YOU have to give it to the man: Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s master of spin has achieved a remarkable tour de force. Over the past two weeks he has managed to turn the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq into a debate about the accuracy of a BBC report claiming the government had deliberately ‘sexed up’ intelligence reports in the run-up to war.
This at the very time when the House of Commons was conducting an enquiry into the way the government had presented evidence on banned weapons on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.
Instead of the government being in the dock, it was the BBC that was called into question. When the findings were finally presented, the story was not whether the government had lied, but whether the BBC had lied, culminating in a grotesque exchange on the BBC’s Today programme (the morning news show at the heart of the controversy), where a government official actually ended up ‘interviewing’ presenter James Naughtie about the whole story.
Most people are fully aware that the attack on the BBC was a smokescreen, a shameless charade aimed at diverting attention from the government’s mounting difficulties over Iraq. And it worked. The fact that Alistair Campbell is once again confirmed as a Machiavellian bogeyman of spin, a sinister yet masterful manipulator of strategy, the hidden face we all love to hate, is neither here nor there. The man is not up for re-election, he does not court popularity and his reputation precedes him.
All that matters to the Downing Street spin machine is that it got Tony Blair off the hook. PR gurus like Campbell operate on the premise of short memories, of a shifting news agenda, a public attention span with as much patience as a bored TV viewer fidgeting with the remote control.
They’ve swept this one aside, now it’s time to spin out the next issue, dodge the next rebellion. Except the issue of Iraq will not go away. Because the public unease is not over whether or not the government injected a specific ‘45-minute launch threat’ into its dossier about Saddam’s weapons capability, as alleged by the BBC’s intelligence source; it is about the broader justification for the invasion of Iraq and its continued occupation by British and American forces.
Downing Street may (or may not) have succeeded in convincing some people that the specific BBC story was exaggerated. Will it now move on to trying to discredit the CIA and its revelations about flawed British intelligence claiming Saddam was trying to obtain nuclear material from Africa?
The British ‘intelligence’ was even quoted by President George W Bush in his State of the Union address in January, prompting an embarrassed statement from the White House on Tuesday that, “knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq’s attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech”.
Alastair Campbell has managed to deflect attention off his master for a fortnight. But in so doing he has further alienated the public, while ensuring an even tougher ride for the Prime Minister from the media as a whole and the BBC in particular. The smokescreen could still turn into a boomerang.
