Tony’s Ten Years by Adam Boulton

Author:Adam Boulton [Boulton, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471128295
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

As the second term began, there was a general recognition that the relationship between the media and the government was in a dire state. Campbell was already talking privately to Blair, as well as some journalists (including myself), about wanting to leave his post. Some desultory feelers had even been put out around Westminster in search of a possible replacement. But nobody really believed that Campbell would go and there was little surprise when Blair managed to prevail upon him to stay – although he was less successful with Anji Hunter, an even longer-standing member of the old firm, who quit in late 2001.

Far from stepping down, Alastair Campbell was now more powerful than ever and he and Blair introduced reforms in the way they interacted with the media. As Blair pointed out in his Reuters speech, these included two innovations which improved open government: monthly news conferences by the prime minister and twice-yearly appearances by him in front of the Liaison Committee of senior backbench MPs who chaired the departmental select committees. However, the media greeted these initiatives with less enthusiasm than they perhaps deserved because they were part of a concerted effort to bypass political journalists and instead appeal to the public directly. Campbell himself stepped back from giving briefings, while remaining director of government strategy and communications. Instead, he appointed two civil servants as the prime minister’s official spokesmen: Godric Smith, a veteran of the Number 10 Press Office; and Tom Kelly, an ex-journalist who had been chief spokesman for the Northern Ireland Office. As was to become apparent during the second internal New Labour crisis of ‘Cheriegate’, the crucial attraction of these new appointments for Campbell was ‘deniability’. Unlike Campbell, both Kelly and Smith could credibly tell journalists that they could not answer their questions because they were out of the loop.

In case anybody missed the message that political journalists were being sidelined, Campbell symbolically moved the morning briefing, which Number 10 hosted, out of Downing Street – and indeed out of Whitehall altogether. Giving the excuse that there were no government premises large enough to host the meetings, Number 10 rented space in the Foreign Press Association off Pall Mall and invited UK-based foreign journalists to attend the briefings as well. An intention of this change was to inconvenience political correspondents who mainly operated from the press gallery in Parliament by adding at least twenty minutes travel time to and from the briefings. However, the lobby journalists refused to be discouraged.

Campbell seemed to have a fondness for the FPA, a former home of Gladstone in Nash’s Carlton House Terrace. In January 2004 he chose it as the location for his own news conference following publication of the Hutton Report. Standing at the foot of the ornate staircase, he accused BBC executives, including Chairman Gavyn Davies and the director general, Greg Dyke, of lying, while claiming that he himself had always told the truth. Davies and Dyke resigned shortly afterwards.

Another attempt by Campbell to transform the briefings also failed.

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