicling in my books on spin what I believed were the abuses that Blair had ushered in.
     In Campbell's eyes my desire to continue writing an insider's account of the government's relationship with the news media conflicted with my job as a BBC political correspondent. The scars on my back show how effective the New Labour machine had become – long before the episode involving the BBC's Andrew Gilligan – in using complaints to my bosses at the BBC as a way to curb what the spin doctors deemed was my 'unhelpful' reporting. As the complaints rolled in, Labour's spin doctors demonstrated their flair for the kind of character assassination which has wounded countless Labour MPs and destroyed many of their careers.
     My editors were told that my reporting was 'dishonest' and sometimes 'fraudulent'; that my shorthand note was 'unreliable'; that I had 'tricked' a union leader into giving an interview when he was drunk; and that I had knowingly 'broken' the BBC's guidelines by filming a Labour MP's children. Although I am no longer a BBC correspondent and have become something of a free spirit, I have continued to monitor Labour's media machine. In my most recent book, 'Trading Information: Leaks, Lies and Tip-offs', I argued that in the years he was chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown became the Labour Party's 'most prolific and longest-serving trader in government secrets'. I described how Brown's two former special advisers, Ed Balls and Charlie Whelan, operated 'a clearing house for leaks' and dispensed Brown's 'booty with deadly accuracy' both in opposition and later in the Treasury. And in Downing Street, Brown's spin doctors have turned out to be just as obsessed as Blair's with their predilection for the advanced briefing of ministerial announcements – or the institutionalised leaking of government secrets as I prefer to describe it.
     While Brown is rightly in the frame for having lost control of his spinners, David Cameron too has questions to answer. Why have the Conservatives apparently abandoned the party's long-standing promise – an undertaking given repeatedly by his immediate predecessors – to purge the burgeoning ranks of special advisers and change the law to force them to obey the code of conduct? Given the fact that he was once a political adviser himself, the media-savvy Cameron is only too well aware of how effective spin doctors can be in attacking (and defending) either government or opposition.
     At the age of 25, Cameron cut his political teeth in the 1992 general election, preparing briefings for John Major. Cameron was one of the leading lights in the Tory brat pack that was mockingly dubbed 'Patten's puppies'. They had a taste for stunts endorsed by the then party chairman Chris Patten which were aimed at destabilising Neil Kinnock. The Conservatives won the 1992 election against expectations and it was the Tories' success in humiliating Kinnock which drove on Alastair Campbell once he was appointed Blair's press secretary in 1994. So history looks like coming full circle and my fear is that an incoming Conservative government will be as addicted to spin as New Labour.