Graeme Archer urges all good Tories not to buy Campbell's Diaries

Graeme Archer's Sunday diary.

Alistair Campbell has published his diaries. Lots of apparently sane Conservatives are poring over them. The blogosphere, Sunday supplements (and BBC supplicants) are awash with reviews. Why this? Am I alone in finding the thinly-veiled respect for Campbell, evident in many Tories, completely repugnant? Why would you want to read anything written by that bullying, foul-mouthed, moral pygmy of a man? What can he teach us, exactly? How to besmirch the name and reputation of honest, good public servants? How to plagiarise Ph.D. theses and pass them off as “intelligence”? How to blacken the names of people who can’t answer back, such as hospitalised pensioners or the victims of train crash carnage? How to use belligerence as a mask for the fact that you have lost whatever moral compass you may have been born with? No thanks. Bad enough that my taxes paid his salary while he infected the body politic; unbearable to contemplate adding to his retirement pension scheme.

*
If you’re not awake at 6am of a weekday morning this won’t mean much to you, but those of you who are: don’t you get sick of those two-way conversations with which Today illuminates its main news stories of the day, after the 6am headlines and before the 6.12am paper review? For the uninitiated, it goes like this: suppose the topic is a report on poverty by the Rowntree trust, or a government white paper on Improved Regulations For Breathing. What happens is that some BBC reporter, adopting the confident tones of a lifetime expert on poverty, or breathing regulations, or whatever, is “interviewed” in a scripted manner by the main presenter. So we’ll have Edward Stourton [for it is he] saying “So, Sally, this report makes pretty grim reading for the government, does it?” – as though he doesn’t know what Sally is going to say – whence Sally replies – breathlessly, as though importing news that should shock you bolt upright against the pillow -  “Yes Ed, that’s absolutely right, this report really does make pretty grim reading for the government”. Sally then proceeds to read out the press release from the lobby group, government ministry or political party involved. It’s pointless (we know no more than had we just read the press release ourselves), patronising (are we supposed to think, post-Hutton, these are spontaneous conversations?) and when the “news” story being so breathlessly relayed to us by Sally is a press release from the Labour party about how great the prime minister is, downright sinister.

*
This summer I shall mostly be eating Daphne Du Maurier. Reading, sorry. It’s the centenary of her birth (I learned this from the BBC website, I’m not some Du Maurier obsessive who dresses in dark red velvet and sits peering from the gloom of an ill-lit and over-curtained drawing room; that would be ridiculous) and then by sub/un-conscious selection picked The Birds, Don’t Look Now, My Cousin Rachel, Rebecca and The Scapegoat as my commuting reading material. It was the first time I’d read Rebecca (the Hitchcock film seems a great match to the source) and The Birds (the Hitchcock film is dreadful by comparison. All Freudian mumbo-jumbo when the sexual tension that Du Maurier wrote about and with which the story climaxes - forgive me - is much more horrific). Since all her stories deal with suppressed rage, growing dread, and play with mysterious and conflicted senses of identity, they have made a perfect literary companion to this un-British summer of biblical downpours and thick, dull humidity. It would be cheap to use them as a metaphor for the post-Ealing Southall Conservative Party, so I shan’t.

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If you’re not awake at 5.45am of a weekday morning, this won’t mean much to you, but Oh! How fantastic is Farming Today? Thanks to FT I know more about the rural farm payments fiasco than you could shake a stick at, despite never getting closer to a real farm than staring in baffled wonder from the windows of my Essex commuter train. (This isn’t quite true. There’s a wonderful city farm in Hackney. But not quite the target of Farming Today I suspect). Recently I have been consumed with fear over the fate of Shambo the Sacred Bull – an unproven carrier of bovine TB infection - and this morning Archer-Pannell towers reverberated with our cries of joy at the news of his stay of execution. All hail Shambo! All hail Farming Today! There is a serious, ongoing issue about the relationship between badgers and bovine TB which I cannot believe is outwith the wit of the scientific method to determine, but which I fear is going to be left in the lacuna where our national sentimentality about animals overlaps with our indifference to the suffering of the farming industry. And someone needs to develop an assay for bovine TB which can be administered prior mortem, not post.

*
Kenneth “Ken” Jones, aka Knacker of the Yard, says casually to The Independent We are now arguing for judicially supervised detention for as long as it takes. What on earth happened to the country I grew up in? This wasn’t even a big news story for more than a day – an unelected police officer, attempting to influence public debate, demanding that he and his colleagues should have outrageous powers over the citizenry. All that it takes etc etc. How should the Conservative Party respond? By not, I suggest, courting tabloid popularity. I fear that the Mail and the Sun have already made up their minds about Brown (someone needs to do a Boweresque probe of the relationship between the Prime Minister and Paul Dacre, editor of the Mail), and all we risk by attempting to outbid the increasingly (ineffective) authoritarianism of his uniformed cohorts – the outriders like “Ken” -  would be to make ourselves look unprincipled. Liberty of the subject is the sine qua non of my own personal Toryism, even in the face of the heightened risk we all face, and I’m glad to see the party leadership standing firm on this. Who ever thought this would require to be said: No Internment should be a Tory manifesto pledge.

Comments

[Roger Evans]

When someone has been paid to 'embellish' the truth for so many years, why should anyone be taken in by his 'candid revelations'? I will not be reading Campbell's diaries because I would not know what was true and what had been made up.

Trust is a wasting asset.

[Stephen Tolkinghorne]

Roger Evans is right. Why bother spending the cash on a copy of Campbell's Diaries (no doubt written long after the events they purport to narrate), when the man is simply a proven and shameless liar. What's the point of reading a Diary which is, to all intents and purposes, almost complete fiction ?

[simon]

Quite right GA anybody with any sense at all would not pick up 'Bonkers' Campbells diaries! Other reccomendations: Gyles Brandreth's 'Breaking the code', Tony Benn's vast diaries, even old Crossman's as well. The only good thing Campbell's 'book' could be used for is loo paper.

[Annabel Herriott]

Simon! One simply could not use it for loo paper. Toooo scratchy !! Not wasting my money anyway. Off to buy Harry Potter. We know that is a rattling good yarn before we start.

[Sam]

Indeed. Why would you read these and believe a word he says. For 10 years he was the master or spin and disguise. Do we really think, at the point of writing these diary enteries, that he wasn't aware of how they reflected on him when they were published.

His reported comments on the David Kelly affair are designed to make him look like he cared. I very much suspect he only cared about himself, and how it reflected on him.

I have no time for this man. I have time for Blair and even Mandleson.

[sjm]

Graeme - if you are reading Daphne du M this summer, you MUST search out The House on the Strand, a love story set in a time-travel context near Fowey, the antithesis of historical romance however.

Campbell is the scummy symbol of everything this scummy New Labour lot has done to our country - re-read Alan Clark instead!

[Umbrella man]

I'm a Farming Today listener, too. Please change this column into a regular review of it Graeme!!!!

[Ken]

I certainly won't be buying or reading Campbell's diaries - but I was pleased to note on "Amazon" that they appear to have been reduced to about 1/2 price. I assume that means they're not selling too well!

[david]

Absolutely right! What can the Tories learn from a man who planned and won three general elections, far better to be good losers, 'Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser'

[John Howard]

graeme i could not disagree more. tory diaries including those of thatcher and major are known to be full of hype in places. It is the way Campbell and Blair view the tories, especially their view in his diaries that they won big in 2001 because of a crap tory party rather than a booming labour party that is interesting to hear. I for one am enjoying the read.

[Matt Wright]

Campbell is still spinning. A very sad man. Whenever I think of Campbell I think of David Kelly.

Graeme on the issue of Today programme, a wider point. I too am sick of this tendency for reporters to interview each other, it is actually quite disturbing.

Detention. Normally I would agree and I am very much anti ID cards etc...and yet I sense problems looming for us over this.

Matt

[Og]

I didn't need telling not to buy them.

[Gary]

Graeme,
I am disappointed that someone seemingly as intelligent as yourself feels the need to choose such low standards and personally attack someone who I imagine you have probably only ever met briefly, if at all as "bullying, foul-mouthed, moral pygmy of a man".

I usually look forward to reading your blog as enlightened, but this crass opening made me not wish to continue. Such a rant leads me to question whether you really understand the issues, or just hate him because he worked for Labour. The latter is not what I assume DC wishes us to use to win the voters over.

Gary

[Disraeli]

I would rather not have people telling me what I can and what I cannot read. Personally I fully intend to buy the book. Firstly, because i am fascinated about how Campbell, Blair et al moved a Labour Party from the verge of political extinction to being the most powerful election winning organisation of the past century. Secondly, I can see beyond tribal concerns and am fascinated by this first hand writing of contemporary politics. All political diaries must be read with a health warning but they can (as was the case with Benn and Castle) pack a pretty powerful punch.

[Richard Carey]

Personally, I have bought and am currently reading Campbell's book, and am finding parts of it a very insightful read. Of course it is written by someone with a powerful politcal agenda, and it should be understood that it is written through a prism - but then I apply a similar discretion when reading my morning newspaper, which also has an editorial line. Campbell's invested years of his life in the Labour Party, and is not going to seek to damage it unduly now (a level of loyalty I find sadly lacking in a few "Conservative" politicians).

I find Campbell's drive and intensity appealing, aside from anything else - whatever you think of some of his positions, it cannot be denied that he was a political operator of some skill, someone who had a single-mindednes in getting his message across. On the flip side, it does not portray a New Labour Party of sweetness and light, but one that went through some growing pains in the process of change. My main impression from it so far is that politics at the highest level is not so far different from that at any other level, and there are personality clashes and difficulties within the book with which I can already identify with to some extent from my limited involvement in our own party!

At another level, while I don't doubt the excerpts in the book may have been heavily edited on political grounds (which I don't disagree with, I might have done the same in that position I think), Campbell doesn't seem to shy away from his own frailties, and their impact on his work. A better writer than me once coined the line "They're not the hypocrites, we are. Because we're all flawed, and yet we pretend we're not...".

So it is a book to be read with the understanding that it was written from the view of someone far too close to the action to be objective (and I don't think the author makes any pretence about that), but a fascinating book nevertheless.

[Scotty]

I have not been tempted to buy Campbell's book yet as I am wading my way through a Brown biography just now. Might buy at some point but not too keen having forked out for Lance Price's anaemic effort in the past. I just don't think a committed Labour man who was excellent at his job as a spin merchant can switch of enough to illuminate us on the Blair years in all there honest glory.

On Daphne Du Maurier, years ago I read most of her books and still find the film Rebecca starring Joan Fontaine a favourite. Was chatting to a relative who has just discovered a taste for her books was informed that she wrote The Birds as well, which funnily enough was a film really disliked.

[Scotty]

I have not been tempted to buy Campbell's book yet as I am wading my way through a Brown biography just now. Might buy at some point but not too keen having forked out for Lance Price's anaemic effort in the past. I just don't think a committed Labour man who was excellent at his job as a spin merchant can switch of enough to illuminate us on the Blair years in all there honest glory.

On Daphne Du Maurier, years ago I read most of her books and still find the film Rebecca starring Joan Fontaine a favourite. Was chatting to a relative who has just discovered a taste for her books was informed that she wrote The Birds as well, which funnily enough was a film really disliked.

[Scotty]

I have not been tempted to buy Campbell's book yet as I am wading my way through a Brown biography just now. Might buy at some point but not too keen having forked out for Lance Price's anaemic effort in the past. I just don't think a committed Labour man who was excellent at his job as a spin merchant can switch of enough to illuminate us on the Blair years in all there honest glory.

On Daphne Du Maurier, years ago I read most of her books and still find the film Rebecca starring Joan Fontaine a favourite. Was chatting to a relative who has just discovered a taste for her books was informed that she wrote The Birds as well, which funnily enough was a film really disliked.

[Scotty]

I have not been tempted to buy Campbell's book yet as I am wading my way through a Brown biography just now. Might buy at some point but not too keen having forked out for Lance Price's anaemic effort in the past. I just don't think a committed Labour man who was excellent at his job as a spin merchant can switch of enough to illuminate us on the Blair years in all there honest glory.

On Daphne Du Maurier, years ago I read most of her books and still find the film Rebecca starring Joan Fontaine a favourite. Was chatting to a relative who has just discovered a taste for her books was informed that she wrote The Birds as well, which funnily enough was a film really disliked.

[Peter Berrow]

The only thing you can say about this message, is that its another stick your head in the sand and hope the problem goes away comment from Graeme, but then we seem to get a lot of them?