Blair, Murdoch and Alastair Campbell

Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair's Director of Communications and Strategy (press secretary) from 1997 to 2003. He was in charge of putting together the public case for the war in Iraq and clearly was aware that some of the information was of very dubious origins. A BBC reporter got hold of some inside information about the manufacturing of evidence and his source was later revealed by the government. The whistle-blower, Dr David Kelly committed suicide and an inquiry was later launched (the Hutton Report) which laid blame essentially on the BBC. Campbell resigned in 2003 and has recently published his diaries.

This week-end he published a guest editorial at The New York Times entitled "Don’t Be Afraid of Rupert Murdoch" in which he writes:

"That standards in British newspapers have fallen in recent years is in my view beyond dispute, and in that Mr. Murdoch has been so dominant in the marketplace, clearly he has to be somewhere in the mix when it comes to handing out the blame. But to pretend, as some seek to, that he is somehow single-handedly responsible for all that is bad in our news media is not just intellectually lazy — it also misses the point...

But in the advanced democracies, though power structures have changed, elected leaders continue to hold enormous power. Mr. Murdoch is a huge global media player. If politicians are intimidated by him, that is their problem. If they make the wrong calls out of fear of his editorial wrath, they shouldn’t have been elected in the first place. And if journalists don’t like working for him, there are more media jobs now than at any time in the history of humankind. He was involved in making that happen, too."

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The Guardian has published an interesting response to Campbell's editorial "Alas, Alastair, if only you'd heeded your own advice":
"The New York Times piece appears under the wondrous headline "Don't be afraid of Rupert Murdoch". Campbell's unique brand of unconscious irony has always been enjoyable. It might be a sports column in which he mentions in passing an exchange with Clinton, to whom Campbell said fawningly what a privilege it had been to work with "the greatest all-round political communicator of the late 20th century", eliciting the reply "that it had been a pleasure working with the best communications adviser in the world". What a pair of lads, to be sure!...
What Campbell says about Murdoch is again exquisite in its unconsciousness. Would Tony Blair have lost the 1997 election "if the Sun had stayed with the Tories?" he writes, and answers, "I don't think so". He is quite right, in my view, but he doesn't begin to see the implications of that. From the start, Blair was always the suitor, cap in hand as he begged Murdoch's favour in a manner both humiliating and quite unnecessary.

Their relationship became much more intimate than almost any of us realised, with Murdoch what Lance Price (a sometime spin paramedic in Campbell's Downing Street team) called the invisible 24th member of the Blair cabinet. We have only just learned about the series of telephone calls between Blair and Murdoch just before the invasion of Iraq, when Blair was much more concerned about the opinion, and support, of the media magnate than of any member of his own government."
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