I got the chance to talk to Alastair Campbell on Thursday night, at an event held by Durrants, the media monitoring company.
Tony Blair's former communications director was speaking about his experiences in journalism and PR. His well-known antipathy towards contemporary reporting was strongly evident. He believes that during his six years at Number 10 the Labour government suffered just five crises: Kosovo, September 11, Iraq, the fuel protests and the 2001 foot and mouth disease. Yet media headlines screamed 'crisis' almost daily: education crisis, pensions crisis, hospitals crisis, police crisis, army crisis, prisons crisis... Anyone who has been a press officer for a high profile organisation will identify with Campbell's view on this.
He described how a reporter from a Sunday paper once ran a story claiming he was to leave Downing Street to become the voice of Manchester United. Campbell called the journalist and told him it was complete fiction. "I know, but I was desperate for a story." But Campbell himself was known to make up stories: in 1991, he had a splash in the Mirror claiming that Labour wanted Jill Morrell, the girlfriend of freed Beirut hostage John McCarthy, to stand as an MP.
The speaker introducing Alastair referred to the blogging explosion. The man once described as the second most important man in Britain responded by saying that "only saddos read them". I later questioned whether he really thought that. "I didn't really mean it!", he laughed, perhaps anticipating headlines mocking his dismissal of the rise of social media. But he added that only a fraction would ever have any influence.
His main theme was the importance of strategy in media relations: nothing else matters. He cited the success of New Labour in winning the 1997 election and then getting re-elected, focusing its key messages. He regarded the early move to grant the Bank of England independence (to set interest rates) as the most important achievement of New Labour in government.
Ironically, just the day before I had heard the tutor at a Chartered Institute of Public Relations course criticise Campbell for being far too easily diverted by tactical battles and not enough by strategy. My view is that he played an essential role in helping get Labour elected but made the critical mistake of not recognising that a different style and strategy was needed in Government. Labour's current difficulties (Iraq aside) largely reflect the fact that party has never sold the story of its successes. It has actually done the opposite, talking up the idea of a dysfunctional public sector. Small wonder the public wonder whether things have got better. And Campbell was far too quick to become the story - disastrously so in his war with the BBC after the Gilligan affair led to David Kelly's suicide. When we talked, he contrasted the fact that Tony Blair rarely reads the papers with John Major's obsession with what Fleet Street was saying about him. A press secretary can hardly follow Blair's example, but a greater sense of detachment would have been a huge advantage.
One story vividly illustrated how life in Downing Street changed between Labour's landslides of 1945 and 1997. Alastair described how Clement Attlee decided to go for a walk after asking the KIng to dissolve parliament for the 1950 general election. Attlee bumped into a leading political journalist in Whitehall, who asked whether he had anything to say about the forthcoming election. "No," the PM replied.
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