Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Fascinating long tussle between John Humphrys and Alastair Campbell on the Today programme this morning. If this is the choice it has to be Humphrys! Campbell sounds like a salesman who sweet-talks you at the front door while your belongings are disappearing out the back.
How was it possible for a tabloid journalist to become the second most powerful person in the land? This is a system question first posed by Peter Oborne in a pioneering biography. I was glad to hear Campbell talking not just of our “political class”, a term defined in Peter’s forthcoming book, but also of our “the media class”. Now we know.
But back to the special use of “truth” developed by Campbell. For him and Blair truth is completely instrumental. I wrote about this after Lord Hutton's report on the way the Today programme covered the Iraq dossier that set out the government’s case for war. It seemed to me that politics was governed by a Campbell Code.
The Code has three principles: First, presentation is an integral part of policy, which today is like a new form of software in which how it looks and feels is how it works. The Campbell Code says presentation is substance.
Second, presentation-as-substance will be attacked by the vermin media who live off exposing failure. The vermin have to be constantly controlled, policed, brutalised and counteracted. Presentation may be substance, it is also media war.
Third, a warrior code is needed to win this war. This code is “truth”. The warrior press-officer will be defeated by the vermin if he or she allows their presentation to include a “lie”. Whenever a policy-maker is caught out with a lie, or partial lie, they must apologise and do contrition immediately.
The then BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan reported on the Today programme that Campbell had deliberately inserted information into the dossier which he knew to be false and which the intelligence services disagreed with. Now the dossier did indeed suggest something absurd, namely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which he could deploy in 45 minutes to threaten Britain. Surely no one believed that! It must, then, have been a deliberate attempt to mislead.
In this morning’s interview, Campbell hid behind the fact that John Scarlett, the head of the JIC – Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee – agreed to and signed off the dossier. Thus it was wrong to say Scarlett thought the published information to be false. It was also not “true” that Campbell and Blair (for he was his master’s mind) thought it to be false, because provided Scarlett agreed they had permission to believe it as well. The JIC became the stamp of authenticity of their truthfulness and sincerity.
For most of us to seek the truth is a risk that may be painful. In the Campbell Code truth is a means to an end without a spirit of its own. At all times, you must make sure you can prove you have been “truthful”. This means you can claim to be sincere. Provided you are sincere you can get away with murder.
