About three weeks ago I received a telephone call from one of the prime minister’s inner circle, the gist of which was that Alastair Campbell was by no means certain to resign, that he was considered well-nigh indispensable within No 10 and that his instinct was to try to tough it out and leave office only after the results of the Hutton inquiry.
I may have been being spun, of course. One needs to be George Smiley in his prime to make any sense of the looking-glass world of the new Labour circus: of what is information and what is disinformation, what is friendship and what is mere expediency. My hunch, though, is that this earlier, pre-Hutton steer was correct. It makes sense. Campbell would have loved to have confounded his critics and gone on for a few more months.
It is, therefore, a testament to his skill as a media manipulator — and also to the chronic, bewildering gullibility of his victims — that his resignation last Friday has come to be presented as a voluntary act, carried out by a distinguished public servant surrendering the burdens of office at a time of his own choosing.
This sanitised, well-spun version is, of course, complete nonsense. Does anyone seriously believe that this is an opportune moment for the government’s director of communications to resign? On the day after his boss was forced into the humiliating position of testifying before a judicial inquiry — only the second prime minister to do so? On the last working afternoon before the widow of a man driven to suicide gives evidence that could shake the government to its foundations? In the week that opinion polls confirmed that public trust in the occupant of No 10 has collapsed, and that the government would lose an election if one was called tomorrow?
Oh yes — this is obviously an ideal moment to leave! Alastair and Tony must have been working on this scenario for months! And yet one flipped from television channel to television channel on Friday and one scoured the newspapers yesterday, and the overall impression one received was that this was a great day for new Labour. To quote from one report: “Friends said that Mr Campbell was elated yesterday and he marked his announcement with an impromptu party with his staff, who presented him with a cake. He had wanted to leave a year ago . . . etc, etc.”
Certainly it is true that Campbell has been moaning for years — practically since he started in the job — that he wanted to stop as soon as possible. But that is part of his lugubrious demeanour. Let us put aside the bad taste of holding an “impromptu party” while the inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death goes on. Let us, though, acknowledge Campbell’s departure for what it is: an ill-timed disaster for the government, mired as it is in a nightmare of over hyped-up intelligence, landed squarely in this mess by the psychological flaws (to coin a phrase) of Alastair Campbell.
The fact is that if he is having to go now, then things must be bad — worse, actually, than most of us can ever have imagined. It suggests to me that his evidence to the Hutton inquiry, albeit delivered with his usual brutal self-confidence and to admiring notices, is in danger of unravelling as it is picked apart by forensic analysis. The story he told to the foreign affairs committee and his flat denials to the Hutton inquiry that he had much to do with the weapons dossier sit very ill with the testimony of his colleagues and the evidence in No 10’s e-mails.
It is also clear that Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, is refusing to play the role of sacrificial victim so thoughtfully allotted to him by briefings from No 10. At the same time, despite the embarrassment to the BBC of Andrew Gilligan’s contacts with the foreign affairs committee, it is becoming obvious to most independent-minded people that their journalism was remarkably well-sourced: that they did reflect what Dr Kelly had told them and that he in turn was only reflecting a widely held belief in the intelligence world that the weapons dossier had been “sexed-up”.
In short, the Hutton inquiry — by the time the prime minister ran the gauntlet of booing and jeering last Thursday — was not going well for the government and, with Mrs Kelly due to give evidence tomorrow, there is every likelihood that it might be about to turn worse. This is the real reason Campbell has gone now. He has been put in a boat and cast adrift — or, to be kind, he has had the professionalism to clamber into the boat and push himself away. He had simply become too much of a liability to be kept on board.
The interesting question now is whether this sacrifice will be enough for the government to avoid disaster. Over Hutton, perhaps it will be. But Hutton is only one aspect of the Iraqi crisis, which falls into two parts — the military and the political.
The military aspect is obvious. With 50 British soldiers now dead, and with the prospect of many more dying in the weeks to come, minds must begin to turn to how we can extricate ourselves from this quagmire. I am sure Campbell and Blair believed that the precise details of how we got into the war would not matter in the long term, so long as it was convincingly won. And, indeed, we were told that it had been convincingly won. But those assurances now ring hollow, and the longer the killings go on the more the decisions that took us to war will be analysed.
The political side of the Iraqi debacle is that it has effectively cost Labour an entire, precious year of its second term. Supporters of the government, who believed this was supposed to be the “time for delivery” on the public services and who had expected to be campaigning for a “yes” vote in a referendum on the euro, find instead that Labour has gone off in an entirely unexpected direction, yoking itself to a right-wing Republican administration in Washington and seeming to turn its back on Europe.
It is baffling. Alastair Campbell’s job was supposed to be communications. But ever since the 2001 election, Labour has been communicating nothing coherently. I find it impossible, in a few short sentences — or even in long ones — to sum up what this Blair government is about. It lacks what they call in the jargon “a narrative”.
There seems to be nothing to it now except Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, with Blair trapped in the role of doomed tragic hero — a Prometheus bound to the rock of the Hutton inquiry, his liver being pecked out each day by the flocking journalists. And whose strategy of attacking the BBC chained him to this rock? That of his own director of communications!
Tony Blair is anything but a fool. By the time he returned to Downing Street last Thursday afternoon, he had seen at first hand where Campbell’s obsessiveness and egomania had led him. The following day, Campbell was gone. The spin is that they were, are and always will be friends. If you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything. But then, remarkably, it seems that a majority of the British media does.
