Theatre
Michael Portillo - Centre stage
Published 08 March 2004
Theatre - New Labour's ex-spin-doctor pulls his punches - for once, writes Michael Portillo
An Audience with Alastair Campbell Royal Festival Hall, London SE1
OK, I am impressed. Two thousand people have paid up to £15 to experience An Audience with Alastair Campbell at the Royal Festival Hall. There are a few fans, but mainly a lot of curious people. A year ago, while most would have known Campbell's name, fewer would have recognised him. That was before his tempestuous television appearances following Andrew Gilligan's Today programme broadcast made him a phenomenon.
Tonight, I scarcely recognise him myself. For a man of 46, who once took to drink and then to working for Tony Blair for nine years, his face is remarkably unlined. He has the lean fitness of the marathon runner that he has become, and he assures a questioner that he doesn't dye his hair. He's fairly relaxed, though he never emerges from behind the lectern on which he shuffles notes a little fussily.
He mentions that a person can change his image, and he cites the running that he's done for charity. This appearance on stage is a further part of Campbell's metamorphosis. What sort of butterfly does he wish to become? Might he seek election? He has qualifications. He fascinates people and his communication skills put most politicians to shame. For example, he offers the most succinct defence of top-up fees I have heard: "You earn more, you learn more, you pay back more." Also, he has a dark secret out in the open, which is de rigueur in politics today: he once wrote pornography for Forum magazine.
He delivers a string of good gags. Some of them win our sympathy because he reminds us that he's a hate figure, but the performance is anything but self- deprecatory. Ross Kemp joins him on stage; his only task is to select questioners from the floor, but he manages to be haughty about it. His performance serves to emphasise that Campbell's demeanour is arrogant, too. They are a laddish twosome, without a hint of humility. Campbell tells us that, as a young man, he was "chippy, bolshy and in drink a bit punchy". Everything except the booze has survived into middle age.
Campbell's main theme is that the media have succumbed to lower standards of accuracy and fairness, are fixated with undermining public figures, and no longer distinguish between news and comment. He's right. He tells us that he hates the Daily Mail and likes the fact that it hates him. For a moment, I forget that I should adopt the sceptical nonchalance of a reviewer and I applaud heartily. But when he has mentioned the Mail for the sixth time and assassinated the character of its editor, Paul Dacre, the audience shifts uneasily. Clearly, Campbell is an obsessive. Labour should be grateful to Dacre. Time and again this unlikely siren has lured the Conservatives into striking absurdly illiberal postures that wreck their chances with the electorate.
Of his row with the BBC, Campbell says that ministers take care over the accuracy of their public statements, and broadcasters should do the same. I nearly disgrace myself by clapping for a second time. But hang on: this comes from a man whom I have heard abuse broadcast journalists with vile obscenities because they dared to ask Blair a fair question that Campbell had declared off limits. If the media had not been so craven in their appetite for snippets of information from the Labour spin machine, editors and governors would have unnerved the Prime Minister with concerted objections to Campbell's outrageous behaviour. Instead, they allowed him to unhinge the BBC with a bombardment of complaints about its war coverage.
An Audience with Alastair Campbell is an entertaining evening. But it's not satisfying, because Campbell holds back so much. Naturally, he's going to be circumspect, especially after declaring during his first performance that President Bush is "a lot cleverer than he looks". But then Campbell is also unforthcoming about his drinking problem and his days as a pornographer. He doesn't let us get close. Also, I expected better. His "big idea" about the media isn't new: he blurted all that out in his triumphant address to the nation from a regal staircase on the day that the Hutton report was published. Where is the larger picture? Here's a man in a position to comment on the broadest sweep of history across the globe. Instead, he tells us how successful child tax credits are.
The biggest unspoken of the evening is why he left government to begin his theatrical career. Let me answer that. He had to go because he had become "the story". Campbell didn't galumph around the television studios being chippy and bolshy because of what had been said about Blair. Gilligan had accused Campbell of doctoring the Iraq dossier. The spin-doctor was defending his own reputation with no regard for the interest of the government, which was to let the matter die a quick death. Ever since, the issue of trust over Iraq has dominated the media and the Prime Minister's ratings have tumbled. In truth, Alastair Campbell has much to be humble about.
Touring nationwide until 27 September. For details, visit www.celebrityproductions.info
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