Diary of a serial spinner
So, I got to thinking . . . It was suddenly, surreally obvious whom the great bruiser of spin reminded me of as he winsomely looked out of the window as his voiceover conveyed his innermost thoughts. Alastair Campbell has morphed into Carrie Bradshaw. Witness that scrunched-up expression as he soulfully mined his memory for the nuggets for The Alastair Campbell Diaries, which you can read or watch on TV: Tony Blair’s ex-main man goes multimedia.
Campbell is a natural actor, able to mug passion, indifference, anger or confusion. When this am-dram dragged, there was lots of archive footage of new Labour in its infancy to fall back on. But the slippy-slidey camera couldn’t get enough of Campbell as he typed away, or gazed into the distance or looked stern (to signify an argument anecdote). By the end you wanted him – like SJP when she wasn’t typing her profundities in Sex and the City – to adjourn to the nearest caf? and start gassing with “TB”, Peter Mandelson and John Prescott about dumping Clause 4 or the hideousness of Carole Caplin. New Labour’s higher command certainly out-bitched Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda.
Critics and political insiders have been very sniffy about the diaries: the main charge is that Campbell has self-censored himself. But this first episode was zippy and engrossing: the closeness of his relationship with Blair was the central knot. Campbell started as Blair’s confidant while still a tabloid journalist, coaching him around speeches after the death of John Smith. How young Blair looked; that smile hadn’t yet frozen into its stricken rictus; a later diary entry has him posing in his underpants, asking Campbell to admire his bod. Campbell always seems to be lurking off stage, with his hand near his mouth, a menacing meathead jabbing his finger at someone.
How much have these diaries been revised in light of later events? Campbell seems extremely wise, years early, about events that would later acquire significance. We get the first Caplin scandal at an early party conference: some topless photos. “Carole had the potential to be a problem for all of us,” Campbell notes.
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And the squabbling . . . Campbell and Mandelson have a set-to about how to dress Tony: Mandelson wants him in cords and open necked shirt, Campbell in a shirt and tie. Fists fly. Mandelson tries to punch him. “TB” comes between them. “I hate this, I’m going back to London,” cries Mandelson, at a moment that required that pah-pah instrumental finale of the Dynasty theme.
Crisis begat crisis; the leadership of the party hated and undermined one another with feverish, masochistic pleasure. Prescott wasn’t invited to a country house meeting to discuss dumping Clause 4, Harriet Harman sent her child to a grant-maintained school. Campbell’s disillusion grew: how could he fight to change the public image of a party if he didn’t have faith in the people he was supposed to be spinning?
At least there was Diana, Princess of Wales. Campbell fell for her – hard. She was “spellbindingly gorgeous”. There was “something in her eyes that went beyond radiance”. They meet over dinner: she was a curious mix of fun and insecurity, he says. “What do you think she’s after?” Campbell asks his partner Fiona. “You,” is Fiona’s weary reply.
This episode took us up to the Princess’s death, a few months after the election that brought new Labour to power. Later in the diaries, speaking about the death of Dr David Kelly, Campbell claims he is far from the ruthless, unfeeling spin master of popular lore. In the early years, if we believe his diaries, he is forever bursting into tears or having tortured nights of the soul over the job and what impact it is having on his home life.
This all seems astonishing given his pugnacious modus operandi, but he claims that he wasn’t happy the morning of that momentous election victory, and instead freaked at the scale of “the job ahead”. It is hard to square the idealistic hardman with the fear and loathing he commanded at the time. But like Piers Morgan he gives great anecdote and has a seductive roughened gravitas, even if he isn’t willing to expose all the skeletons. Like Carrie Bradshaw, he will always be in thrall to his own Mr Big.
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Out of the box
— Grimness. A little girl is snatched. The local paedophiles are being rounded up. Robson Green, who sees things in his head, in lurid red, is on the case. The Colour of Amber (ITV1), the latest Wire in the Blood written by Alan Whiting and directed by Peter Hoar, was as dark and miserable as every other Wire in the Blood. Deranged violins. Shadows. Screams. It gets much worse and nastier. Terry and June, anyone?
— Big Brother Fake Week: last year the producers courted outrage by putting Nikki back into the house after we’d voted her out. This time they are asking us up front to pay for a similar conceit. V polite. So we get to vote out Charley only for her to go back in again. Actually, it seems like a plan.