Bismarck never fought a war on two fronts. In order to unite Germany, he defeated Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, in separate wars. In 1914 and 1941 Germany fought European wars on two fronts and lost both. Now Tony Blair is engaged on a war on two fronts, and so is the BBC.
Blair’s two fronts are Iraq and Europe. The war in Iraq, which I supported, was immensely unpopular on the Centre Left, in the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. The euro and proposed European constitution are immensely unpopular on the Centre Right. Both of these issues transcend party loyalties.
The Iraq critics think that the Prime Minister has betrayed his country to a Texan gunslinger; many of them are more concerned to repudiate this Iraq policy than to secure Labour’s re-election in two years’ time. Tory Eurosceptics were prepared to destroy John Major’s administration in order to repudiate the Maastricht treaty and European monetary union. They saw their own Government as traitors to the independence of Britain, and they now see the Prime Minister in the same way.
These groups extend across all parties; some Liberal Democrats are critics of the Government’s policy on Europe as well as on Iraq. Yet it is the coalition of forces which threatens the Blair administration. The Eurosceptics are coldly determined to break the Government rather than agree to a ratification of the European constitution; the Iraq critics are equally determined to force the Government out of its commitment to American policy in Iraq. There may be no sea room between these two rocks.
On Iraq there are two critical issues, both in Britain and the United States. The first, which is the cause of Downing Street’s quarrel with the BBC, is the contrast between the Prime Minister’s warnings about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and the failure to find such weapons in the aftermath of victory. Both in London and Washington, the politicians are blaming this on the spooks and the spooks are blaming it on the politicians. The outcome of the war was the welcome overthrow of a murderous tyrant, but the case for the war did contain some exaggerations.
The second emerging issue is the state of Iraq now. It is becoming increasingly clear that the United States had no adequate plan for reconstructing Iraq after the war. President Bush had not worked out what he would do when he won. His failure is now being paid for in US and British lives as well as in Iraqi suffering. I do not think this will be politically unimportant, either in the US or in Britain. Many Americans who supported the war are shocked by the postwar confusion and alarmed by the growing casualties.
These are Tony Blair’s two fronts, and he is falling back on both of them. He is going to the US in 18 days’ time to receive a gold medal from Congress. That will do him precious little good; the nation-building in Iraq is what matters.
The BBC is now fighting its own war on two fronts: one front is against Labour, led by Alastair Campbell, the other is against the Tories. The BBC probably retains the confidence of Charles Kennedy. I have spent one-fifth of my working life as a regulator of broadcasting, five years from 1981 to 1986 as Vice-Chairman of Governors of the BBC, and another five from 1988 to 1993 as the first Chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council. Regulating British broadcasting is like eating a diet of chopped hay, but it does give one some understanding of the situation in which the poor devils of BBC governors now find themselves.
The Tories hate the BBC. Anyone who watched the local election broadcast on May 1 will understand why. The BBC planned the programme on the assumption that the Tories would do badly and would then face a leadership crisis. An obscure Tory back-bencher, Crispin Blunt, was to be the Guy Fawkes of the leadership conspiracy, and chose that day for his now forgotten attack on Iain Duncan Smith. The BBC had prepared the evening’s story as “Tory defeat — leadership crisis”. Unfortunately for them, the Tories were not defeated and a leadership crisis did not occur. Yet the BBC ploughed dismally on, hailing every Tory victory as a setback. The coverage was not impartial; it was not professional.
The two top men in the BBC, Gavyn Davies, the Chairman and Greg Dyke, the Director-General, are both seen as “Tony’s cronies”. In practice, they had, from Tony Blair’s point of view, “gone native”. They are BBC men, not Tony’s men. But that has not changed the Conservative belief that the sympathies of the BBC are Centre Left, not Centre Right. The BBC occupies the broadcasting slot which The Guardian occupies in print. The Conservatives believe that the BBC has an anti-Conservative bias.
At present, Labour, or at least the administration, is equally angry with the BBC. I do not have much personal sympathy with Alastair Campbell: he is a professional propagandist who knows every trick in the book. Indeed, he wrote the book. He is now complaining about allegations the BBC may have got wrong as a cover for allegations they got right. Nevertheless, as one would expect from a propagandist of his skills, some of his complaints are justified.
It is his most general accusation that I find most convincing. In the words of the letter of June 27 from Richard Sambrook, the Director of BBC news: “In your evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, you made it clear that you believe that the BBC had an anti-war agenda . . . You know that we strongly dispute that charge and the BBC’s Board of Governors, after detailed discussion both during and after the war, have expressed their complete satisfaction with the impartiality of BBC news coverage.”
This can only be a matter of opinion. I watched a great deal of the BBC coverage of the Iraq war. It was in line with that of the newspapers which were opposed to the war. The BBC emphasised criticisms of the decision to go to war, and grossly over emphasised the minor military setbacks of the early campaign, in which Allied losses were, fortunately, very light. I have no doubt that in this, his most important criticism, Alastair Campbell was right and the Governors were wrong.
In other matters he was on weaker ground. There is nothing in his objection to the BBC reporting an unattributable single source; as he well knows, lobby journalism is based on reporting unattributable single sources, whether they are ministers, Members of Parliament, officials or, as in this case, intelligence people. It happens routinely, throughout the media, hundreds of times every day.
Nor is there much in the argument that the criticism should have been put to Downing Street. Apparently it had been put to the Ministry of Defence and every opportunity was given for a prompt official rebuttal. Downing Street has a bad reputation for counter-spinning stories before they can even be published. If Alastair Campbell is not told because he is not trusted, he has only himself to blame.
Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter, was undoubtedly telling the truth. A qualified intelligence source did brief against Campbell, just as Campbell once briefed against Cherie Blair. No doubt Campbell had wanted to make the case for war as strong as possible. That was his job. The source was mistaken in thinking that the “45 minutes” story was Campbell’s — it came from a genuine intelligence source, which was also, ironically, a single unattributable source. To this extent Gilligan’s source was mistaken — but the broad thrust of his criticism of the Downing Street approach to the dossiers was not necessarily wrong.
The governors are in the same impossible position I remember from the 1980s. They are ultimately responsible for the government of the BBC. They have, however, only a limited ability to control the management, which looks to the Director-General, not to them. They have a duty to maintain the BBC’s independence. They have a duty, also, to adjudicate fairly complaints against the BBC, including complaints from the Government. If they uphold a government complaint, they seem to the staff, whom they do not directly control, to be betraying the BBC’s independence.
It must be wrong for the BBC to be judge in its own cause, but it has been for 80 years. Now that has alienated both Labour and the Conservatives. Yet the BBC depends on the politicians. They could turn to Ofcom as an alternative regulator; they will have to decide the future of the licence fee. Both for Blair and the BBC, war on two fronts is a highrisk strategy.
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