Spin-doctor Campbell proposes a risky course of schemo-therapy
All of us, whatever our politics, will be sad to hear that the Prime Minister is once again undergoing treatment from his spin doctors. Mr Alastair Campbell, president of the Royal College of Spin (RCOS), has been called back to No. 10. He is carrying out an operation following smear tests. The smears were on Mr Howard and Mr Letwin, it should be emphasised, not on Mr Blair. Spinning is the only form of surgery in which someone other than the patient feels adverse side effects.
No one devises better schemes than Mr Campbell; so the operation will be followed, until 5 May, by schemo-therapy. (I follow the Harley Street etiquette, incidentally, of referring to a surgeon of Mr Campbell’s distinction as ‘Mr’; it being a solecism to use ‘Dr’ of such an eminence, though I gather that that is not the case in the United States.) As was so during the operations which Mr Blair underwent before the last two general elections, the Prime Minister is being made as comfortable as possible by trusty male-nurse Mandelson, who has been practising in Brussels. Dr Fraser Kemp is also on call. Our thoughts and prayers are with Mrs Blair and the children at this difficult time.
The first indications are that Mr Blair is responding to treatment. Labour increased its lead in this week’s Populus poll in the Times. But the surgery being carried out on Mr Blair only serves, as the newspapers would put it, ‘to highlight a growing scandal in healthcare’. Mr Blair is a beneficiary of the ‘postcode lottery’. Living, as he does, in Downing Street, he can be treated by practitioners of the calibre of Mr Campbell and male-nurse Mandelson. Other politicians are less lucky.
Consider, for example, the heart-rending case of Mr Michael Howard. He has been waiting well over a year for a spin operation. He is still behind Mr Blair in the polls. When will he receive his percentage replacement? Recently, he felt he had no alternative but to go to Australia to find a spin doctor. This doubtless admirable physician, a Mr Crosby, is now treating Mr Howard in a private ward at Conservative Central Office. This doctor’s arrival was greeted by the Times reporting that Mr Crosby did not think the Tories would gain a majority at the election, and that they should concentrate their efforts on those seats which they had a reasonable chance of winning rather than a large number of seats which they did not. Mr Crosby’s reaction was to sue the Times, or at least to be party to suing it. That is a rather drastic piece of surgery. Perhaps the reasoning behind it was that it might make the Times think twice before printing more stories helpful to the government and damaging to the Tories. It would be embarrassing for the Times to have to retract. If Mr Crosby’s operation is successful, suing the Times will have been a skilful use of the scalpel. In the meantime, we laymen can but hope that Mr Howard’s health is in good hands.
The truth seems to be, however, that for more than a decade the Tories have been poor at spinning. True, long ago, there was the Zinoviev letter. Grigory Zinoviev, a Moscow functionary, purportedly signed a letter calling the British Communist party to subversive action. The Daily Mail printed it during the 1924 general election, when a minority Labour government was already accused of being weak towards left-wing subversives. The Tories won. It has long been assumed that the letter was a forgery and that certain Conservative Central Office figures knew it to be. It is now listed in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable under ‘fakes’.
But the Cambridge don Mr Christopher Andrew, in Secret Service: the Making of the British Intelligence Community (1985), wrote: ‘Perhaps the greatest weakness of the various forgery hypotheses is that they take no account of the large number of genuine Soviet and Comintern documents successfully intercepted by the British and Indian intelligence services.’ MI5 of course had agents in the British Communist party. At least one of them seems to have reported to Whitehall on the letter in question. Mr Andrew observed, ‘If the Zinoviev letter was forged, it must surely have been sufficiently close to a genuine Comintern communication for the MI5 agent at party headquarters to confuse the two.’ True or false, though, the Zinoviev letter was a smear, not a spin. There is a difference. A smear is what it sounds like. Spin is something ascribed to words and deeds. The spin doctors are the ascribers. It is possible to point to the time when the terms ‘spin’ and ‘spin doctor’ entered political discourse: the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries. Early on, there were seven contestants; inevitably called the ‘seven dwarfs’. They debated with one another inordinately. After the debates, their representatives moved about the media quarters, each putting a victorious spin on what their candidates had said — ‘spin’ being as much a term in baseball as in cricket. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Governor Dukakis, the candidate who won the nomination — and therefore presumably had the best spin doctors — went on, whatever his other qualities, to be as dull a presidential campaigner as any in memory. At the term’s birth, it was shown that spinners cannot spin into office a politician whom voters dislike.
I believe that history will decide that Mr Blair won on the scale that he did in 1997 and 2001 despite, not because of, his spinners. That will also be true if he wins anything like the same this time. If he does not, the reason will probably be traced to the spinning operation at present under way.
Middle-class respectability — the most beneficial force in our or any other country — has made Mr Blair what he is; both his own and that of those who vote for him. Spinners, like us journalists, tend not fully to be part of that force. Their tone is not the same. The Mail this week quoted Mr Campbell as emailing a journalist who was investigating for Newsnight his latest activities, ‘Now f—– off and cover something important, you t—–.’ He sent a second email to say that the first had been sent by mistake. Yet the sentiments of the first seemed consistent with Mr Campbell’s opinion of the person to whom he sent it. For whom, then, was the first intended? If readers would pardon any breach in doctor-patient confidentiality, perhaps it was the Prime Minister.
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