When Tony Blair first came to power he turned to Alastair Campbell, whom he appointed to run his press operation shortly after becoming party leader.
t is worth noticing how accurate Blair’s sense of the press-government relationship is: it makes you wonder, if he saw things so clearly, how on earth he could have put Campbell in charge.
There is a structural problem with the government and the press; there is a historical problem with Labour and the press; so this was always going to be a tricky subject for Labour in office. Who to put in charge of this complex, delicate area?
I know: let’s find our angriest, shoutiest, most tribal, most aggressive party loyalist. As Craig Brown joked in the Mail on Sunday, it is as if, instead of turning to Doctor Watson for advice, Sherlock Holmes had instead consulted the Hound of the Baskervilles.
Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises political journalists, a recovering drunk of the type that is angry with everybody all the time, a foul-mouthed natural bully who genuinely hated most of the people it was his job to deal with on a daily basis, and made no secret of it. ¡
Olé! Thought Blair the discerning Prime Minister Sign him up!
The next day: ‘Up to see TB in the flat. Another Austin Powers moment. Yellow/green underpants and that was it. I said what a prat he looked. He said I was just jealous – how many prime ministers have got a body like this?’ There is a flirtatious edge to this. Martin Amis, in a piece reporting on Blair’s last weeks in office, also described himself flirting with Blair. Some men have that effect on other men; it’s not a gay thing exactly, but it’s not the opposite of a gay thing, and there is something faintly homoerotic about the governmental milieu described here, full of dark-haired men shouting at each other, TB and AC and PM and GB all coming to blows (Mandelson v. Campbell in the course of an argument about whether Blair should wear a tie), bursting into tears, having make-up heart-to-hearts, saying bitchy things about each other behind each others’ backs, and ruthlessly doing each other down while secretly knowing that they are mutually dependent. Anyone being sent to a girls’ boarding school would do well to prepare by reading The Blair Years. The cover photo is part of this, Blair looking up at Campbell with an expression of submissive yearning that verges on the pornographic.
How Blair fell in love with his own certainty and sense of conviction.
Something eems to have led Blair to succumb to a form of magical thinking about his ability to will away obstacles. ‘He thinks he’s invincible,’ Derry Irvine tells Campbell, as early as 1997. ‘It happened to Thatcher after ten years. It’s happened to Tony after six months!’ By 2003, this has begun to grate even on Campbell. ‘I was more conscious . . . of how regularly he said: “I know I’m right about this.”’ At another point, Campbell notes that ‘he had clearly been chatting to his maker again.’ That may be the key to Blair’s metamorphosis from a politician who prided himself on his sensitivity to public opinion, to one who prided himself on his ability to ignore it.
Blair didn’t mind Campbell’s negative qualities because for him, they were an asset. Here, as elsewhere, Blair was adapting the lessons of his heroine Mrs Thatcher. She famously said that every prime minister needs a Willie. From Blair’s point of view, it was actively useful to have a press secretary who behaved like a total prick.
Source: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/john-lanchester/shtum
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