BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 21
suffered, according to Ivor Richard, from not being a very good committee chairman.46 When he left government, there was no one to take the
lead. Blair for his part was not intellectually engaged. He was prone to
prevarication. ‘Waiting for Blair is like waiting for Godot’, wrote Paddy
Ashdown.47 According to one senior politician, whenever he saw Blair
and raised the issue of the Constitution ‘his eyes just glazed over’.48
Though Blair could engage where action was needed to achieve a particular outcome, as in Northern Ireland, that was to achieve a very particular
goal, and usually involved the oratorical and negotiating skills at which
Blair excelled: there was no conception of seeking to achieve a broader,
coherent constitutional goal. Blair had no clearly defined view of a
desired constitutional landscape and never articulated one.
Blair’s lack of interest was graphically illustrated in a Commons debate
in July 2000 on a motion on parliamentary reform moved by William
Hague. Blair derided Hague for devoting valuable parliamentary time to
the issue. ‘He could have discussed jobs, the economy, schools, hospitals
or even crime. I do not know whether people in his pubs and clubs are
discussing pre-legislative scrutiny, but they are not in mine.’49 It was a
populist approach that failed to engage with the issue or even to appreciate its relevance to the health of the political system.
Blair entered office having no previous experience of government and
never showed any intellectual curiosity as to why the relationships at the
heart of government worked in the way that they did. He eschewed established forms of decision-making in favour of what came to be termed
‘sofa government’: decisions being made by a small group in an informal
setting – ‘a loose, fluid group which takes momentous decisions over
44 Anthony Seldon, Blair (London: The Free Press, 2004), p. 205.
45 See Constitution Committee, House of Lords, Changing the Constitution: The Process of
Constitutional Change, Fourth Report, Session 2001–02, HL Paper 69, pp. 10–11.
46 Jones, Labour of Love, p. 78.
47 Ashdown, The Ashdown Diaries, vol. II, p. 255.
48 Senior MP and Privy Counsellor to author.
49 House of Commons Debates, vol. 353, c. 1097 (13 July 2000).
coffee in the “den” and does not trouble with such bureaucratic, Old
Labour formalities as taking minutes’50 – and largely by-passing cabinet51
and other organs of government. This created problems in the running of
government, but also reflected a wider lack of engagement with the rationale for the existence of the Westminster model of government. It also
created problems for the future. By severing existing links at the heart of
government, it also generated vulnerability. ‘He has severed the element
of trust and interdependence that previously characterised British government. Coupled with the absence of any clearly honed ideology, this
means that if things start going wrong he is in danger of not being able to
mobilise support, either in terms of ideological commitment or of institutional loyalty.’52
Conclusion
Tony Blair presided over major changes in the nation’s constitutional
arrangements. They did not go as far as initially envisaged in 1997 and
they had a number of unintended consequences, generating tensions
with the political system, not least but not exclusively between ministers
and the courts.53 They changed the contours of the British Constitution,
but without any clear view of the type of Constitution that was being
created for the United Kingdom. At no point could the government identify a constitutional end point or a coherent intellectual approach to constitutional change. Major constitutional change took place during Blair’s
watch – it is likely to be one of the principal things for which the Blair premiership is remembered – but it is not something for which Blair himself
was principally responsible. It was left to others to deliver.
50 Francis Beckett and David Henke, The Blairs and their Court (London: Aurum, 2004),
p. 195. See also Naughtie, The Rivals, p. 104.
51 See e.g. Clare Short, An Honourable Deception (London: The Free Press, 2004), pp. 70–1.
52 Philip Norton, ‘Governing Alone’, Parliamentary Affairs, 56(4), 2003: 558.
53 See ibid., pp. 551–6.
7
Media management
First as Leader of the Opposition (1994–7) and then as Prime Minister
(1997–2007), Blair was careful to pay considerable attention to the task of
managing the media. This involved Blair and his advisers – most notably
Alastair Campbell, his press secretary between 1994 and 2003 – in the
pursuit of different but complementary communication objectives: first,
setting the news agenda by promoting some stories and downplaying
others; second, ensuring that issues were framed in as positive a fashion
as possible; and, finally, projecting an upbeat image of New Labour in
general and Blair’s leadership in particular. This obsession with media
management was understandable. The UK political communications
environment of the Blair era was characterised by the twenty-four-hour
news cycle, an explosion of media outlets, notably rolling news channels
and internet websites, a phalanx of journalists hungry for insider information and a broad range of political actors, including parties and pressure groups, functioning in competition with the core executive as
sources for the media. In the promotional culture of a ‘public relations
democracy’, managing the media was a necessity – not an option – for
Blair and New Labour.1
For several years, Blair’s media management activities met with considerable success. However, towards the middle of his first term as Prime
Minister, journalists’ stories critical of the government’s attempts to
control the news agenda began to replace comments which in the main had
previously been full of praise for the professionalism of New Labour’s
media machine. ‘Spin’ increasingly provided the narrative frame for much
of the media’s coverage of government initiatives, as journalists revealed
the behind-the-scenes process of news management to their audiences.
As a result, long before the fall-out from the Iraq War completely tarnished
11 Aeron Davis, Public Relations Democracy: Public Relations, Politics and the Mass Media in
Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
the government’s reputation for truth-telling, one of the defining characteristics of Blair’s leadership of New Labour in the eyes of many voters was
the close and negative association with sound-bites and ‘spin’.
Aiming to keep the media on message
It was during Blair’s leadership of the party in opposition that New
Labour acquired a reputation for its skilful handling of the media. Blair
built on reforms introduced by his immediate predecessors to strengthen
the power of an inner core elite based around the dominant position of
the leader both to make policy and take charge of the party’s strategic
communications with
the press and broadcasting.2 In the eyes of this
inner core, the formulation of policy and its communication to the electorate were not distinct, separate activities but rather had to be managed
in an integrated, holistic fashion. Changes in party organisation were
accompanied by a cultural shift whereby communication was regarded as
central to the way in which New Labour functioned: the Millbank model
of ‘command and control’. Moreover, day-to-day media management
was part of a broader exercise in political marketing whereby the New
Labour brand was promoted in the electoral marketplace.3
After its 1997 election victory New Labour transferred into government the techniques of news management it had honed in opposition. As
a result, ministers and their special advisers were constantly engaged in
seeking to harness the media in the task of promoting the government’s
achievements to the electorate through positive imagery generation and
symbolic construction.4 During Campbell’s tenure in charge of the Prime
Minister’s communication operations, the New Labour government’s
strategic approach to media management was characterised by three key
features: centralisation, professionalisation and politicisation.5
12 Colin Hughes and Patrick Wintour, Labour Rebuilt (London: Fourth Estate, 1990); Richard
Heffernan and Mike Marqusee, Defeat from the Jaws of Victory (London: Verso, 1992); Eric
Shaw, The Labour Party Since 1979: Crisis and Transformation (London: Routledge, 1994).
13 Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party
(London: Little, Brown, 1998); Jennifer Lees-Marchment, Political Marketing and British
Political Parties: The Party’s Just Begun (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001);
Dominic Wring, The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005).
14 Nicholas Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2004), pp. 172–89.
15 Bob Franklin, ‘The Hand of History: New Labour, News Management and Governance’,
in S. Ludlam and M. J. Smith (eds.), New Labour in Government (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
2001), pp. 130–44.
First, Campbell put in place in No. 10 a highly centralised organisation
which sought to coordinate governmental communications and impose a
single message from the top down. For example, government ministers
who did not adhere to the rules whereby major interviews and media
appearances had to be agreed in advance with the No. 10 Press Office
quickly found themselves reprimanded by Campbell. In addition, any
minister or adviser he regarded as being ‘off message’ was treated with suspicion. During the first Blair administration, for instance, Gordon Brown’s
press officer at the Treasury, Charlie Wheelan, frequently came into conflict with Campbell because of his tendency to brief the media on his own
initiative to promote the Chancellor’s interests. The feuding between these
two New Labour ‘spin doctors’ continued until Wheelan was forced to
resign at the start of 1999 over his alleged role in leaking information about
Peter Mandelson’s home loan from Geoffrey Robinson.6
Second, a highly professional engagement with news management was
evident in the various innovations introduced by Campbell in Downing
Street. These included the establishment of a Strategic Communications
Unit to coordinate government news announcements across departments so that a clear, focused policy message was distributed to the media
on any particular day. Former journalists, such as David Bradshaw ( Daily
Mirror) and Philip Bassett ( The Times), were employed to ensure that a
media rather than bureaucratic mindset informed the process. In terms
of trailing policy announcements, the rebuttal of critical statements, the
‘pre-buttal’ of opposition criticisms not yet disseminated in the public
sphere, the proactive planting of stories via favoured journalists and
speedy reaction to possible negative stories, the New Labour government’s media management operations pushed back the frontiers, going
further than any of its predecessors in Britain and even acquiring a
glowing reputation abroad.7
Campbell was in many respects the personification of this professionalisation of governmental news management. As a former journalist and
political editor at the two Mirror titles and Today, Campbell knew the
world of the news media, and particularly tabloid journalism, from the
inside. He did not have to second-guess what journalists might do with a
lead; he knew from his own experience how a story would play in
different media outlets. Campbell’s attention to detail became legendary,
16 Nicholas Jones, Sultans of Spin (London: Gollancz, 1999), pp. 259–80; Andrew Rawnsley,
Servants of the People (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000), pp. 210–34.
17 Steven Barnett and Ivor Gaber, Westminster Tales: The Twenty-first-century Crisis in
Political Journalism (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 106–13.
as did his facility for the appropriate sound-bite, such as the ‘people’s
princess’ used by Blair on the occasion of Princess Diana’s death in 1997.
Moreover, Campbell was highly valued by journalists as a source because
of his well-known proximity to Blair in the inner circle of key ministers
and top advisers.8 He was the first No. 10 press secretary to attend cabinet
meetings on a regular basis and he acquired the reputation of having
more influence in decision-making than some policy advisers.9
Campbell was not averse to browbeating and bullying those journalists
who he thought were not giving Blair and New Labour fair treatment. He
also exploited the rivalry in the lobby system of briefings by favouring
some journalists at the expense of others.10 Certain correspondents, for
example, were given advance notice of material that the government
wished to bring into the public sphere in the expectation that in return
the government would receive positive coverage.11 The Murdoch newspapers were a good example of this exchange relationship. On a day-to-day
basis Trevor Kavanagh, the political editor of The Sun, was the recipient
of insider nuggets of information – such as the date of the 2001 general
election – ahead of their being made available to other parliamentary
lobby journalists. In return, the Murdoch press provided a good platform
for New Labour, while Blair had numerous articles published under his
personal byline. Another tactic employed by No. 10 was to bypass lobby
correspondents by targeting regional newspapers, women’s magazines
and ethnic minority publications so as to get its message across as unfiltered as possible to different sections of the electorate.
During Campbell’s stewardship the procedures of the lobby system
also underwent important structural reform. While the televising of its
proceedings continued to be rejected on the grounds that this would give
too much publicity to the Prime Minister’s official spokesperson, briefings were now carried out on an on-the-record basis and from March
2000 a selective summary of the brie
fing was made available on the internet. In 2002 a further reform was introduced, whereby the morning sessions were opened up to a wider cross-section of journalists, including
specialist and foreign correspondents. The Prime Minister also started to
18 Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), pp. 476–538.
19 Peter Oborne, Alastair Campbell: New Labour and the Rise of the Media Class (London:
Aurum,1999), p. 161; Andrew Roth, ‘The Lobby’s “Dying Gasps”?’, British Journalism
Review, 10(3), 1999: 22.
10 Bill Hagerty, ‘Cap’n Spin Does Lose his Rag’, British Journalism Review, 11(2), 2000: 13–14.
11 Ivor Gaber, ‘Lies, Damn Lies . . . and Political Spin’, British Journalism Review, 11(1),
2000: 69.
hold monthly press conferences, which were ‘on the record, televised,
accessible to a much wider range of journalists than the lobby (including
overseas journalists) and unrestricted in subject matter’.12 Campbell
argued that these American-style reforms were a genuine attempt to be
more open with the media and less ‘buttoned up’ about the next day’s
headlines. However, according to some leading lobby journalists, the government’s aim was to minimise the disruptive potential of the traditional
lobby correspondents who were accustomed to ‘grilling’ a government
spokesperson on a particular issue in comparative secrecy. Some lobby
correspondents feared that the new media briefings would become more
orchestrated by government, for example through the choice of journalists invited to ask questions and in the lack of opportunity to engage in
sustained interrogation, and so give ministers more power to shape the
news agenda.
Finally, politicisation of news management was evidenced by three
important developments. First, Campbell was allowed to give orders to
civil servants. This meant that he could adopt a more overtly partisan
approach in his relationship with the media than had formally been the
case with his predecessors. Second, Campbell’s belief that the non-partisan
civil servants acting as ministerial press officers in the Government
Information Service (renamed the Government Information and
Communication Service) would be insufficiently proactive in pushing the