3 JULY 2004, Page 36

Placeman without a place

Alan Watkins

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL by Peter Oborne and Simon Walters Aumm, i8.99, pp. 378, ISBN 1845130014 0 ne of the chief characteristics of New Labour, Blairism or the Project — they amount to the same phenomenon — is that many of the cheer-leaders began their careers not just on the far left of the Labour Party but so far to the left as to be outside the party completely. Peter Mandelson and John Reid belonged to the latter group: Charles Clarke, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Straw to the former. They then went on to serve Neil Kinnock with varying degrees of devotion. By and large, they had an unhappy time under John Smith, who tended to prefer old-fashioned Croslandite revisionists. But they returned to prosper under Tony Blair, whose most forceful critics were themselves inclined to be old revisionists such as Roy Hattersley.

Into this pattern Alastair Campbell fitted quite snugly. His politics were formed by the treatment of Mr Kinnock by the predominantly Tory or, at any rate, Thatcher-supporting press. While Mr Mandelson was advising the leader and organising Labour's election campaigns, brilliantly, so everyone said — though unfortunately Labour kept losing — Mr Campbell, for his part, was working as a journalist for the Mirror, in its Sunday and daily versions, and also for Eddy Shah's Today.

Indeed, so devoted was Mr Campbell to Mr Kinnock, so determined to scatter his enemies and show him in the best light, that readers might have been forgiven for thinking that he had some private arrange

ment, whether with the party or with its leader. This is precisely what some people did think. After all, such arrangements were not unknown. Mirror journalists had sometimes been borrowed for party or even governmental purposes; George Brown had been subsidised by the organisation, while Hugh Cudlipp had designed and largely written Labour's muchadmired statement of policy for the 1959 election. It would have been odd, but not altogether surprising, if Mr Campbell had been occupying a similarly disreputable half-way house. He was not doing this: what he was doing was behaving as a polemicist, not only for Labour but, most of all, for Mr Kinnock. Such figures are quite common in British journalism. However, they are not inclined to write political columns properly so-called but articles on the lines of: I say, stop these shameful practices. Moreover, Mr Campbell did not confine himself to polemical columns, He wrote polemical news stories as well. Sometimes they were completely made-up. Mr Oborne and Mr Walters have discovered one of these, in which Mr Campbell claims that Jill Morrell, then the heroine of Middle England, was to stand as a Labour candidate.

Where Mr Campbell does not fit the pattern is that. like Mr Blair, he came to politics late. Most people who become politicians, political functionaries or even political writers first show an interest in the subject in their late teens or, as the precocious William Hague did, even earlier. Mr Campbell did not follow this course. His father was a Keighley vet, 'a bit of a boozer' (as my own father would have put it), a pillar of the local Conservative Club, which does not, of course, mean that he voted Conservative. Young Alastair's circumstances were comfortable. At Caius — a college which the authors misleadingly depreciate, for, quite apart from anything else, it is the third richest in Cambridge — he was famous for surliness and for propping up the college bar, He showed a particular dislike for the products of the major public schools. But he took no interest in university politics, in the university Labour club or the Union. In this respect he resembled Mr Blair at Oxford.

It seems that Mr Campbell was turned into a political creature not only by the treatment of Mr Kinnock but, before that, by his wife Fiona and his father-in-law, Robert Millar, who was an old Daily Express socialist, now an extinct type. Unlike more famous representatives of this small group, notably Michael Foot, he did not write provocative articles or go on to edit Lord Beaverbrook's newspapers. He restricted himself to uncontentious, perhaps rather dull pieces and to working for the Movement in north London. His daughter, Mrs Campbell, followed him on to the Express but, like him, continued to serve the Labour party, as she does still, The political influences on Mr Campbell were therefore different from those that impinged on Mr Blair. But the result was the same. Both of them would say, after the defeat of 1992: Never again! And, of course, Mr Mandelson — for long a rival of Mr Campbell's for the ear of Mr Blair — took the same view. It was Mr Campbell who administered the final shove when Mr Mandelson was removed from the Cabinet, not once but twice. Now Mr Campbell writes a sports column for the Times, having, so the authors tell us, been turned down by Rupert Murdoch or his minions for a more general — or perhaps a specifically political — column in one of his papers. He also exhibits himself on public stages, like the unfrocked Rector of Stiffkey, who, it may be remembered, was eaten by a lion on the Golden Mile at Blackpool. Mr Mandelson remains an MP, and is spoken of from time to time as a candidate for some European post or other of pomp and power, and is consulted by Mr Blair, as Mr Campbell is likewise. But for both of them, one somehow senses, the game is up; or, if it is not quite over, it is now in extra time. It is a matter of choice whether to fix the kick-off in 1994 with the death of John Smith (as the authors show, a crucial event), or in 1997, with Mr Blair's spectacular win in the general election of that year. In the initial stages, it combined the characteristics of a game with those of a court or of a soap opera: Cherie could never stand Anji Hunter and relied on Fiona, but Cherie fell out with Fiona over Carole. Now they have all gone, apart from Cherie and possibly Carole.

And yet the salient characteristics of No. 10 in this period, which may now be drawing peacefully to its close, were not so much those of a court as of the central committee of a communist state. From the time when John Mackintosh first published The British Cabinet in 1962 and R. H. S. Crossman wrote his famous introduction to Bagehot's English Constitution a year later, the orthodoxy was that the Cabinet committee had replaced the Cabinet as the place where real power was exercised. In this excellent book, Mr Oborne and Mr Walters look back regretfully to the days of Cabinet committees as the acme of democratic governance, supplanted as they have been by government by sofa and coffee mug.

• These metaphors are, however, misleading because they are too cosy. It was Charles James Fox who laid the foundation stone of liberty when he came up with the phrase 'His Majesty's Loyal Opposition'. This is a concept which newly independent states have often found difficult to understand. Mr Campbell does not understand it either; or, if he does, he evidently does not care for it much. He conducted not so much presidential government as one-party rule. It is wholly appropriate that so many of Mr Blair's more dedicated followers should be either old Trotskyists or former members of the party itself.