Watching brief - Amanda Platell tells Blair to take his hands off Today
Published 08 September 2003
If Blair really means what he says about ending spin and creating a new openness, he should start by taking his grubby hands off the Today programme
Word is out that the first casualty of the war between the BBC and Downing Street is to be the independence of the Today programme. During the summer, stories were leaked to friendly papers that the jewel in the Today crown, John Humphrys, was to have his wings clipped. You're more likely to get John Leslie to keep his trousers zipped.
The price the BBC must pay for peace - and the removal of all threats to its charter - is for the Radio 4 flagship news programme to lose all spontaneous interviews and for political interchanges to be scripted. It would be the end of the Today programme as we know it and that is exactly why the government is targeting it.
It would be the end of interviews such as the one Andrew Gilligan did with Humphrys over Dr David Kelly. And although increasingly we questioned Gilligan's techniques, we cannot question the basic truth of his story, that Tony Blair exaggerated the case for war with Iraq. No 10 claims all it ever did was influence the presentation of the facts. Most of us now think it maliciously manipulated the truth.
It is no coincidence that the neutering of parliament has corresponded with a steady growth of the Today audience. The peak average of 2.8 million at about 8am is up 300,000 on four years ago, an increase of 12 per cent.
It is the most listened-to programme on Radio 4, with an audience of 6.48 million in a typical week. To give these figures some perspective, 4.6 million tune in to The Archers in the course of the week (including the weekday lunchtime and evening programmes, plus the Sunday editions) and Today has almost double the audience of PM, the 5pm news show.
As the democratic process has become less accountable, that shabby little studio with its long-life orange juice and stale croissants in the heart of BBC Television Centre has replaced the House of Commons as the place where ministers are held to account.
The team of presenters, led by Humphrys and James Naughtie, is more effective at calling this government to account than the whole of the opposition front bench.
Tony Blair has announced the end of spin by putting Peter Mandelson in charge of No 10's new communications operation, heralding a new openness. If he really meant it, his first act would be to take his grubby hands off the Today programme.
The front page of the Observer on the weekend Alastair Campbell resigned carried a puff for Andrew Rawnsley's column. It asked: "How can Blair survive without Campbell?" It could just as easily have asked: "How can Rawnsley survive without Campbell?" He and other new Labour sympathisers in the lobby have thrived on the equivalent of a political Atkins diet - raw meat hand-fed by their masters in No 10.
However much Campbell likes to think he will remain as close to Blair as he is now, he need only look as far as Mandelson to see how much influence comes without day-to-day intimacy.
Campbell is awash with offers, but where will he end up? I doubt his old paper the Daily Mirror will want him back, or that he will even consider working for a paper that has so readily trashed the government.
No, Campbell's real home now - unthinkable ten years ago - is the Sun, a newspaper that distinguished itself with its unflinching and unquestioning support for Blair and the war in Iraq.
The Sun was so shameless in its adoration of both Campbell's and Blair's performances before the Hutton inquiry that the Westminster village has started to wonder if its formidable political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, has sunstroke.
Given his earlier career as a writer for a sex magazine, and with no great gift for the pen, perhaps Campbell will end up in another natural home - with Richard Desmond at the Express. Campbell's only value as a columnist would be to reveal the inner workings of the government. To do so would destabilise Blair, something he would not do. I am afraid whoever ends up with him will get about as much value as the Mail on Sunday has with its sleep-inducing column by the mud masseuse Carole Caplin.
The new Mirror boss, Sly Bailey, has spent the summer slashing the daily and Sunday colour magazines. A big TV campaign supported the new package and the figures held up, until News International unleashed its lethal weapon, David Beckham's autobiography, My Side. But the soft lad who married the pop star has put the pure into puerile. He reveals all - and in doing so shows little, as there is so little to him. He called Alex Ferguson the gaffer, got cross when Fergie kicked a shoe in his face, and is the only person in Britain who thinks his wife is posh. They say revenge is a dish best served cold. In Beckham's case, it's a bowl of soggy Frosties.
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