Media
The spin doctors have lost their powers
Published 22 January 2007
Blair's third term has turned into a public relations calamity to rival Michael Foot's Labour leadership and John Major's final years
In the space of just a week the following things have happened. Tony Blair declared that asking people to fly less for the sake of the environment was impractical, but a day later he had to announce he would "offset" his own flights. Around the same time 10 Downing Street advertised to fill a new, £50,000-a-year post of "house manager"- a job swiftly renamed in the press "Blair's Jeeves".
Meanwhile, several papers reported that British Airways had upgraded the Blairs from business to first class for their recent flight to Miami, a perk valued at £6,000. On regional television a penniless ex-soldier called Justin Smith told an embarrassed Blair to his face that since returning from Iraq he (Smith) had lost his home, his security and his self-belief. And on a lighter note, members of the Prime Minister's elite armed guard were sent for laser eye surgery to help them see straight, while Peter Foster, who once advised Cherie Blair on a property deal, jumped bail in Fiji only to be detained in colourful circumstances in Vanuatu.
Say what you like about new Labour in the late Blair period, you can't accuse them of controlling the news agenda. Indeed, so hostile is the coverage of the Prime Minister, right across the spectrum, from the Independent to the Mail, that you have to wonder whether the man can bear to look at the daily papers over breakfast these days. Blair spin, a political phenomenon that was once a wonder of the world, may not quite be dead, but it is wobbling towards the grave and the successors to Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell seem unable to rescue it.
Trivial though some may appear, all of the stories listed above were damaging and unwelcome to the Prime Minister, and the collective public impact over just a few days must be dreadful. What is most striking, however, is how many were avoidable or could have been mitigated. Blair did not need to make that stupid remark about flying, and if he had held his tongue he would not have had to repair the damage a day later. The No 10 press office should surely have foreseen that the butler advertisement would be treated as further proof of the Blairs' parvenu taste for luxury. The whole lurid holiday fiasco, of which the BA upgrade was a late echo, need never have happened if somebody had thought it all through. And as for Blair appearing on television in the same studio as an aggrieved war veteran, Campbell would not have allowed it to happen.
Because the collapse of the government's media power has happened by increments it has been possible to miss. Stop and look now, though, and it is obvious. The control freaks who set out to make the political weather appear helpless and storm-tossed. No longer can they bully and twist; no longer can they make two and two add up to five, or black seem like white. In fact, Blair's third term has turned into a public relations calamity to rival Michael Foot's Labour leadership and John Major's final years. And it is not just 10 Downing Street: the coverage of the entire government has taken on a mocking, whatever-next character.
Health? In those same seven days we also read that 11 ministers are fighting their own government's hospital closures, that GPs' salaries are rising out of control, that the number of chronic patients is soaring and that the chair of the BMA thinks there is only one year left to save the NHS.
Education? Besides the Ruth Kelly affair, which, whatever the merits, was a very unpleasant embarrassment, we also learned that more than half of teenagers still leave school without decent English and Maths GCSEs, something masked for years by the way the figures were presented.
Crime? Where do you begin? From the government's point of view the best that can be said about the coverage of the Home Office blunderings is that somehow John Reid still had his job after a week, though not his leadership hopes.
The economy? You may have noticed that interest rates have just risen. Iraq? Don't even ask.
And when Blair personally tried to seize control of the agenda with a heavyweight speech about Britain's role in the world, delivered aboard a shiny new warship in Plymouth, it made almost no impact. Weeks of complaints from military chiefs had already left him on shaky ground, and two stories the previous day overshadowed him. First came the televised reproaches of former guardsman Smith, and then the Sun laid on an eloquent aerial picture-spread (soon widely copied) showing something like half the Royal Navy at anchor in Portsmouth, waiting to be mothballed or scrapped.
Scanning the coverage the next morning, the Prime Minister may well have wondered whether his news managers had deliberately buried the speech in the way they used to do so successfully with bad news. The truth is, even if they had wanted to, they no longer have the power.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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