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Departure of top Blair aide, Campbell, seen as chance to end Britain's culture of spin
Jordan Times, Sunday, August 31, 2003
LONDON (AF) — The resignation of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's most powerful aide is a chance for the government to end its much criticised culture of spin, but it remains to be seen if Blair can make that leap, analysts and the media said on Saturday. Alastair Campbell, one of the original members of Blair's inner circle who helped steer the Labour Party to two election victories, said on Friday he was standing down as the prime minister's director of communications and strategy.
"This is a real opportunity for Mr Blair to show the country he has learnt the lessons of the past months. To demonstrate that he is turning away from an obsession with spin and news management," the Daily Mirror tabloid said in an editorial.
Campbell, a 46-year-old former tabloid journalist, was loathed by many members of parliament and political writers as an unelected, unaccountable "spin doctor," intensely preoccupied with managing the image of Blair and his centre-left Labour administration.
Papers on Saturday described him as "the most powerful man in Britain" and "a real driving force in British politics."
"He is a serial liar, a bully, a manipulator and a ruthless perpetrator of smears, whose resignation ought to be an opportunity for new Labour to try decent behaviour for a change," said the Daily Mail tabloid, a fierce opponent of the government.
"Blair can relaunch his premiership at the autumn Labour Party conference, focusing more on the substance of policy than on the spin for which Mr Campbell was often blamed," said the broadsheet Financial Times.
"Attempts to suggest that Downing Street (Blair's office) had abandoned spin were never likely to be believed so long as Mr Campbell was there," explained BBC analyst Nick Assinder.
But not everyone was convinced Blair was prepared to move away from his perceived obsession with presentation over substance.
"Make no mistake — Campbell's spinning has not been the work of a maverick acting in isolation. Everything has been done with the full knowledge and approval of Mr Blair," Martin Sixsmith, a senior civil servant from 1997 to 2002, told the Daily Mail. "It will take more than words to convince me the leopard has really changed its spots."
The Times, a right-of-centre broadsheet, doubted Campbell's departure would really herald "the end of Labour's spin cycle."
"Although ... there will undoubtedly be a great deal of empty talk and commentary about a new 'spin-free' era in Labour's communications, this new message will itself be only another kind of spin.
"Beneath it the real spin will continue ... and the longer Blair stays in power without visible result, the more energetic the spin will have to become. Cambpell leaves not as the need for this kind of media management recedes but as it grows."
As for the impact of Campbell's departure on the prime minister, the Times said: "While much will be made of the supposed political liability that Mr Campbell became, Mr Blair has never been more vulnerable."
The resignation came on the same day as the publication of a YouGov opinion poll suggested that 59 per cent of British people believe Blair is untrustworthy.
The Financial Times also commented on the "curious" timing of Campbell's resignation, in the midst of judicial hearings over the government's case for war on Iraq and the apparent suicide of one weapons adviser David Kelly — an inquiry before which Blair himself had appeared the day before.
Kelly, a former UN arms inspector, was the source of a BBC report that Blair's office had embellished an intelligence dossier on Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction in order to boost the case for joining the US-led war on Iraq.
A BBC reporter directly accused Campbell of "sexing up" the dossier.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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