Now Tony Blair begins his final mission: to shackle the media
PETER °BORNE
Never has Labour stood so high, or the Tories so low, as they do this weekend. To gain just 250 seats in the local election results was a catastrophe for the Tories. Look back at the 1980s, when Neil Kinnock's moribund Labour rarely failed to gain 45 per cent or so of the vote in local elections. The Conservatives staggered to 35 per cent. Where they go from here is obscure.
Even now many Tory MPs do not fully grasp the dimensions of their problem. It is possible that, for the first time since the collapse of the Liberals, we are witnessing the death of a great political party. Historians may yet look back at William Hague and the 167 seats he secured in last year's general election, and marvel at how well, not how badly, he did. Look at the scale of the problem: vanishing membership, negligible support among young voters, an organisational structure that has collapsed across vast tracts of the country. Part of the problem is failure of will. The political class which sustained the old Tory party still exists. Indeed, thanks to the resurgence of the City of London, it now enjoys greater wealth than for 100 years. But all that money, talent and energy goes into private life, domestic consumption and, increasingly, the purchase of private estates in Continental Europe. Only the anti-hunting debate seriously animates people of this type. With a few luminous exceptions, of which fain Duncan Smith is an outstanding example, this class has opted out.
The political analyst Peter Kellner last week raised the question: if the Conservative party did not exist, would it be necessary to invent it? It is not clear that it would. Nor can the Conservatives easily reinvent themselves. There is no great symbolic gesture available. like Clause 4. There are no half-baked policies lobe rejected with a great show of virtue, like unilateralism or nationalisation. The New Labour modernisers could see their path through the wilderness. For fain Duncan Smith the problem is more insidious. The rules of national debate are skewed against him. When the health spokesman Liam Fox proposes reforms to the health service, he is said to be bent on the destruction of the NHS. When Alan Milburn, a few months later, produces the same sort of policies, he wins praise for bravely confronting the publicsector unions. When Tories like Ann Widdecombe talk about asylum-seekers, they are racist. When New Labour does the same in
far more robust language, it is praised for tackling the problems that exercise the voters. In this context, the Labour chairman Charles Clarke's article in last week's Tribune magazine should be studied with care. Bear in mind that big New Labour policy-changes are often associated with a change in language. Thus 'spending' became 'investment' and last week 'immigration' became 'migration'. In an interesting foray into new territory, Clarke writes that 'migration' can be 'destabilising and not sustainable'.
This linguistic sophistication is one example of how New Labour sustains its hegemony. Like a good general, Tony Blair moves on. Having swept aside opposition, New Labour is now putting down roots. The Prime Minister is at last trying to put into effect a longstanding objective, the creation of a press that will report the government within its own chosen parameters. Two steps were taken along this route last week. First, the government used the draft Communications Bill to sweeten Rupert Murdoch. It allowed him to tighten yet further his grip on the British media by converting Channel 5 into a new version of Sky One. Murdoch's people are said to be 'very relaxed' about Tessa Jowell's Bill.
Second, No. 10 Downing Street made the first moves towards the creation of a compliant press corps very consciously based on the US model. Last week's changes to the Westminster lobby are an attempt to recreate the White House West Wing and the deferential reporting that goes with it. Government ministers assert that the new morning press conferences, open to the foreign press and others, will increase 'openness'. They will do nothing of the sort. These changes are designed to make the workings of government more opaque and less accountable. On Tuesday afternoon I went along, as I sometimes do, to the 4 p.m. briefing up in the lobby room. It is a scruffy, rather mysterious, place, right at the top of the Commons. About 25 journalists, and the Prime Minister's official
spokesman, were there. First subject of discussion was the Department of Transport's belated settlement with its former communications chief Martin Sixsmith.
The questions were led by Jon Smith of the Press Association and Paul Linford of the Newcastle Journal. These two had grasped that this fresh development raised as many questions as it answered. It was a pleasure to observe them at work, unpicking this latest government announcement through polite but forensic questioning. They spotted its admission that Stephen Byers lied not merely on the Jonathan Dimbleby show but also when he came to the Commons to 'clarify matters' in the wake of that Dimbleby appearance. The government spokesman squirmed, wriggled and did his best. Discussion then moved on to the revelation that the businessman Paul Drayson had made a second Labour donation while negotiating his smallpox vaccine contract, and from there to Cherie Booth's chairmanship of government seminars. It finished off with an attempt to establish the Prime Minister's attitude to homosexual adoption.
It is easy to understand why Downing Street want rid of this lobby system. Though easy to caricature, it holds No. 10 to account in a way that open press conferences, with microphones being passed from hand to hand, never could. The government disingenuously claims that these conferences will bolster Parliament by giving more prominence to ministers. That is nonsense. These will be media class events that will give great scope to showboating celebrity journalists and take ministers yet further away from the Commons. Difficult questions about Byers will be easily evaded, with the microphone then being passed to the London correspondent of an Eastern European newspaper with a question about, say, EU enlargement. Smith from the Press Association will get one question if he is lucky, and certainly not the opportunity to follow through his line of argument to its conclusion. Linford from the Newcastle Journal will be fortunate to get a look-in at all, unless he has taken the trouble to establish a reputation for being 'reliable'. Meanwhile secret communication between government and friendly journalists will only intensify. With critical journalists thrust into the darkness, a 'White Commonwealth', not dissimilar to the one fostered by Harold Wilson in the 1960s, will re-emerge. Some, indeed, would guess that this has already begun to happen.
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