SHARED OPINION
PM sick after course of WI treatment; spin doctor refuses to accept blame
FRANK JOHNSON
GMC in dock over second gynaecolo- gist: Another "Butcher" Doctor'. Thus Sat- urday's Daily Mail headline. There was worse to come. That is, the disturbing case of Dr Alastair Campbell, one of the country's lead- ing spin surgeons who practises in Downing Street, which is to spin doctoring what Harley Street is to plain doctoring. It was officially admitted that Dr Campbell had diagnosed that it was safe for a London man, in his mid-forties, to recover his health by addressing the massed Women's Institute.
Predictably, the man had a relapse. His life is now in ruins. His stricken family are demanding compensation. Said his wife, Cherie, 'Now I am free to sell my heart- break story — I mean, tell my heartbreak story. Basically, my Tony was perfectly fit until he placed himself in the hands of Dr Campbell. He had a majority of more than 170. He had just become a father. Then he suffered some minor wounds as a result of some class scuffles started by our next-door neighbour, a Scotsman whom the children had never really liked because he supports Raith Rovers which our two older boys can't find on the map. They think there is something odd about a man over 40 who's not married to a proper team.
'Anyway, Dr Campbell said he had a cure. All Tony had to do was say nothing for an hour to the Women's Institute. But the oper- ation went terribly wrong. By Sunday, he was suffering from a collapsed MORI. Like mil- lions of women up and down the country, I'm just a simple liberal QC. I don't know anything about medicine. But I was brought up to believe that the National Spin Service was the envy of the world. What's Mr Blun- kett doing about my husband's case? As far as I can see, nothing. I didn't vote New Labour to see a so-called qualified spin doc- tor treat a patient like this.'
Mr Blair is now undergoing counselling. Mrs Blair appealed to the media to allow her husband space in which to recover.
Dr Campbell has a different version. After days of hiding from the cameras, and entering his surgery with a red box over his head, he broke his silence. But his remarks showed a breathtaking arrogance. 'I'm a highly competent, skilled spin doctor,' he boasted. 'I have carried out thousands of operations. Sure, I've made my mistakes. Some of them have gone wrong.
'I can't discuss an individual case. I read in the media that in the matter of this unfortunate London man I advised a course in WI therapy. Maybe I did and maybe I didn't. But WI always involves side-effects. I arouse envy because I'm flamboyant. Kindly leave my doorstep.'
Mrs Blair was 'gutted' by that interview: 'He showed no remorse. It's not his majori- ty that's in danger. He can always go back to the Mirror.'
It will be noted that Dr Campbell did not go so far as to admit that he prescribed the controversial WI treatment. This is further evidence that, since the botched operation, there has been buck-passing among the medical team who operated on Mr Blair. Defenders of Dr Campbell claim that the same recommendation that Mr Blair should undergo WI was made by no less a figure than Dr Peter Mandelson, president of the Royal College of Spin Doctors. Meanwhile, before Mr Blair was treated with WI, Dr Philip Gould, the senior spin registrar who pioneered the miracle drug Focus, wrote Dr Campbell a memo. In the light of the botched operation, it shows Dr Gould in a favourable light. It was leaked to this week's Sunday Times. It was the sec- ond of Dr Gould's memos — detaching himself from responsibility for Mr Blair's illnesses to appear in the Sunday Times in about as many weeks. This suggests that the surest way to attract publicity for not being to blame for something is to get it into one of Dr Gould's confidential memos. We await his leaked memo next year explaining that he is not to blame for any large loss of Labour seats at the general election. Dr Gould will thus survive to operate on other Labour politicians.
Dr Gould's memo refers throughout to 'TB'. This seems to mean not the disease, but the patient. Commenting on a draft of the WI speech, Dr Gould observes that 'it looks once again like TB is pandering, lack- ing conviction, unable to hold to a position for more than a few weeks before he moves on from it, lacking the guts to be able to tough it out'.
How else did Mr Blair become Prime MM- ister in the first place? Dr Gould was one of the dedicated team which carried out the successful transplant on Labour's reputation among the middle class. The surgery depend- ed for its entire success on Mr Blair's pan- dering and lack of conviction. It is too late to change him now. Let us now see how Dr Gould deals with an epidemic of TB.
Aclash of dates ensured that through- out England versus Portugal I was at the first night of the Kirov ballet's Covent Gar- den season. As the evening proceeded, I kept wondering about my country's fate in Eindhoven. By the last interval, I could deny myself no longer. I telephoned the Daily Telegraph sports desk for the result. I was also making a humanitarian gesture towards the menfolk among the large pro- portion of the audience that was being cor- porately entertained. Those stoics had to endure four hours of ballet before dinner. Mr Michael Heseltine was among them. He bore it with characteristic courage, having already survived two heart attacks. Eventu- ally, I was able to break the news — we had lost 3-2 — to some of these men, several of whom added the information that we had been winning 2-0. It seems that they had all been surreptitiously at the mobile tele- phones. Could there have been anyone in the crowd at Eindhoven wondering how the Kirov ballet was going? I would have bro- ken the news: 'Russia won'.
But was it entirely a Russian victory? The Kirov's opening Sleeping Beauty, a brilliant re-creation of the 1890 original, owed much to the help of non-Russian scholars includ- ing an American and an Italian, the latter the dance critic of The Spectator. The British have long had more authentic versions of ballet's Russian classics. The Germans have long been better than England at football (though I write before Charleroi). But we have for some time been better than them at their game of Wagner. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s much of the cast for succes- sive Bayreuth Rings was British, led by Mr John Tomlinson as Wotan himself.
National characteristics change. German football tactics are now cautious. Mr Kee- gan's error against Portugal was to carry on being aggressive when we were winning 2-0, thus exposing his home front — an error which had previously caused the defeat of German statesmen.
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