The New Criterion

It was Henry “Chips” Channon, one of the most entertaining, and informative, of Britain’s twentieth-century political diarists, who asked what was more “dull than a discreet diary.” Quite. Yet in some ways it is the discretion of the diaries just published by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former press secretary (and much, much more), which makes them so interesting.[1] What’s in them, I suspect, matters far less than what’s been left out.

The published diaries amount to “only” 350,000 words out of the more than two million Campbell wrote between starting work for the then-opposition leader Blair in 1994 and resigning some nine years later. The full text is promised for another time, but for now Campbell has, he says, produced a volume focused on Blair himself: “I always intended … to be part of the mix that starts to shape the first draft of historical judgement around him.” Even the admission that this master media manipulator is now spinning history is itself spin. It comes across as candor, refreshing after a decade or so of, well, something else, but he’s only confessing to what everyone had already assumed.

Prior to publication, the diaries were also vetted to ensure that they did not breach secrecy laws or otherwise risk damaging the United Kingdom’s national interest. In addition, Campbell tells us “some conversations so private they will never see the light of day” have been excluded, as have a number of others which “the participants would have assumed to be confidential for some time.” All that’s reasonable enough, but it still leaves hundreds of thousands of words to account for.

Campbell cleverly highlights one area they cover with his claim that he has “no desire” to make the “hard” job of Prime Minister “harder for anyone … let alone Gordon [Brown],” phrasing of such marvelous insincerity that one can only applaud. In writing that, Campbell comes across as public-spirited, loyal, and admirably reticent. At the same time he makes it quite clear that he has the goods on Britain’s new leader, the dour, jealous Chancellor whose Gollum’s quest for the keys to Number 10 Downing Street helped create, define, undermine, and, eventually, destroy Blair’s premiership. Those expecting Campbell to have shed much light on the complex rivalry and partnership between the two men will be disappointed. Worse, bundling Brown offstage destroys any pretensions these diaries may have to offer a properly rounded picture of Blair’s leadership. It’s unfair to compare them to Hamlet without a prince, but less so to say they are an Othello without an Iago.

Whatever the sympathy Campbell may claim to feel for the latest holder of that “hard job” he writes so sanctimoniously about, he had none for Blair’s predecessor, the hapless John Major. Campbell was a prominent member of the coterie that orchestrated the destruction of a Conservative government that was nothing like as incompetent or as sleazy as it was smeared, caricatured, and, fatally, believed by the electorate to be. The Labour landslide of 1997 was the culmination of the most brilliant, and the most unscrupulous, election campaign the country had ever seen. Unfortunately, these diaries offer little fresh insight as to how this was done.

In one respect this doesn’t matter. The key element, the transformation of “old” Labour into “New,” has already been explained far better elsewhere. Campbell may have been at the center of these changes, but the portrait he paints of them is partial, admittedly incomplete, and clearly selective. Not for the first time, the reader is simply left to guess at what has been omitted, and why.

A significantly greater disappointment is how (relatively) little Campbell, a former journalist, has to say about the way that he enlisted Britain’s powerful media class as critical allies in the fight against the Major government. Yes, we are told a bit about the wooing of Rupert Murdoch, but there’s almost no discussion of the tactics for which Campbell became infamous, the brutally effective bullying, deception, and intimidation of the media rank and file. Neither does there appear to be much recognition that Campbell was pushing at an open door: a large percentage of the media class wanted the Tories out.

For Campbell to concede this would, I reckon, have meant accepting that his (undeniably enormous) contribution to the 1997 victory was slightly less than he believes. It would also make nonsense of his obsessive contempt, even hatred, for the media that gathered pace, rancid, vitriolic, and increasingly unbalanced, as the years went by. Given the position that Campbell held, this fury and this disdain are deeply disconcerting. What makes it even more remarkable is that media coverage of the Blair government was, as it happens, broadly supportive until the Iraq war.

The real problem, of course, was that any carping was unacceptable to those at the helm of the New Labour “project,” a project that was, at its core, both profoundly authoritarian and tinged with a gimcrack messianism. What must have made this criticism (such as it was) all the more galling was that it persisted despite the extraordinary efforts made to smother, bludgeon, blunt, and derail it. These went beyond the abuses of the opposition years (although those continued in office, unabated and, in these diaries, largely, and absurdly, unmentioned) and extended into the machinery of government itself. Within days of Labour’s win, and with the help of nifty legal and procedural footwork, Campbell was given the authority to tell civil servants what to do. The political impartiality of the civil service was one of the many British traditions to take a battering under the new regime. As one of Campbell’s shrewdest critics, the commentator Peter Oborne, has noted, “within two years of taking power … New Labour had sacked seventeen of the nineteen information chiefs in Whitehall, a staggeringly high turnover.” Draw your own conclusions. In fact, you’ll have to: Campbell has tellingly little to say on the subject.

None of this is to argue that there’s nothing in these diaries worth reading. On the contrary. Neither press secretary nor any of his later, grander titles do full justice to Campbell’s role. He was not only Blair’s principal propagandist and most feared enforcer, but also a key policy adviser, Bobby, in some respects, to Tony’s Jack. He was, therefore, a diarist in the right place at the right time. Whether it’s on Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Iraq crises, the response to 9/11, or the neatly drawn descriptions of British and international statesmen from Blair to Clinton to Yeltsin to George W. Bush, there’s plenty here to digest, even if not much of it is very new.

Finally, and try as hard as he might to avoid it, by the end of these diaries its author has revealed something of himself, above all that he (a former alcoholic with a history of depressive illness) is a man driven, even if it’s never exactly clear by what. There are the shreds of ancient socialist orthodoxy (a fanatical attachment to Britain’s failed state school system), and, almost certainly related to that, there is the class resentment left over from his misfit youth (which in turn dovetails neatly into the more iconoclastic aspects of the New Labour “modernization” of the United Kingdom). Then there is the delight—wild, baroque, and ecstatic—that he takes in hating those on his enemies list. The poisonous media, the wretched Tories, a Labour minister or two, whoever; it’s the hating that’s the thing. Or perhaps the secret lay in the exercise, and the narcotic, of power. In any event, whatever it was that drove Campbell, Blair saw that he could use it, and he did.

And as to what that says about Tony Blair, once again you’ll have to draw your own conclusions.

Notes
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1. The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alistair Campbell Diaries, by Alistair Campbell; Knopf, 794 pages, $35. Go back to the text.