DIARY
SIMON HOGGART Those of us who believe that it is essen- tial for the Labour Party to win the next election are getting just a tiny bit worried about Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's press officer, who has been involved in an excit- ing new libel case. A flurry of articles about him has recently appeared in the popular papers. Most imply that he is a sinister cap- tain of the Thought Police, lurking in the background, forcing innocent members of the shadow Cabinet to do his evil bidding. Personally I find him more comical than sinister. Just seeing him always cheers me up. There he stands outside the Commons Press Gallery where I work, dispensing benison or loathing upon reporters, a confi- dent master in the netherworld of political news-gathering. This is a world in which `facts' and 'the truth' are trivial components of the far more important 'story', like a bag of plain flour to a master patissier. It's not only Clare Short who has offended Mr Campbell. Recently he had a difference of opinion with Robert Peston of the Finan- cial Times, over the correct interpretation of some remarks about tax policy made by Mr Blair on the plane to New York. Not for Mr Campbell the subtle reprimand murmured over the lobster bisque; throughout the visit he excoriated Mr Peston in the crudest way, both to his face and to other journalists. On the return trip, an aide even checked that he had not been upgraded to first class; if he had been, the Blair party was ready to downgrade itself to club rather than drink vintage champagne from the same bottle as the hated hack. All this for the political editor of a paper which has a greater respect for the facts than any other, and which supported the Labour Party at the last election. Oh, and Mr Peston's father, Lord Peston, is a Labour front-bench spokesman. Journalists are usually very courteous to Campbell, since they assume he will be the press secretary in Downing Street and expect that he will use his knowledge and power ruthlessly to reward those who please him and punish those who don't. But behind his back they swap amusing and outrageous stories about him. For example, in America he received faxes of each correspondent's article, and handed them out in the manner of a hec- toring schoolmaster: 'This is crap'; 'crap headline, not bad story', and to one writer who had (I am told) largely copied out a Labour press release, 'Excellent!' At the moment all this jollity goes on behind the scenes; my anxiety as a Labour supporter is that during the general election Mr Camp- bell will fail to restrain himself in front of the many reporters and cameramen who will have no interest in keeping in his good books, and do something silly in public. Outside the Lobby, on the edge of the known world, are some wild beasts, and they would be only too happy to gobble Mr Campbell up.
Many of the tributes paid to the Queen recently have described how quickly she puts commoners at their ease, or, alter- natively, how someone who makes a faux pas can be frozen with a basilisk stare. I have never met her myself, but I have talked to Princess Di twice, and can con- firm that meeting royalty does have a terri- fying effect on the synapses. The first time, she had just flown out to Australia on her first big tour with Prince Charles. I found myself having one of those sympathetic, `oh-I-know' type of conversations with her on the subject of how difficult it is to fly long distances with small children. (Prince William was not yet one year old.) What gave this banal conversation its surrealist tinge was the fact that she had flown in a private plane with a staff of (I think) 35, and — even weirder — I had completely forgotten that I did not then have any chil- dren. Later I met her at the British embassy in Washington where someone asked what she would be wearing at the White House dinner that night, and she replied, 'A little black number — it's the last new thing on the whole tour.' I piped up, 'So it's a sweater and jeans from now on then?' and was favoured for this tiny pleasantry with that wonderful, vast, heart-melting, knee- buckling smile which has enslaved so many men. They say that at this stage the great danger is over-confidence. She complained amiably about formal meals, and the embarrassment of finding something to say to distinguished people who were tongue- And I declare this heart operation open'. tied anyway. I said casually, 'Well, with any luck they'll put you next to Clint Eastwood, and you won't have to say a word all night,' which I thought was funny, but which she didn't get, and caused her to give me a blank, numbing stare.
Iwas delighted to see that David Sexton, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, called the BBC 2 series Secrets of the Paranormal `shameful'. I used the same word in a pre- view of the series in the Guardian, and have had the usual mail grumbling about people who sound off on topics they know nothing about (actually, I know quite a bit about paranormal nonsense, having co-written a book on the subject). Other correspondents whinge that their pet lunacies should have equal time with sceptics, as if, say, the theo- ry that the earth is flat should have the same academic standing as the theory that it isn't. I sometimes wonder why stupid, uncritical series like this bother me so much. Am I in danger of becoming as much a crank as those who believe that 2,000- year-old spirit surgeons inhabit living peo- ple, or who imagine that distant thought- waves can improve a football team's perfor- mance? Often the producers weasel out by saying that they are not taking sides, merely letting people make up their own minds. Yet they rarely let balancing facts intrude, since these would kill the story. I suppose what peeves me most is that the world is full of people trying to lie to us, including politicians and their press officers, advertis- ers, door-to-door salesman and the popular press. We are surrounded by a constant, static hum of misinformation, and the BBC should not add to it.
The death of the original Christopher Robin is sad on many levels. The Winnie- the-Pooh stories and poems may have made Dorothy Parker `thwow up', but A.A. Milne caught perfectly the bittersweet nature of parenthood: we take intense pride in our children's growing maturity and independence, yet at the same time yearn for them never to lose the charm and innocence of childhood. That's why the books are, I suspect, more popular with parents than their offspring; certainly mine put up with them out of kindness to their old man, and preferred Roald Dahl. (My daughter is now reading Swallows and Amazons; Arthur Ransome was a real mid- dle-class socialist, not a counter-jumper like John Prescott.) Christopher Robin's estrangement from his parents is well docu- mented, and their sadness must have been intolerable. 'We lost Billy [his family name] years ago,' Milne said, with terrible poignancy, not long before his death.
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