Robert Harris's morality tale of an ex-prime minister at bay is not a spiteful satire, but a misguided admission of media guilt.
Advance notice of Robert Harris's The Ghost suggested this was to be a payback story. The author had frothed for years about Tony Blair in his Sunday Times columns and elsewhere - "a textbook example of political leadership", "a consummate politician . . . the most brilliant I have seen". But he was now said to be rancorously foaming at the mouth, because Blair had been horrid to Harris's dear friend Peter Mandelson, and because of Iraq (the comparative importance for Harris of these two matters was not weighed up, thus heightening hopes of a showdown between a discredited leader and a man deranged by rage). Reviews have cooed over how "jubilantly spiteful" the book is, how "Blair is skewered with magnificent rudeness" in "a fictionalised attempt to stab Tony and Cherie Blair firmly in the front".
Were this true, it would be a shabby work, but none of it is true, any more than it is true that the novel deals with a "Labour ex-prime minister", even if the Times, the Guardian and BBC's Newsnight all say it does. The Ghost no more mentions the party affiliation of its Blair soundalike, Adam Lang, than it gives the name of its first-person narrator, the hack called in to ghost the PM's memoirs when the original scribe - an Alastair Campbell type, a "thug . . . with eyes like a snake": "he was brutal, especially on the phone" - mysteriously, but you might think richly deservedly, dies. The hack is just "I".
Harris foresaw the scenario that would be concocted for The Ghost and put it into the book. "I" browses two works on Lang, one "an early hag iography", the other "a recent hatchet job", and discovers both are by the same author. By itself, that pre-emptive joke might have been a cunning ploy, like an unattributable briefing from an official spokesman. But Harris takes great, careful and sometimes odd trouble to create resemblances, affinities even, between his hack and his politician. As the narrator writes Lang's autobiography, he notes that "a few of my memories inevitably became blended into his". Adam's father dies suddenly while gardening: "there he was, in the middle of the lawn. Just a graze on his face where he'd fallen" - words that could come more accurately from Harris, whose father had a "massive heart attack while working in his garden" in 1996 (Leo Blair Sr is still living in Shropshire).
The parallels go on. The hack has an agent described as "Mephistopheles on a 15 per cent commission"; the politician played Dr Faustus at school. And they are both still schoolkids at what remains of their hearts. When Lang is in trouble and the US secretary of state stands cosily shoulder to shoulder with him, he "looked like an eager student collecting a prize on speech day". The narrator gets roped in to write Lang a press release and delivers it "like a schoolboy handing in his homework".
The Ghost is, then, a fine, rueful tale of how "I" becomes Lang's "accomplice". The moral is familiar and none the worse for that: they build you a pedestal and then pull you off it. When Lang, accused of war crimes, leaves the Waldorf, he steps out "into the tumult of noise and light, and it was as if all the controversy generated by the war on terror, year after year of it, had briefly converged on one man and rendered him incandescent". This is the phosphorescence of a scapegoat, indistinguishable in wattage from the light of adulation. Harris's fable is plain, but its point has not been mentioned in reviews. This may be because the media conceives of itself by turns as mighty (it was the Sun "wot won it" for John Major in 1992) and weightless, non-existent as a factor in how stuff happens - a ghost, you might say. And so, it finds it difficult to face, as Harris with a rare decency does, its own possible hand in a mess.
Alastair Campbell's diary for 15 September 2000 reports Blair saying of journalists: "For pragmatic reasons, we entered into a whole series of basically dishonest relationships with them . . . I promise you, nobody despises them more than I do."
But how could he despise the media - which he lived to please - without coming to despise himself ? Blair and the press looked, early in their partnership, like a celebrity couple at their dream wedding. It was a marriage made in hell, however, for the parties to it had perfectly matched failings as regards what the philosopher Bernard Williams identified as "the two basic virtues of truth": accuracy, which is not the press's forte, and sincerity, an ideal from which "reasons of state" and opinion management debar holders of high office.
Blair was not that keen on accuracy either. He said of Andrew Gilligan's contribution to the Today programme in May 2003: "Any person listening to that would think we had done something improper, not that we just got our facts mixed up." Just! So much for accuracy, which demands assessment of evidence, which in turn demands general consideration of how trustworthy some kinds of evidence are. The history of intelligence guesses about an enemy's possession of WMDs is littered with gross mistakes, as Blair could have discovered had he read Harris and Paxman's A Higher Form of Killing (1982; timely, revised edition, 2001). But prime ministers have little time to read, and Blair prefers Walter Scott to Robert Harris. Like Adam Lang, "history doesn't really interest him", except when he has the sensation of its hand patting him on the back.
It is reasonable to be in (at least) two minds about whether and how truthfulness matters in a democracy. On this issue, Alastair Campbell is broad-minded to the point of double-jointedness. He can be solemn about "systems of democracy founded on the duty of politicians to tell the truth", while forgetting the "very good laugh" he and Tony had "when we imagined what it would be like to go out and deliver a truth speech - Conference, Gordon and Peter really do hate each other". In 2001, he deplored media-tokenism - "that thing most loved by our wretched media - a symbol". His 1994 rapture over the abolition of Clause Four had slipped his mind: "In terms of the political substance, it didn't actually mean that much. But as a symbol . . . it was brilliant."
The commodity "news", like much that is mass-produced, requires built-in obsolescence. It needs to be instantly memorable but memorable only for an instant or two. If you can remember something has happened before, that's history; and history is not news. Those who "make" news, whether hacks or politicians, are subdued by what they work in. This wreaks havoc with their own memories and hence with their capacity to take responsibility, let alone feel remorse, for what they have done. Campbell reassures himself over and over again during the summer of 2003 that "I had done nothing wrong", "I knew I'd done nothing wrong", "I knew I had done nothing wrong, but in this climate things had gone beyond reason, it was like a drama or a novel, and nobody had control of events".
On the contrary. "Control of events" is an illusion, manufactured by a novelletish style of conducting and reporting politics; you don't, anyway, need to have been in control of something to be responsible for it. Along with control over imaginary events, novels offer a writer the advantage of what Robert Harris thought was needed after Mandy's second resignation: "a deep breath, a pause, and then a patient laying-out of all the facts, with suitable apologies for errors all round". The Ghost is just that, though what it lays out are fictions. One luxury that fiction allows Harris is a freedom for regret little known in Campbell's adversarial domain, where the BBC "believed they would combust and die if they ever admitted the BBC got something wrong", Tony Blair "always knew best, there was no one else could put a counterargument, he was like a man possessed" and each fed the opponent's clenched self-righteousness.
The self-dismay that seeps through Harris's pages eventually spills over into mawkish self-hatred as the hack takes the rap for all that has happened : "I couldn't work up any sense of self-justification, or resentment against Lang. I was the one at fault." But Harris should have stayed more faithful to the implications of the emblematic names he chose for his imagining of Blair: "Adam", whose fault is everyone's, in whom the species recognises its own imperfection; "Lang", from "auld lang syne", the bygones that will not let us be quite the radical yet rootless, self-determining agents of the new Labour pipe-dream, those "forces of conservatism" that are intrinsic to us and that Harris once invoked in an unusually empurpled passage: "And what holds true for politicians holds true for the rest of us. We argue and we write and we vote, and we like to think that we do so as freethinking, independent adults. But always at our backs, there walks this silent, vast and unacknowledged army of ghosts" (Sunday Times, October 1996).
Harris's ghosts do not hang out on your customary battlements. They live in archives, they are the persistent life of archives - the "stacks of metal shelving, infinite rows of cardboard files" that Hester searches in Enigma (1995), the Rosarkhiv of Archangel (1998), and now the Lang Papers in Cambridge: "two thousand boxes of documents. Two hundred and fifty metres of shelving." This preferred haunt of the Harris ghost is not as weird as might be thought; in the idiom of the press, an archive is a morgue.
Harris hankers after those vast oubliettes of what we cannot bring ourselves to discard but have contrived to shelve. (His most entertaining non-fictional work of 1986, Selling Hitler, on the Hitler Diaries, wryly details the forging of an archive.) They are his retreat from the hectic market in which he has spent much of his working life, where "in the process of being gathered and transmitted, information is fought over, distorted, buried, managed, mangled, stamped on, twisted, spun, slanted, fabricated and forged" (Gotcha! Government, the Media and the Falklands Crisis, 1983).
But not, if Harris's list is exhaustive, "considered" or "put into perspective". Those are tasks for the historian, a tribe for which Harris has a touching reverence, expressed by his Cicero in Imperium (2006): "What is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history ?" It is hard not to be, on the whole, in favour of history, but there are sensible kinds of history from whose viewpoint the history Harris champions as enshrining "the worth of human life", with its "eras" defined by big-name politicians, is faintly bogus. Some historians regard the tsetse fly as a more historically significant creature than Tony Blair, or even Cicero.
He is less loud or clear about what journalists are worth. Sometimes they strike him as "intrinsically comic figures"; it is a sign of his real amiability that he includes himself in this category. Sometimes he speaks of "prostitution and hysteria . . . the ready connivance of the media at their own distortion", which sounds less amusing. In Good and Faithful Servant (1990), he gave a catalogue of "all sorts of journalists", mentioning eight sorts but making no mention of people who are skilled at assessing and marshalling information to serve as evidence.
I expect he thinks only a naive person who has little contact with journalism would imagine that its prime concern is to pass on reliable information. If that was its job, it would be a puzzle why the Sunday Times gained 20,000 readers in the weeks after it made, as Harris says, a "temporary laughing stock" of itself by publishing ludicrously inept fakes as the Hitler Diaries, or why millions buy newspapers though only about 30 per cent of the population say they trust them. As The Ghost shows, little changed in this respect in the "utterly different kind of Britain" that Harris prophesied Blair would bring in, in April 1997. It remains true now as under Thatcher that "neither press nor politician was in much of a position to damn the other's morality".
That last phrase of his is overkill for "criticise the conduct of", and it clouds an important asymmetry in the sorry situation he identifies. Politicians should not spend time fretting about the press - but it has, historically, been integral to the justification of the press's freedom that it should be able to call governments to account. When Harris wrote in 2005 that "politicians . . . feel able to lie and cheat" because "they won't have to face a trading standards officer", it may have been grandiose of him to have implied the media should be such an officer. But it was a good kind of grandiosity; we could do with more of it.
One reason Harris comes across as muddled and uneasy about the relations of "history" and "news" is that, despite his frequent harrumphings against River Café-leftist chatter, he has swallowed whole the modish notion that fact is indistinguishable from fiction and everything is just "narrative". He tells us it would "underrate" Konrad Kujau, the forger of the Hitler Diaries, to call him a "compulsive liar"; he "simply liked telling stories". If he simply liked telling stories, it's remarkable that every one he told was to his own advantage and at the expense of others. Or again, from a 1996 column: "Successful politicians continually weave fictions about themselves and, like successful fiction writers, they must believe absolutely in the stories they spin."
"Believe", like "story" and "politics", is a complex word. Nothing is gained by treating their various meanings as equivalent. What if politicians tell stories about things other than themselves? Must we acquiesce in those, too? "Once upon a time there was a king called Saddam who killed anyone he didn't like in 45 minutes . . .": that is recognisably the opening of a fiction. It isn't always easy to tell fact from fraud from fiction; the difficulty is what makes it imperative to try to do so.
He's still at it in The Ghost: "Everybody tends to heighten their own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote . . . Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact . . . And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape." I wonder if he has ever known someone prey to delusions - a heroin addict awash with self-pity, for instance, or a teenager who cannot tell the difference between her obsessions and the reality of the world for other people. He might need to reconsider his geniality about "myth" if he met them.
Myth, by the way, accumulates not slowly but at frenzied speed, as anybody who follows rolling news knows; and it never amounts to history, though it plagues the historical record. A fiction is a document from which there is in principle no appeal to any other document. History, however, arises from the disparity between documents, their resistance to each other and our ability to resist any of them. As when Robert Harris writes about Wednesday 16 April 1997: "Alastair and I linger for a few minutes in the terminal to watch the news." They sound such chums. Yet Alastair Campbell had written in his diary on April Fool's Day of the same year: "The last thing we needed on top of all this was Robert Harris sitting up front taking note of every spit and fart." Between them, and against their will, perhaps, they open the door for history.
Some readers may feel I've not told them much about the plot of The Ghost. But it is a thriller as well as a thoughtful book, and I am bound not to spoil the fun by telling you who did it. I am, however, able to reveal that it definitely wasn't Alastair Campbell. He did nothing wrong. You have his word for that, and, what's more, you have mine.
Eric Griffiths is tutor in English at Trinity College, Cambridge
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