So ends a classic era of spin, during which an undisputed master of the
misleading baffled his opponents with endlessly devious skills, reviving an
old art so that the public, even those who hoped for a different outcome or
found his personality unsympathetic, could only watch, wonder at, and
applaud in admiration. But enough about Shane Warne, what about Tony
Blair, now at last preparing to leave 10 Downing Street?

What began in a euphoric atmosphere promising unlimited success
turned sour, not simply for the usual reasons of politics, in which events
prove to be beyond the grasp of the person in power, but because the
enthusiasm with which most of the news that the media greeted the early
triumphs of New Labour was largely replaced by antagonism. Blair and his
cohorts spun success and failure alike with a ruthlessness that led to
journalists, embarrassed and guilty at too-often readily accepting what they
were told, responding in kind and with what developed into habitual
hostility.

Whatever Blair’s much-discussed legacy means to Brown in terms of
continuing policies, the media coverage of a Brown-led government will alter
because of the differences between the new Prime Minister and Blair on a
personal rather than a political level. Blair quickly showed an actor’s ability
to assume the role of the modest, sincere visionary, carrying his message with a ready grin and an athletic stride, even if, with the passing years, those same characteristics have made him look, to some, like a prancing jackanapes. His speech patterns reproduce informal conversation, using hesitations, interjections such as “Look…” and “Y’know”, and unobtrusive
mispronunciations, with consonants frequently being replaced with glottal
stops and some vowels with the unstressed sound linguists call “schwa”. The
implication is that, despite being the product of Fettes, Oxford and the Bar,
he talks like the man in the street. His choice of phrases is often Biblical, the
archaic reversal of word order as in his celebration of the 1997 landslide: “A
new dawn has broken, has it not?” There must be some of the actor in Brown
as well – few politicians thrive without it – although his public persona seems
consistent with his past: son of the manse, Kircaldy High School, Edinburgh
University as student, lecturer and Rector. There is certainly some of the
writer in him: he has produced a biography of the Independent Labour Party
leader James Maxton, and the newly-published Courage: Eight Portraits of
heroic men and women (excellent volumes, no doubt, but unlikely to have
attracted the advances being forecast for Blair’s memoirs).

And Brown was also a researcher at Scottish Television, so he has inside
experience of the media. As for his speaking style, the phrase that will dog
him for the rest of his career is “post-neoclassical endogenous growth
theory”. Since it fell leadenly from his lips in 1994 many outsiders have
shaken their heads in disbelief when told by grizzled parliamentary hacks
that Brown could be an incisive, witty and even hilarious speaker both in and
out of the chamber. The recent elimination of the word “prudent” from his
speeches indicates that he may have emerged from what often seemed a dense verbal fog.

The problem in his new Government’s dealings with the media soon to be
faced by the incoming Prime Minister arises from the early days of the New
Labour “project” and the plan devised by Blair and his advisors, principally
Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, to woo the hostile elements of the
press. The strategy was a sensible one, given the historical antipathy of the
majority of newspapers to Labour – witness the savage treatment of Neil
Kinnock – but as No 10 and other departments forced through their
determination to control the news, the media responded in kind.

We hope Gordon Brown will want to mark a change of regime by insisting
on a more straightforward approach from government spokesmen and
ministers. Journalists and public alike would welcome a truce in what has
become a damaging crossfire of misinformation: selective leaking and
contradictory briefings by factions inside the party in power, and highly-polished innuendo and personal sniping, rather than legitimate, fact-based criticism, by the media.

Everyone would benefit from the eradication of spin. Why, the public
might even recover confidence in political institutions and rediscover some
trust in the press. As long as the deterioration in the relationship between the
Government and the media over the past 10 years is not totally irreparable,
things can only get better.