Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1868
- 1879)
WEDNESDAY 30 JANUARY 2008
Mr Alastair Campbell
Q1868 Chairman:
Mr Campbell, I am sorry to have kept you waiting; we were having
a interesting discussion on the Press Complaints Commission and
our card has already been marked on that. People say that you
have very strong views on the Press Complaints Commission, rather,
the Chairman said you had very strong views.
Mr Campbell: I do.
Q1869 Chairman:
Would you give them in a couple of minutes because we are not
here really to ask about that.
Mr Campbell: I think it is a pretty useless
organisation.
Q1870 Chairman:
Useless, why?
Mr Campbell: Because I do not think actually
that it offers a real system of redress for people who are traduced
by newspapers. I think it is part of a cosy media club and I particularly
felt that when Christopher wrote his book and serialised it in
a newspaper that I regard, as you probably know, as utterly evil—
Q1871 Chairman:
Can you just remind us, and I am sure everyone does remember?
Mr Campbell: It was in The Mail stable.
I just thought that that summed it up for me, that it is for the
press and it is by the press. Also, I think the other point I
would make about it, and I think this does relate more generally
to your inquiry and I was reading a lot of the evidence in the
last couple of days, I think the media world has changed so fast
and it is continuing to change so quickly that it is just out
of date. You can complain to the Press Complaints Commission because
something has been said about you in a newspaper, but actually
by the time it has been said in the newspaper, it has generated
a whole wider debate in forms of media where, frankly, I would
not have a clue how to begin to try to get redress, so I think
it is not just the fact that it is, as I say, for the media, by
the media, run by the media, owned by the media, his salary is
paid by the media, I think it is also that the world in which
it is operating has completely moved on.
Q1872 Chairman:
Well, I think we will come back to this particular point, but
perhaps we will leave it there just for this morning. You know
what we are looking at, which is concentration of ownership in
the media, whether ownership in fewer hands has an effect on the
news basically, but we also want to explore the influence that
the owner or the editor, and there is the question of which, can
have on senior politicians and on prime ministers. Obviously,
with your background, and we have also asked Sir Christopher Meyer
on his role when he was at Number 10, now we come to you, and
we have the benefit of your diaries which I gather I should congratulate
you on as these were made Political Book of the Year, were they
not, by Channel 4 Television?
Mr Campbell: They were. It must have hurt them,
but there we are!
Q1873 Chairman:
We also found them extremely useful in preparing for the questions
we are going to ask you.
Mr Campbell: Gosh, okay!
Q1874 Chairman:
Let me take you back to your years in opposition, 1995. You then
set out, as I understand it, to influence Rupert Murdoch personally
by your well-known visit in that year to Australia and you took
the view, or did you, that power resided with Mr Murdoch himself
and what he said was what his papers would say?
Mr Campbell: It is certainly true that we thought
that, I would say, within the media marketplace that existed at
that time, of the traditional media barons, if you like, Rupert
Murdoch was the most successful, the most influential, probably
the best at what he does. Because of the politics at that time,
when the invitation was issued to Tony Blair to go and speak to
Murdoch's senior executives in Australia, there was an element
of political risk attached to it because within the Labour Party
Murdoch is historically, particularly at that time, a pretty neuralgic
figure. The decision that Tony Blair took which I completely agreed
with was that, particularly in opposition, it is so important
that you can get your message through to the public because, as
Gerald Kaufman is always saying, "In government, it is what
you do that you think about when you wake up and in opposition
it is what you say". So we were trying to get over a message
of modernisation and change in the Labour Party to the public,
because it was about the public in the end that we were concerned,
and not to take that opportunity to go and speak to that collection
of people with the influence that they have in the media, not
just here in Britain, but around the world, I think, would have
been something of a no-brainer.
Q1875 Chairman:
Although Neil Kinnock, and again I use your diaries, said afterwards
that it was, I think I correctly quote him, "a sell-out",
and he represented the traditional view of the Labour Party, as
far as that was concerned.
Mr Campbell: I think there was some anger within
the Labour Party and the Labour Movement more generally that we
went there because the argument that was put, and again in the
book I quote somebody as saying this, that we were "traipsing
half-way round the world to bow down before Rupert Murdoch",
but, in terms of that relationship then and as it developed, it
suits the purposes of the non-Murdoch media to present it in that
way. I would simply say, as Tony Blair said in his speech about
the media shortly before he left office, that in the modern political
world not to have a proper, professional media organisation and
to engage with people like Rupert Murdoch is, as he put it, like
"going out to face bodyline bowling without pads on".
I never saw a situation where, as it were, Tony Blair said to
Rupert Murdoch, or indeed any other media figure, something that
he would not have said to a member of the public. It was not as
if he was going to Australia and saying, "Right, Rupert,
what do you want us to do?" It did not, and does not, in
my view, operate like that.
Q1876 Chairman:
That is a crucial question, is it not, really? Was there a price
to be paid as far as this coming together or closeness, however
you want to put it, with Mr Murdoch was concerned? Perhaps I can
just quote to you what Lance Price said. Lance Price was your
deputy, I think, for three years and he wrote an article in The
Guardian in July 2006, and he said then, "In my first
few weeks as Alastair Campbell's deputy, I was told by somebody
who would know that we had assured Mr Murdoch we wouldn't change
policy on Europe without talking to him first". Is that a
fair and accurate description of where relations were?
Mr Campbell: I do not think so, and Lance, for
the record, was not my deputy, he was a specialist adviser within
the Press Office.
Q1877 Chairman:
What does that mean?
Mr Campbell: Well, he was one of a team, and
I cannot remember what his official title was, but I had an official
deputy and it was not Lance Price. The point I make about this,
and let us just take Europe which is an interesting area, anybody
who follows the political debate, unless they have been on Mars,
knows what Rupert Murdoch basically thinks about the European
Union. Likewise, I think anybody who follows the debate, more
importantly, knows what Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and other elected
senior politicians think about Europe. It is a fundamentally different
position. Bear in mind that we had The Sun saying, "Tony
Blair's the most dangerous man in Europe", and all this sort
of stuff happening, and I think I referred to this at one point
in my book where there was a dinner with Murdoch and, I think,
Irwin Steltzer was there as well where there was not even a discussion
of Europe because it kind of was pointless, there was no point
really in engaging, and I actually think, to his credit, Gordon
Brown, since becoming Prime Minister, has gone down a route on
Europe that clearly does not meet favour with the Murdoch press.
I sort of feel in this whole debate that, because Murdoch is the
biggest, because he is defined by his rival media organisations
as the `baddest', there is in a sense far too much focus on him
and on his newspapers. As I made clear to you, within the whole
media world, the UK media, I think the real poison actually does
come from The Mail Group. I think there is a cultural question
about broadcast journalism and the changes that have happened
there which I think are just as serious as these media ownership
questions. I think the arrival of the Internet and the impact
of 24-hour news has fundamentally changed the way that people
are engaging as news consumers, and I know you have been looking
at that in the earlier part of your inquiry, so I think the Murdoch
question, as it were, it almost feels to me as part of a debate
that was of ten years ago. I think the media world has moved on
so much and so quickly, so in relation to something like Europe,
I do not accept Lance's characterisation of that at all. I think
I remember that that is the piece where he said that Rupert Murdoch
was the 23rd member of the Cabinet, whatever it was, and it is
just a ridiculous thing to say.
Q1878 Chairman:
The interesting thing he did say in that article I quoted was
that, when he put his manuscript into Number 10, which we all
have to do so that they can go through it and take out the particular
bits that they do not like, the real surprise was that no fewer
than a third of the objections from Number 10 related to Rupert
Murdoch. It does seem that there is a degree of sensitivity on
this issue.
Mr Campbell: Well, I had left by then, so I
do not know that, so whether there was or there was not, I just
do not know.
Q1879 Chairman:
But you did not feel yourself that, when you were there, you were
looking over your shoulder to see how particularly the Murdoch
press would react to what you were doing, what the Government
was doing?
Mr Campbell: No. This is one of the things that
became quite tedious about the job that I did really, that I worked
out that, whatever we did, I could pretty much immediately compute
what every newspaper and every commentator was going to say. I
think that is one of the other things that has happened, that
there is so much space and yet actually it is much easier to work
out what people are going to say and what they are going to think
about something. Of all the papers and the groups to deal with,
and this is not a terribly fashionable thing to say probably,
I actually found The Times and The Sun at times
probably the most straightforward to deal with. In my previous
life as a journalist, I worked on a Murdoch newspaper, I worked
on Today when Richard Stott, who was the Editor, was turning
it into a kind of left-of-centre newspaper, and I never sensed
any kind of proprietorial presence at all, whereas I can tell
you, when I worked for Robert Maxwell, that was an interfering
proprietor.
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