Alastair Campbell has not been off the front pages since he announced that he would be keeping a lower profile. So much for his supposedly mystical powers to control the news agenda. He was on the front pages before he assumed his new, more "strategic" role as well. Nothing has changed. The news-papers are obsessed. So are the broadcasters. So is Ken Follett.
The government is doomed if hostile newspapers convince their readers that it is led by a bunch of sinister, manipulative spin-doctors. Viewed in such a light, announcements, even those of real substance, are easily dismissed as froth. Nightmarishly complicated political manoeuvres, such as persuading this inward-looking island to support the euro, become infinitely more difficult. Indeed, "spin" and the future of the euro are already being subtly brought together. Variations of the sentence, "The leaked DTI report claiming that inward investment will suffer if we don't join the euro is another example of spin", appeared in the Times, Mail and Sun in recent days.
The current bout of "spin" hysteria is erupting at the wrong time. In the early years, the government was far too dependent on overblown presentation. In that initial phase, newspapers were kneeling at the altar, proclaiming cautious, incremental steps as revolutionary acts. Now that ministers are getting into their stride, they are dismissed as a bunch of feuding spinners.
Tony Blair's headline-grabbing stunt on crime stands out because such gimmicks are not deployed on a near-daily basis any more. This particular initiative was even worse than I had imagined it would be. As I revealed a couple of weeks ago, the Home Office ministers were summoned recently to a session at Chevening with Philip Gould. The message from his focus groups was blunt. William Hague had overtaken them on the issue of crime. The ministerial response, encouraged by No 10, was grimly predictable. "We need a totemic story to show we are tough on crime," they concluded, as if they were 20 points behind in the polls. Cue: new powers for the police to take thugs to their cash machines and make them pay their fines on the spot.
Such frenzied diversions obscure some good work going on behind the scenes at the Home Office that will, over time, make a difference to crime figures. The work focuses on improving police efficiency. As one Home Office insider put it to me, officers function as if criminals conveniently operate within the boundaries of each individual force. There is not enough co-ordination between the different constabularies, nor is police time efficiently used. Proposed remedies are complex and do not make great headlines. But ministers should stop chasing every headline, as Tony Blair suggested in his WI speech before he resumed the chase.
Thankfully, he chases much less often these days. The government is growing up. Currently ministers are immersed in a challenging Comprehensive Spending Review. In those early years, some misguided energy was spent on working out how the government could give the impression of spending lots of money "revolutionising" the public services, while simultaneously proclaiming their prudence and reassuring certain audiences that virtually no additional money was being spent at all. These are the contrivances required when, as Blair has put it in a defining phrase, "the entire country is our core constituency". But since the election, Blair has recognised that there is a real crisis in the public services that demands reform and a substantial investment of cash. This is real government involving real money. Perversely, at the very moment ministers get down to the details of complex reforms, linked to large injections of cash, they are bombarded with accusations about "spin".
Amid the hysteria of recent days, the most perceptive observation has come from the Home Office minister, Charles Clarke. On Newsnight, he accepted that the government had a presentation problem. He could do little else, as he was the unfortunate minister charged with the duty of explaining how the cash-machine initiative was only a metaphor, rather than a policy. Perhaps he should have said that Blair's "metaphor" was poetry with a purpose. But he went on to make a broader point: that the government announces its initiatives with great glitter, yet it can sometimes take years before an announcement is put into practice. The gap can cause disillusionment.
That is the strategic error made by ministers and their spinners. In May 1997, they should have made it much clearer that there was a huge crisis in the public services and that it would take many years of arduous reform to overcome it. Instead, after One Hundred Days, they were proclaiming a revolution. It was not like that for those travelling on the London Underground or the west coast main line. It is still not like that now.
The rest of the hype around spin is overblown nonsense. The government has made the relationship between its spinners and journalists more transparent. We know that Alastair Campbell speaks for Blair. There is no attempt to pretend that he is a neutral civil servant. I have never understood the fuss. Campbell's job is to present the government in the best possible light. If you seek candid, uninhibited conversation, you probably have to go elsewhere, although goodness knows where. I can't remember the last time I had a candid, uninhibited conversation with anyone.
Ken Follett hit the wrong target, although I believe he was doing it out of genuine anger. There is a fair amount of backbiting at all levels in this administration, although it is not as intense as in previous Labour governments. Recently, I spent a morning with Joe Haines, Harold Wilson's press secretary. On the wall of his study is a framed photo of the 1974 Cabinet, all of them smiling be-nignly. Haines showed me the photo, paused and said: "Harold didn't trust any of them." We knew at the time that Harold didn't trust any of them. We knew also that "they" did not trust each other, either. I was a teenager in the 1970s. Presumably I knew because I read the newspapers. The journalists gossiped then, as they gossip now, and then wrote about it. There may be more spin-doctors now, but, then again, there are more journalists, too.
Follett does have one valid point. It was reinforced by the briefings that followed against him. "He's only doing this because he is on the margins. He's out of the loop." But why is he out of the loop? His wife, Barbara, got no further than being a parliamentary aide to Jack Cunningham and, apparently, the great angler had to put relentless pressure on No 10 to secure that lowly appointment. There are too many hard-working MPs and others who are mystified by their own exclusion from decision-making. I am not just talking about sacked ministers, or MPs with unfulfilled ambitions. There are plenty of ministers who feel unappreciated. They sense that they are there merely to carry out orders, often for 18 hours a day.
Even quite senior ministers express their loyalty in a revealing manner. "The government has a good narrative to tell of economic competence and radical reform," one told me recently. But he was speaking almost as an observer rather than a participant.
There is another problem, which is to do with perception. I bumped into Ken Follett on the Sunday morning he was doing a round of interviews. I told him that, whatever might be said about others, I had never heard Campbell personally attack a minister. I could see he did not believe me. Probably, in this mad world, he thought I had been spun or, perhaps, was spinning. As far as my very limited exchanges go, it was the truth. But if Follett does not believe such proclamations, the voters in the real world will not believe them, either.
This means that the government needs to be more vigilant. There should be no more attempts at "chasing headlines" or overblown policy announcements. Policy implementation is what matters, as it always should have done once the days of opposition were over. It also means that policies need to be watertight, containing no seeds of deception within them.
This is the problem with the single currency at the moment. I do not believe the Cabinet is greatly split. Messrs Blair, Brown, Cook, Byers and Mandelson want to join the euro when there is convergence. The promise of a referendum means that it will not be a decisive election issue. Those opposed to the euro can still vote Labour in the knowledge that they would still be able to vote "No" in a referendum. Pro-euro Conservatives would have no such alternative option under a Hague government. I suspect the euro could become a vote-loser for Hague, part of the Conservatives' much wider credibility problem.
But there is an evasiveness at the heart of the government's approach, relating to the promised "review" of its economic conditions. I heard someone with close links to the Treasury give a magisterial review of those conditions the other day. It took ten minutes. Why not simply say that the government intends to recommend entry when our economy converges with those in the euro? This would avoid awkward questions about the timing of the "review" and over who will actually carry it out (probably Gordon Brown and Tony Blair sitting on a Downing Street sofa).
There is another point. Alastair Campbell would demystify his role by allowing the lobby briefings to be filmed on a daily basis. After the initial excitement, the media would lose interest. He would soon be despairing as to why he was not in the newspapers more often.
