The Prime Minister's press secretary is getting more publicity than the Prime Minister. Last Wednesday, Alastair Campbell managed the rare feat of making virtually every front page with one story, and the inside pages with another. Meanwhile, Michael Cockerell has begun filming an "Alastair Campbell Special". The only ministers to attract any publicity are those who have complained about the government's failure to get its message across. This is all very bizarre, given that the man responsible for conveying the message has been everywhere.
Campbell argues that his ubiquity is precisely the government's problem. The media have grown obsessed with the messengers rather than the message. There is something in this. Some editors who have never worked at Westminster are obsessed by spin-doctors. They will continue to be, until the cameras obtain permission to film the lobby briefings, at which point they will lose interest. Just look at what has happened to the coverage of the Commons and party conferences now that the cameras have gained access. Most editors want less of both rather than more.
The lobby exchanges transcribed in some of last Wednesday's newspapers show that much of the time is spent in a tedious cat-and-mouse game in which journalists attempt to persuade Campbell to reveal more than he wants to on the sensitive issues of the day.
Even so, the focus on the messenger is not the main reason why the message has been obscured. On the central issue of "taxation and spending", the message itself has grown confused. The government has never had a consistent line on acceptable levels of spending and tax. Half the time, ministers revel in their prudence; the other half, they give the impression of spending money hand over fist.
Hence, Campbell's hijacking of the front pages on Wednesday. His admission that the tax burden had increased under the government was significant. Although Tony Blair had said it before (under pressure from William Hague during a Prime Minister's Question Time last year - but who pays attention to what happens in public in the Commons?), and although the figures have been publicly available since the last Budget, this is the first time the government has volunteered the information.
On one level the reason for the change of emphasis is obvious. The so-called core vote has been flexing its muscles. But there is more to it than that. Increasingly, Downing Street realises that the level of public spending matters. There has been the two-year spending freeze, the setting of tough targets, the emphasis on the need for public services to modernise.
Without reneging on the need for reform, Downing Street now conveys a slightly different message. It wants to show that ministers are indeed putting additional money into these services, and that it recognises the need for more cash in the future.
It does not take a great genius to follow the shift. A brief look at Blair's public statements reveals a little of what is going on. Take as an example Blair's view of "tax and spend" in an interview he gave to the Independent in September 1998. Then, he confidently stated that taxes and spending would fall and that more imaginative ways of funding public services, through the private sector, were required. By January this year, he was telling David Frost that the government would aim to spend as much on health as other European countries, implying a huge rise in public spending.
Nor is it just on health and education that Blair is under pressure to deliver. There is some alarm in Downing Street, for example, that the number of police officers will not be as high as Blair had promised by the time of the next election. There is no getting away from it, recruiting more police officers costs money.
The Treasury is warier about the presentational shift. Downing Street itself is ambiguous, which is why Campbell was careful to stress, the day after his initial briefing, that families paid less tax under Labour. Blair supports the cut in income tax, to be announced in the Budget.The cut is tactical - the government's answer to the Conservatives' tax guarantee. "We should be able to see off the tax guarantee if we cut the basic rate," said one government insider, speaking as if the Conservatives were 25 points ahead in the polls.
Fortunately for the government, Hague has stepped into the breach by offering an approach to tax and spending that is even more confused. This week, he presented the moral case for his tax guarantee. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but during his wild phase in the mid-1990s Michael Portillo made a very similar speech arguing for lower public spending. His case was somewhat undermined by data showing how public spending had soared when he was responsible for it at the Treasury.
Similarly, I read Hague's speech several times to find out how we would reach this utopia where we were all going to keep more of our income and then hand it over voluntarily to Oxfam. All I could find was a commitment to increase public spending on health and education.
Like Brown's cut in income tax, Hague's tax guarantee is an electoral tactic, a device to expose the government's "stealth taxes". Hague would be alarmed if he ever had to implement it. He knows from his experience at the Treasury, when Norman Lamont was forced to increase taxes, that cutting the burden of tax cannot be "guaranteed" under any circumstance. Now that Michael Portillo has moved on to his mellow phase, he knows that, too.
For now, Portillo has to pretend otherwise. On behalf of his boss, Campbell has put his toe in the water to see what life would be like if he stopped pretending. The debate on tax has moved on a little.
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