Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1880
- 1899)
WEDNESDAY 30 JANUARY 2008
Mr Alastair Campbell
Q1880 Chairman:
I think we have had evidence on that point. Why do you get so
excited about The Mail Group?
Mr Campbell: I do not get excited about it.
I reached a point, I could not tell you when, but a few years
into government, and again just as with Murdoch and the Murdoch
press from a position of opposition where the Labour Party historically
had had a pretty bad deal out of the media, we had a strategy
to try to engage more with them and we did the same with The
Mail. As I said in the Cudlipp Lecture that I did the other
day, I made the point that I think it is a really interesting
paradox that any journalist you speak to, by and large, will agree
that The Mail is the most poisonous newspaper in the country,
yet—
Q1881 Chairman:
That is actually quite a big claim to make.
Mr Campbell: I think they will though, most
journalists, if you say that to them, and, as I said earlier,
I do think it is a form of evil, I really do, I think The Mail
is evil. When the senior Rothermere and David English were there
alongside Paul Dacre, I think it was kind of somewhere closer
to the edges of humanity, but I think that, without the senior
Rothermere and David English, it has become absolutely poisonous.
I really do believe it is a poison in our national political life.
Q1882 Chairman:
So you have a sunny view, if I can summarise it, as far as the
Murdoch press are concerned—
Mr Campbell: I have a more realistic view of
the Murdoch press than I think most people do.
Q1883 Chairman:
You do not regard that as in any way questionable?
Mr Campbell: There are lots of things you can
question about it. I think the way that it covers Europe is a
joke. When it sometimes takes up a campaign and really goes for
it and does not allow any other view to intrude, I do not think
it is particularly professional, but I think actually The Sun
does at least have a kind of sunny disposition towards being alive
and towards being British. On the rare occasions, if I get in
the back of a cab and someone has left The Mail and I flick
through it, I kind of wonder why—
Q1884 Chairman:
You read it, do you?
Mr Campbell: I would not allow it in the house,
certainly not, but I might sort of pick it up.
Q1885 Chairman:
It is quite difficult, is it not, to have these views without
actually reading the paper?
Mr Campbell: I saw today's Mail in a
cab this morning. I think it just has a view of the world which
is utterly poisonous. The other thing is this point I was making,
that journalists know what it is and what it does, yet, if you
say to them, "What's the most professional newspaper?"
most of them say The Daily Mail, and I think that is a
very interesting paradox. I think that the culture within the
media needs to be challenged and I think that is the question
as opposed to whether Rupert Murdoch owns 60% of Sky or—
Q1886 Chairman:
Well, we will go into some of these points, but just to finish
the point on The Mail, I think you are not in this case
attacking the proprietor as much as the Editor-in-Chief, Paul
Dacre.
Mr Campbell: Well, I could be wrong about this,
but I do not actually think that the proprietor has much power
within that newspaper group at all and I think Paul Dacre completely
runs it. His view is writ in virtually every single headline,
every single picture selection. You talk about the relations that
prime ministers have with people in the media, I cannot remember
if I kept this in the book or not, but there was a dinner that
we had at Number 10 with the young Rothermere and his wife, I
think her name is Claudia, and it was at the time when the Express
Group, under Richard Desmond following his taking over the Express
Group, were really running quite an aggressive campaign against
The Mail and against Rothermere about links to the Nazis
and love children and all this sort of stuff. Honestly, with an
absolutely straight face, Claudia Rothermere said, and this was
to the Prime Minister, Cherie Blair, myself and Fiona who were
at this dinner, "Do you know the worst thing, Prime Minister,
is that they actually go after your families", and you just
sort of thought, "Well, what planet are these people on?"
and what do they think Mr Dacre and his colleagues get up to day
after day after day in what I define as a cultural denigration
of public and political life, and I really do mean that. I think
that the political class as a whole continues actually to sort
of pander to it far too much.
Q1887 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Leaving The Mail for the moment and going back in time,
you were at the heart of the 1992 election. Do you feel that the
Labour Party lost that election or that it was due to influence
on public opinion by the media?
Mr Campbell: Well, I certainly do not believe
it was The Sun that won it, I really do not. I think newspapers
can have influence at the margins. I think the idea that a newspaper
says, "Vote Labour" or "Vote Tory" and all
their readers will rush out, as I said in my speech the other
night, it is one of my favourite little-reported facts that Labour
support amongst Daily Mail readers went up between 1997
and 2001, which suggests that they have got minds of their own
and they can separate out what they are being fed and what they
actually want to digest. I think it certainly had an effect in
terms of the framing of political debate at that time and it is
one of the reasons why we did want to try to even up the media
marketplace in terms of how it was portraying Labour and Tory.
Christopher Meyer was there with John Major, but, if you go back
to when Mrs Thatcher was there, if you are pursuing, as she was,
a really difficult, radical reform agenda for change and you can
pretty much call on, when the chips are down, The Sun,
The Mail, The Express, The Telegraph, The
Times, as she could, it can kind of give you a bit of wind
in your sails, I think that is true, and certainly at times of
difficult areas of public policy where we would feel that you
were better placed to take forward a policy or a programme if
you had a bit of media support around the place. Would it stop
you doing it if you did not have that? I do not think so, and
Iraq actually is a very good example where the Prime Minister
did it with very little media support, so I do not think the media,
as it were, decided the 1992 election. I think what they did do
was frame the debate over the previous few years in a way that,
when you got to the election campaign, what was already difficult
for Labour became more difficult.
Q1888 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
One of the suggestions that is made about the way in which you
went about evening this out is that, once you were in Downing
Street, you used your access to proprietors to influence their
attitudes to certain journalists and, consequently, were able
to manipulate the stories or the way in which specific journalists
were running stories. What is your response to that, that you
had favourites and that you manipulated the—
Mr Campbell: I do not know who you are referring
to specifically there, but Andrew Marr, for some reason, thinks
that I tried to get him to lose his job under Montgomery, which
I never did, but I cannot think of any other. On this question
about whether there are favourites, there are some journalists,
some of whom are still operating here, whom I respected more than
others. There are some journalists that I felt you could have
a conversation with and you could engage with them in a discussion
about something that was going on without thinking that all they
were trying to do was sort of trip you up. Now, I just think that
is the nature of any walk of life, any relationship, but in the
systems that we operated we used to, twice a day, first at Number
10 and then over here in the Commons in the afternoon, sit down,
we would open them up, they were on the record, there were transcripts
that went on the Web straightaway. It was interesting actually
that it was the Westminster lobby and the clique, if you like,
that were more resistant to us actually opening that up more,
bringing in foreign media, bringing in non-political media, so
that was the sort of backbone of the system of communication that
we had. Now, outside of that, if a journalist, if Mike White from
The Guardian wanted to talk to you afterwards, would I
talk to him? Yes, I would. If there is a specific instance, you
will have to remind me, but I cannot think of an instance where
we, say, went to a proprietor and said, "This guy's beyond
the pale". Also, had we done that, I think it would have
been completely counterproductive.
Q1889 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Removing it from the proprietor level, I remember when I was a
spin doctor myself, a much less powerful one than you—
Mr Campbell: You were a communicator!
Q1890 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:—
watching you at work and there was no question that there was
a suggestion that certain people would get more access than others,
that there was a system of "If you scratch my back, I'll
scratch yours".
Mr Campbell: I am not sure about that. When
we were in opposition, when I would be bumping into you the whole
time, my basic system was that at some point during the day I
would go to every single office in the corridors upstairs—
Q1891 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
The labyrinth, yes.
Mr Campbell: Yes, and talk to every single newspaper
and every single broadcasting organisation, and that is what I
did. As to who was there at the time, I think it is just simply
unrealistic to think that, having been here as a journalist for
quite a few years as well and knowing these people as I did, there
are not some that you are, frankly, going to trust more than others
and, therefore, you might be more open with them. I was talking
about this after the Cudlipp Lecture the other night and we did
a Q&A and people were talking about this whole business about
briefing speeches before they happen and all the rest of it, again
I think this is simply a consequence of the volume of space that
is out there that is kind of begging to be filled and the assumption
that, if you work for the Prime Minister and the Government, in
a sense you are seen as, if you like, the biggest space-filler.
Now, there are lots of things we did not get the balance right
on, and I know it is kind of routinely said by some of the media
that we went round, bullied them and lied to them and all the
rest of it, but I just do not accept the critique at all.
Lord Maxton: Can I say on The Daily Mail,
I will not have it in the house either.
Chairman: You do not read anything! You do not
read The Sun or The Daily Mail!
Q1892 Lord Maxton:
But I do go to a gym which gives it to me free and I occasionally
read it over a cup of coffee.
Mr Campbell: Actually I think its sales figures
have kept up because every time you get on a plane, you are given
one and you have to read it, otherwise you cannot get on the plane!
Q1893 Lord Maxton:
Chris Mullin has raised with us the issue that of course The Mail
now own in London The Evening Standard which gives them
in the evening paper area almost a total monopoly over a very
wide area of the public and that, equally, I would assume you
would think was a very dangerous thing. If I can lead on from
that, do you believe, as I do, that over the past 25/30 years
the press in this country has become trivial and more negative
and has created about politics, in particular, a level of cynicism
among the population which is one of the reasons why turnout in
elections is down and, leading from that, do you believe the time
has come, particularly with what you said about the Press Complaints
Commission, where we ought to have some form of regulatory body
set up by law to regulate the media in this country?
Mr Campbell: I do not know, is the answer to
the final bit. I agree with everything that you said prior to
that. The reason I do not know about the last bit is what is it
exactly that you are going to regulate and how do you do it when
you are talking about the media now and people's media consumption,
like with a lot of kind of economic and industrial change that
has happened, which really is beyond borders? I do not read newspapers
really anymore, apart from for sport. In terms of any news consumption,
I will maybe once a day for five minutes just go on the Internet
and flick around or somebody might tell you that there was a really
interesting piece in Le Monde yesterday or The New York
Times today and you can get to it straightaway, and I think
that is becoming most people's, or not most people's, but I think
it is developing as media consumption, so I am not sure in the
end what you would regulate. Certainly a couple of years ago,
if you had asked me about the PCC, I would have said, "I
think it's absurd it's not on a statutory footing", but,
as I said in my earlier answer, now I think we are dealing with
a different world already. I thought it was fascinating some of
the notes of the meetings you had in America with some of the
people, including Murdoch and others, that you saw out there and
I thought that, even the world that they were describing just
a few months ago presumably, because of now Facebook, MySpace,
YouTube, it is changing so quickly, so I do not know the
answer to the last part. The first part though, this is what I
think is the really serious point, it is this culture of negativity,
this idea that news is only news if it is bad, particularly if
it is bad for the people in the top jobs in politics. Also, the
speed now with which the news-makers, the news-producers have
to put it out means that there has been an impact on any real
interest in whether the story is right or wrong. I think one of
the most interesting phrases that has crept into the media language
and landscape now is "if true". All the time in the
broadcast media, "If true, this is very damaging for Gordon
Brown". We had one on Saturday night where The Sunday
Mirror had a story about Alan Johnson, it went to the BBC
a few minutes before their ten o'clock bulletin, it led the news,
but they had no idea if it was true or not, they had not checked
it out independently, they just read the story out and said, "This
is what it's about. It's terribly embarrassing for Gordon Brown,
if true". Well, I thought journalism was to find out whether
things were true and then you would broadcast them or print them.
The point about cynicism that you make, what I think the press,
particularly the political press, try to do and this is what they
always do if I am talking about this or when Tony Blair is doing
speech or whatever, and I really recommend Jeremy Paxman's speech
on this, the MacTaggart Lecture that he did because he, I thought,
thought about it far more deeply than a lot of people at the BBC
and elsewhere in the media do, they like to say, "Well, you're
a spin doctor and you're responsible for spin", and then
there was the `dodgy dossier', then there was Bernie Ecclestone
and they trot out all this stuff and say, "Therefore, we
can't believe a word you say". It is such a ludicrous argument,
but that is the way the argument is put, "You spun us, therefore,
we can say whatever we want about you" is kind of how it
goes. The prism now that has formed around politics and political
debate, let us be frank, most political coverage now is TV reporters
standing before a microphone, telling you what they think. Here
we are, it is 12 o'clock now, you are about to have Prime Minister's
Questions and that is one of the rare moments in the parliamentary
week when you will get proper live coverage and, by the time you
get to the news tonight, you might have a clip of Gordon Brown,
you might have a clip of David Cameron and then you can bet your
bottom dollar that you will have Nick Robinson or one of the others
coming on and saying what it all meant when I actually think the
public, frankly, could not care less what he thinks and they really
want to know what Gordon Brown and David Cameron are about.
Q1894 Lord Inglewood:
You have been slightly sort of proprietor/editor-specific when
you were talking about your days as, I think you describe it,
communicator, but were there any kind of general patterns that
emerged from when you were trying obviously to get a particular
message across into the newspapers, whether it was proprietors,
editors or journalists who were really the principal means of
achieving your ends, or did it vary from newspaper to newspaper
or between tabloid and broadsheet? Were there kind of general
rules that used to apply because they were the most effective?
Mr Campbell: As I say, the main basis of our
communication with the media was the briefings, every day, twice
a day. They were the points at which you had to be on top of every
issue, know what it was that you were trying to get out of it,
know what it was that they were probably trying to get out of
it and that was the main basis. You see, the other point on this,
and again I said this in the Cudlipp Lecture, is that, although
the downside of the media is the size of it and the unmanageability
and the chaos of it, in a funny sort of way, the political leaders,
particularly somebody as effective a communicator as Tony Blair,
the politicians still do have an extraordinary capacity and ability
to dominate that agenda and drive their own agenda. The media
can make it difficult and they kind of see it as their job to
make it difficult, which is fair enough, but I still think, for
example, sometimes probably or maybe the best way to get a point
over to the public would just be to say that Tony Blair goes on
television, Tony Blair does a press conference, Tony Blair makes
a speech about this, and that then or the policy itself in a given
area becomes far more important than any of the verbiage that
is going on around it. Then, within that, Tony Blair, certainly
when he was Prime Minister, would see most of the editors from
time to time, not terribly often, I do not know how many times
he would see Murdoch, reasonably regularly, but far less regularly
than all sorts of people who are never mentioned in the media,
so I do not think we did operate systems in the way that your
question says.
Q1895 Lord Inglewood:
Sort of Harold Macmillan's "Events, dear boy" is really
the basis, that you have just got to play it as it comes and develop
a kind of plan. You just did it by the seat of your trousers as
you went along.
Mr Campbell: No, I am actually saying something
different. I am saying that the way to deal with this chaotic,
unmanageable media is actually to be far more strategic and understand
that, for all the noise that is going on around you, ultimately
it is about the decisions that the decision-makers are taking.
Having been out for a few years now and looked at it from a different
perspective, I sometimes feel that the politicians overestimate
how much a lot of this stuff matters. The politicians, if only
they would realise it and exercise it, have far more strategic
space in this debate than they think.
Q1896 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I am just a bit puzzled by the contradictions and I do not think
they are just within what you say about this, but they are there
at the heart of this whole question of the culture of the media
and how both politicians and the public react to that or contribute
to it. On the one hand, it appears that you are saying, "Actually
politicians really shouldn't be so worried about it. They have
the capacity to dominate it", and that it can really be managed
by the sheer force of argument and the power, frankly, that people
have as politicians. On the other hand, you are saying that there
is this terrible culture of negativity, it is poisoning our political
process, there are particular newspapers which contribute to that
more than others, but it is a generality. You also said, and I
want to ask you about this, that it had been put to you, as it
were, that journalists react to you and more generally in this
way because they feel that they cannot trust you because "You
spun me, so I'm going to say what I like about you". Two
questions, therefore: firstly, do you feel that your generation,
as it were, of media managers—people who manage what the
media say, or try to—have had any responsibility for accelerating
this culture of negativity? Secondly, is it reversible? I read
your Cudlipp lecture—very interesting and very, very stimulating—but
at the end of it I was not sure whether you thought we were all
going to hell in a handcart or whether there was something we
could do.
Mr Campbell: What I said at the end is that
I do not think this is going to change unless the public think
it matters, and I do not really sense the public think it matters
that much. They complain about it a lot, they do not much like
it, but with all the other things they worry about I am not sure
they are that seized of this. Of course, they do not really have
access to the debate about it. As I said in the speech, I thought
it was interesting and significant that when a Prime Minister
who has been in office for ten years goes out of office and says:
"I am going to make half-a-dozen speeches reflecting on what
I have learnt" (which was the theme of those speeches he
did as he left office), that one of them should be about the media.
As I said the other night, the debate came and went in a day because
they do not really want that debate. It was interesting, at the
end of the lecture the other night, there was a group of journalism
students who were all, probably, going on to be journalists who
came up; it was very interesting because they said: "Look,
you've got to trust us more as the next generation. We know there
is a bit of a problem here, but I think we understand this better
than maybe you think". I completely accept there are contradictions
in my kind of analysis of this—I accept that—but I
feel that the balance has swung too far away from the politicians'
own understanding of how they can operate within this admittedly
difficult, noisy media market place.
Q1897 Lord King of Bridgwater:
The purpose of this Committee is to look at the issue of control
of the media and news provision—whether there is polarity
of views and whether there is otherwise distortion of views because
of too much concentration of power. One aspect of this has been
the obvious dominance in certain quarters and the extraordinary
spread of the Murdoch press. You have given your answers to that
and it is very clear in your diaries that it was recognised (and
Tony Blair recognised it) how important it was to get The Sun
on side. The other side, for which you have been particularly
recognised, is showing what the power of your position was with
the power of access to the Prime Minister. You have just talked
about news briefings and treating everybody equally. It is well-known—and
I respect it, I think, with some jealousy, seen from the other
side of the political stage—the way in which it was seen,
I think, by many of us that you have corralled an awful lot of
the press into being pretty supportive, or certainly not too hostile,
because they could not afford to be otherwise. That side of it
you have rather played down, but it is not just a question of
briefings, is it, it is a question of the power of the office
you had and the power of the access to the Prime Minister for
proprietors and for visitors to this country—you controlled
a lot of that. Do you have any views on that, sitting back now
and wishing to repent at all?
Mr Campbell: It is true that not just myself
but people like Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan and Anji Hunter—all
sorts of people within the Number Ten operation—lots and
lots of people would try to get through us to get access to him.
You could actually put the argument in a different way, that sometimes,
when you talk about the media, access can be gained by them kind
of attacking you, kicking up a fuss or making arguments that you
do not particularly agree with. We did tend, probably, just to
operate a bit of a "horses for courses" on this. As
you know from your time in the Government, the Prime Minister's
diary is a very, very precious, much-fought-over commodity, and
you would be having within the Number Ten structures lots of arguments
as to what should be happening with his time. However, ultimately,
he would be really directing how much time he felt he should himself
be spending on seeing journalists and dealing with the media.
I think there is a line in my diary that there were times when
I felt he was seeing them far too much. So that would be me stopping
access not because I did not like Journalist A or Proprietor B
but because from where I was sitting the argument I was feeding
into the Prime Minister was that he had better things to do with
his time. To go back to Lady McIntosh's question, which relates
to this, about whether there were things we did that contributed,
the one thing I think we would have to accept—and maybe
this is just a product of having been in opposition for so long—was
that there were techniques and communications methods, if you
like, that in opposition I felt were absolutely right and proper
and appropriate. For example, this whole thing about "re-announcing",
so-called; the idea that because somebody puts out a press release
you never talk about it again when, maybe, 0.5% of the public
are even aware that anybody has said it. If you have got something
you want to get through to the public you get it through over
time. So that is a technique, if you like, that in opposition
we did. Maybe there were some techniques in the first year or
so when we got into office that we should have left at the door
of Number Ten—I accept that. However, I think that politics,
generally, and the Labour Government in particular, still get
hit for things that actually we stopped doing years ago, because
it suits the media to say: "Well, all they do is spin".
So Gordon, for example, comes in and says: "We are going
to change the way of communication", and I think they have—they
have tried to learn some of the lessons from what happened between
us and the media and do things differently. What it sometimes
means is that when they do kind of "do" communication,
the press will say: "Why are you doing this, because you
said you weren't going to spin", as if somehow now talking
to the public or doing a particular interview at a particular
time is an illegitimate thing to do.
Q1898 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
If I may turn now, Mr Campbell, to one of the five most trusted
organisations in the UK, which is the BBC, there was a period
of time, 2004, where you got very excited by the BBC—some
might even say you became vindictive towards the BBC.
Mr Campbell: I had left by then.
Q1899 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Maybe it was 2003, but around the period of the Hutton Inquiry
and the issues surrounding Andrew Gilligan, and so on. Could you
just reflect back on that period and whether you felt that you
probably went a bit too far in your anger? Have you changed your
view of the BBC subsequently in the light of its editorial significance
and independence?
Mr Campbell: I have not changed my view at all
about the events of that time—not at all. To be fair, I
think there are people within the BBC who have changed their view.
I thought it was interesting that Michael Grade, for example,
when he was in his previous job at the BBC, acknowledged that
the whole issue was driven by what he called "a failure in
BBC journalism". You talk about anger. There is no point,
unless you particularly want me to, in going over all the arguments
and revisit the facts of that, but there does come a point, as
I think several people in this room know, where if you are in
the press a lot you get used to things being written about you
that are not true, and you just kind of live with it; you get
on with it and it bounces off you. Every now and then something
gets stated that is of such fundamental significance and seriousness
that I feel and I felt then—and, more importantly, the Prime
Minister felt—that you cannot just let that bounce off you
and let it lie there. So, as to the second part of your question,
whether I think differently about the BBC, I think the BBC has
got a lot of good going for it, I think it has got incredible
advantages and I am not sure it plays them terribly well.
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