The last year has been a climacteric period for relations between
government and the press. Historically the press is on the attack,
government driven back on the defensive. In 2002 it was government that
set the pace. It has set out to claim that the media in general, and the
written press in particular, is intent on distortion, trivialisation and even
the ultimate destruction of the British democratic process. The central
assertion is that the British press is a narrow, sectional interest group
without legitimacy of its own.
This sustained and co-ordinated attack on the press has no parallel in recent British political history. Politicians such as John Major sporadically lashed out. Harold Wilson tried to wage war on the lobby system, but emerged the loser. Not since Baldwin in the early 1930s has a government squared up to the press in the determined way Tony Blair’s Government did this year. And Baldwin was facing a far more direct challenge than was Tony Blair. The two great proprietors of the time, Beaverbrook and Rothermere, had combined to create a fresh political force, the United Empire Party, with a view to imposing tariff reform. Beaverbrook and Rothermere were ready to run their own candidates at elections: they wanted to destroy Baldwin if they could.
Tony Blair does not face a remotely comparable threat. And yet this year he has authorised a far better organised, more subtle and deadlier attack than Baldwin’s. He wants to change the terms of trade between government and the media. Ministers say that they are aiming at a “new settlement” with the press. This is a longstanding New Labour ambition. In the 1980s, when still Neil Kinnock’s director of communications, Peter Mandelson spelt it out with engaging candour: “Of course we want to use the media, but the media will be our tools, our servants; we are no longer content to let them be our persecutors.” New Labour is already close to reaching Mandelson’s objective: the offensive of 2002 is simply about delivering the coup de grace.
The Government strategy has numerous prongs. These include: the undermining and partial replacement of the 120-year-old lobby system; an assault on the long-established system of “unattributable” briefing; the creation of a new and powerful “white commonwealth” of friendly newspapers and political editors; a new ruthlessness in the old trick of exchange of information and access in return for friendly copy; a willingness to isolate and smear journalists who write “unhelpful” stories; and Downing Street’s new tactic of using the Press Complaints Commission as a weapon to suppress stories it finds inconvenient or damaging. The aim is the creation of a political press corps which is ready to report government in the terms it wishes to be reported, and within parameters set by Downing Street itself.
At the same time, Government apologists or partisans in the press – Jonathan Freedland and Roy Greenslade in The Guardian, David Aaronovitch in The Independent and Alice Miles in The Times, to name a few – have rallied behind the Government argument. Even the British Journalism Review took a sympathetic line in its last editorial. A series of longer articles have appeared in the periodical press giving support to Charles Clarke’s general proposition. In this autumn’s Political Quarterly, Steven Barnett, Professor of Communications at the University of Westminster, asserts that “evidence is growing” that “the increasingly hostile tenor of political journalism in the 21st century may he helping to undermine faith in the democratic system itself.” John Lloyd devoted a long essay to a broadly sympathetic exploration of the Clarke thesis in the October issue of Prospect magazine, blaming “the media” for the cabinet resignations of Stephen Byers and Peter Mandelson (twice), and taking newspapers to task for putting Derry Irvine and Robin Cook through “media hell”. Lloyd’s contention is that “they were pursued not for major dereliction of duty, or crimes, or corruption – but essentially for being human. They were pursued by men and women who would deeply resent the same kind of ‘standards’ being applied in this way to them.” A related argument was made by the philosopher Onora O’Neill in this summer’s Reith Lectures. She argued that the press has played a malign role in destroying the trust which societies and institutions need to survive. O’Neill especially called into question the investigative role of the media.
It is fair to say that the Government and its allies have managed to establish a near consensus, stretching through academia into high journalism, that political reporting as practised in Britain must be changed. If this climate persists, it will enable the Government to recast its relationship with the media in a very fundamental way. Behind this summer’s offensive lurks the threat of regulation and other restraints on a free press. It is surprising that not one editor or even political reporter has stood up to defend the integrity of our trade and deal in detail with the criticisms made by Clarke and others. The remainder of this article will be devoted to answering the attack on the press made by government ministers and their partisans.
The first point to be made is an easy one, though no less legitimate for that. It concerns the motivation of the Government. The argument made by Alastair Campbell, whom, it may be assumed, masterminds much of the ministerial assaults, is self-serving in the extreme. Take his speech at the Fabian Society seminar on the media early in 1999. Campbell accused the written media of fomenting “cynicism about politics, about politicians, about people who work in public life”. How Campbell has the audacity to make this criticism – and carry on making it – defies belief. As a writing journalist on the Daily Mirror and Today he wallowed in a culture of media arrogance that still makes the reader boggle, and has no parallel of any kind among political reporters today. In one column he boasted that he had dismissed a friendly advance from John Major, the elected Prime Minister, with the phrase: “Oh, sod off Prime Minister, I’m trying to do my expenses.” It was Campbell who propagated the story that John Major tucked his shirt inside his underpants, thus turning him into a figure of ridicule. On another occasion he referred to “this piece of lettuce that passes for Prime Minister”. He was more scathing still about members of the Royal Family: Princess Diana was denounced as “vacuous, shallow, silly and egomaniacal”. Her brother Lord Spencer was described as a “hypocritical upper class little pillock”.
Nor did Campbell’s fundamental attitude change once he joined Tony Blair as press secretary in the autumn of 1994. There is no doubt that the three-year campaign Campbell and Tony Blair led in opposition was brilliant. But it was also a three-year-long smear campaign on British public life. It was surely legitimate politics – though politics of the kind that ministers now condemn – to foster the notion that every cabinet minister or Tory MP was in Parliament for personal benefit. But in opposition, Labour’s net spread far wider to claim bystanders in a position of authority. Cedric Brown, the chief executive of British Gas and an honest and decent man who had risen from the shop floor, was humiliated and then hounded from office by the New Labour “fat cat” campaign after it emerged that his salary had been lifted to £500,000 per annum, the same amount that Charles Falconer QC might have earned in a disappointing year.
It is only in government that Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and others have started to preach to the media about “cynicism”, triviality and the damage this does to trust in British public life. This show of outrage from the Prime Minister and his friends would be very much more convincing if they had not themselves done so much to lower public standards while in opposition. They would be more convincing still if New Labour had not been so ready to import a culture of mendacity and deception into government. Governments deserve trust if they tell the truth. But New Labour will go through any kind of contortion to avoid doing this (there is not room to demonstrate this assertion here, but examples of this depressing syndrome are given in my biography of Alastair Campbell, in John Rentoul’s biography of Tony Blair, and in Andrew Rawnsley’s admirable Servants of the People. Most lobby journalists have been deliberately misled or lied to by Downing Street at some stage). New Labour’s culture of deception, its manipulation of statistics and the secretive smear campaigns aimed at prominent figures – Mo Mowlam, David Clark, Filkin, Livingstone, Keith Hellawell and many others have been victims – denies it any right to be trusted. Reporters dealing with this Government have no choice but to be cynical. The Government demands one set of standards from the press, but itself practices another, sharply lower, set. During the summer I listened with astonishment as Charles Clarke told journalists at one of Carole Stone’s seminars that reporters today should consider abandoning the use of “non-attributable” quotes. At least Clarke had the decency to blush when I pointed out to him that he had had lunch with his friend Tony Bevins of the Daily Express the day before that paper’s front page ran the eye-catching headline description of Chancellor Gordon Brown from an (unnamed) government minister: POWER CRAZED AND BONKERS.
It is easy to see that in government, New Labour wants to evade scrutiny. That is the motive that causes it to whinge at every opportunity about the “cynicism” of the press. But this Government has no moral right of any kind even to make the accusation. Quite the reverse. The hypocrisy is quite breathtaking. The Government wants a timid, controlled media and will resort to any argument that lies to hand to promote this agenda.
The lobby changes that Downing Street pushed through during the early summer are an interesting example of this. Alastair Campbell and government ministers assert that this is about bringing a new openness and transparency to political reporting. They say that this is why they have allowed in cameras, encouraged government ministers to attend, allowed in specialist reporters and foreign correspondents, and moved the briefings to Carlton House Terrace. This line has been swallowed wholesale by the government’s numerous apologists in the press, mainly columnists with little or no experience of hard reporting. At first glance the government story appears plausible, but in fact the reverse is the truth. Though it had its weaknesses, there was a kind of rough democracy about the old lobby system. True, the briefings were not held in public. But all political reporters, from the political editor of the BBC to the political editor of a regional newspaper group, enjoyed the same status.
The quick, intimate atmosphere of a lobby briefing makes it possible for reporters to get at the truth – and it still survives in the afternoon briefings (now under threat) in the House of Commons and on the less formal Carlton House occasions. If fobbed off with an evasive or incomplete reply by a government spokesperson, journalists can and do press the point. The new system which operates at 11 Carlton House Terrace, when ministers are present, is designed to prevent that. Reporters get one question if they are lucky. If the reply is inadequate, too bad. Proceedings now have the air of general election campaign press conferences, which are dominated by the big broadcasters and with awkward questions being obstructed. At the first lobby briefing under the new arrangement in mid-October, with David Blunkett present, the BBC was granted four separate questions, while there was only one from the regional lobby – and that was from Blunkett’s local paper.
But it should not necessarily be assumed that just because ministers’ motives are wretched and their objectives sinister, their arguments are automatically wrong. And even if the attacks by ministers are so obviously self-serving that they can be entirely disregarded, it is still necessary to counter the eloquent critics within our own ranks, such as John Lloyd of the New Statesman, or Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, as well as powerful outsiders such as the philosopher Baroness O’Neill, in the Reith Lectures.
O’Neill maintains the power of the media in the 21st century is a danger to society because it destroys trust. At times she speaks as if she would rather the media did not expose medical negligence, because in that way the reputation of the medical profession is diminished, or as if she would prefer newspapers to let politicians get away with corruption rather than undermine the authority of government. Jasper Gerard of The Sunday Times interviewed O’Neill the week after his newspaper’s sting operation had exposed the fact that Pembroke College Oxford was ready to give a place to an undergraduate in return for a generous donation from the student’s wealthy parents. He asked O’Neill about this. It emerged that the Baroness’s scorn was levelled not at Pembroke College but at The Sunday Times. “What we notice is that the journalist has not been sacked and the two academics have lost their jobs,” she replied.
O’Neill’s view could suggest that truth can be less important than the “trust” in which institutions are held. “Some sorts of openness and transparency,” she says, “may be bad for trust.” Any red-blooded journalist can only find the O’Neill case repugnant. The job of a reporter is to root out the truth. That must be a primary motivation and is the ultimate vindication. He or she does so in the light of a profound conviction that shining a light in places that those in power would rather remained hidden makes the world a better place. Journalists must reject with great force the obscurantist O’Neill analysis.
It is all too easy to understand why Government ministers have found the O’Neill thesis so beguiling. But the readiness of so many newspaper reporters to be attracted to this doctrine is baffling. John Lloyd quotes her with approval and articulates many of her assumptions. He expresses sympathy with cabinet ministers Peter Mandelson and Stephen Byers, rather than the journalists who wrote about them and played a role in their eventual resignations. He portrays Peter Mandelson as a victim of the media, ignoring the fact that it was a parliamentarian, the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who asked the questions which led to Mandleson’s (second) downfall. Lloyd or O’Neill would presumably have preferred the fact that Byers was a serial liar who made a shambles of the British public transport system to have gone unreported. Both of them, and O’Neill explicitly so, seem to be aiming at some kind of platonic world divided between a handful of enlightened “guardians” – government ministers and others in establishment positions – and an ignorant populace sustained by necessary and useful myths.
This is a sinister doctrine. Historically it has been linked to totalitarianism. It fails to take account of the connections between a free press and a properly functioning democracy. This demented belief that it has suddenly become illegitimate for the press to criticise politicians has now become embedded in the new establishment. A good example was the ministerial ripostes after Estelle Morris’s resignation in the middle of October. Robin Cook, leader of the House of Commons, said that she had been “hounded out of office”. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, escorting her out of her department for the final time, turned to waiting reporters and said: “Haven’t you lot done enough?” Home Secretary David Blunkett claimed that she had fallen victim to a “feeding frenzy”.
The media was simply carrying out its job in the cases of Morris, Byers, Mandelson and others. For the most part, political reporting today is much fairer and more generous to ministers than it has been for some years: it is necessary to compare only for a moment the coverage of the Blair and John Major administrations to understand this point. The assertion made by Professor Steven Barnett that journalists had become “increasingly hostile” to government at the start of the 21st century disregards the facts. The media was far more destructive a decade ago, when at times it made it difficult for John Major to govern, or two decades ago, when it played an important and to some extent discreditable role in making Neil Kinnock unelectable. No lobby correspondent operating today describes politics in anything remotely like the callous, angry and unforgiving language used by Alastair Campbell during the early 1990s. No political reporter tries to call Tony Blair “this piece of lettuce that passes for Prime Minister”, or makes acid comments about the way he tucks his shirt into his underpants. We would be rightly criticised, not least by Campbell himself, if we did so.
It is perfectly reasonable for the Prime Minister and his ministers to go on the attack. All governments seek to secure a tame press. New Labour’s media operation has been prodigiously successful in this respect. New Labour understands with Leninist clarity that political reporting is, in one sense, about the exercise of power. That is why it has devoted so much of its attention to the bullying, cajoling and manipulation of reporters. It is no coincidence – though a departure from all previous practice – that the Prime Minister’s director of communications is his closest and most powerful adviser.
With remarkably few exceptions, the newspapers and the broadcast media have been ready during the last five years to follow the injunction of Peter Mandelson and be used as “the tools, the servants” of the Government. And that is a disturbing state of affairs. Reporters should never be servants of anything, or of anyone. They should simply be servants of the truth. Revealing the corruption and incompetence of cabinet ministers is part of our role in a properly functioning democracy. It is most emphatically not an abuse of power. Those who try and persuade us otherwise should be dispatched with a flea in their collective ear. Government ministers can say what they like, but it is nothing short of baffling that today so many journalists are ready to swallow their selfserving, dishonest and anti-democratic arguments.
Peter Oborne is political editor of The Spectator.