THE MOLE IN THE GUACAMOLE
Who is behind the leaks? Campbell, Gould, the Tories — or Blair himself?
Sion Simon considers the evidence WHAT's the traditional mark of a top civil-service molehunt? Easy: failure to find the culprit. What are the prospects for that tradition in the age of the uber-spin doctors? Robust, you might think. We shall see.
The media chattocracy will arrive at a consensus more quickly. And a good thing too. Moles at the centre of government are insidious beasts. And if they cannot be blasted to bits by the judicious intervention of a shotgun, they can at least be made to feel such heat on them that they desist from their moleish endeavours. At the risk of neglecting my journalistic duty of schaden- freude, democracy is not well served by stok- ing the atmosphere of paranoia, suspicion and fear in Downing Street. There is enough of that at the best of times.
The guiding principle in hunting moles is clear: cui bono? As Abbe Faria (the Frank Johnson of 19th-century penal servi- tude) explained to Edmond Dantes with respect to his own sad stitching-up: 'If you wish to find the guilty party, first find whose interest the crime serves.' (I make no apology for quoting from The Count of Monte Cristo twice in a week: there is more pithy wisdom in this one potboiler by the hack Dumas [pere, naturellement] than in a dozen finely crafted doorstops of his reviled and resented rival, Balzac.) Most obvious are those quibus the bon= plainly ain't. That is, Messrs Campbell, Gould, Blair and the latter's personal staff. I have nothing but respect for those Don Quixotes of conspiracy theory (pronounced, by the way, in the 16th-century Castilian in which it was conceived, as 'key-shot', with- out the throat-clearing faux-Spanish noises of the modem affectation), who argue either that Gould is leaking as an attempt to bring an out-of-touch Blair down to earth, or that Campbell is the culprit, driven by a kind of megalomaniacal sibling rivalry to destroy and humiliate the man whose suc- cess is his own raison d'etre.
Both of these rationales fail the cui bono test as surely as does that growling Testarossa of conspiracy theories — that Blair himself is responsible for the leaks because he wants us all to feel sorry for him. For while it is not certain which of the blessed Trinity is made to look the most foolish by the leaks (Blair is well ahead on points), it is quite clear that they all — collectively and individually — look considerably worse than if their privacy had been respected.
The next most extravagant canard is the `teenage cybermole lurking in the Down- ing Street mainframe'. It seems to be lent credence by the last but one leak having been an email — from Blair's 'special assistant', Anji Hunter, instructing every- one to be on best behaviour in front of Michael Cockerell's television crew. But it is conclusively undermined by the 'TB' and Gould memos. The Prime Minister is unlikely to have emailed, because he does not use email (this is a polite way of saying that he does not know how to use email). He faxes. The cybermole may thus consid- er a malevolent tube of metal to have spewed forth shot from the top of his hole, exterminating him.
The next postulate, popular in certain Labour circles, is a better one. But it is probably mistaken. Some naughty cynics have been suggesting that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (shocking though I know it must seem to the general reader) might have been leaking in order to undermine and destabilise the Prime Minister. In this case, at least, the bonus is unmistakable: Mr Brown gets to be Prime Minister instead of Mr Blair. The first test is whether Mr Brown would have had been copied in on all the papers that were leaked. As it happens, I can reveal via non- mole moles of my own that the Chancellor was on the copy list of the 'TB' memo.
On the other hand, I am also told that the first Gould memo was faxed directly from Mr Gould to Mr Campbell, and to no other.
And I am reasonably convinced by the nois- es emanating from the Treasury to the effect that the Chancellor is displeased that his cherished announcement on public spending was overshadowed by mole-mania. One could argue that the contrast between the `emptiness' of Blair as supposedly revealed by his memo, and the 'substance' of Brown contained in his prudent spending splurge plays in the Chancellor's favour. But Brown would never have timed such a leak for his big spending week. Nor, to be fair, is there any evidence that he would go so far in his determination to lead Labour as so system- atically to betray Mr Blair.
Which leaves the explanation that I favour: a brilliant plot by the Conservatives and their agents. First, and most obviously, the greatest bonus of all accrues to the Opposition. What is more, there is a strong consensus in the better-informed quarters of the parliamentary lobby that the six leaks of the last three months have each had a certain whiff of Tory dirty tricks in the manner of their materialisation. The `TB' memo, for instance, was given to Trevor Kavanagh of the Sun and Andrew Pierce of the Times, of which the latter in particular is a noted political (rather than simply ideological) Conservative. The plac- ing and the drip-feeding of the leaks has been consummate.
Most tellingly, the leaks all date from the same period: about three months ago. Almost the only logical explanation for this is that the papers concerned were collected by someone who had access to them then, but doesn't now. At the spy-movie end of the spectrum that could be somebody like a temp, sent in to Downing Street specifically to gather such intelligence. Except that a temp would not have had access to such papers, and that such things rarely happen outside Mossad and The Iperess File. More likely it is a civil servant who either left Downing Street for a more anonymous department, or left the civil service altogeth- er, but is now in cahoots with the Tories.
In which case, he or she ought to be rela- tively easy to track down. For the Blairites, the identification of the mole as a Tory turncoat would be mixed news. The black side would be the fistful of other docu- ments still to come out, some of which could be even more embarrassing than those which have already emerged. The bonuses would be that, over time, the papers' currency would wane; and that the Blairites would at least know that it wasn't one of their own number. So they could all stop looking over their shoulders in mutual fear and suspicion. That would never do.
Sion Simon is a Daily Telegraph and News of the World columnist.
Previous page
