Blair Vs. The Press

Blair got a taste of what’s to come last week when he launched his party’s campaign among hymn-signing schoolgirls in south London. In The Times of London, columnist Matthew Parris’s usual elegant wit gave way to a diatribe on the stage-managed, Blair-in-shirtsleeves performance: “It was breathtakingly, hog-whimperingly tasteless. If the P.M. sanctioned the arrangements for this dire event, and if there is a Hell, he will go there.” And that’s from a paper expected to back Blair in the election. In the always problematic Daily Mail, a not-so-cherubic-looking Blair was pictured beneath the smirking headline here BEGINNETH BLAIR’S CRUSADE.

Britain’s historically feisty national press has become even feistier. The United Kingdom has the most competitive major-newspaper market in the world: sensationalism, killer headlines, rapier writing, crusades to save the pound or send asylum seekers home. Journalistic aggression has become institutionalized amid weakening circulation and the struggle for market pre-eminence. As ideology wanes and political differences blur among the mainstream parties, newspapers on the left and the right carry the torch of strong opinion. They hammer Blair mercilessly–on everything from Britain’s ailing health service to schools, Europe and mad-cow disease. None of which is likely to keep him from winning, but all of which have made for rousing entertainment.

The right-wing press, says a source close to Blair, has come to believe it has a “divine right to rule” after nearly two decades of unbroken Tory governments. The power monopoly only ended when Blair rose up to smite the Conservatives in 1997. Brits were tired of Tory rule and Blair, a new face, co-opted many of their positions, including pro-business policies. Post-defeat, the Tories lacked a strong personality to pull them out of their funk. And William Hague, their dogged but ineffectual leader, failed to capture the public imagination, or seal a deep internal rift over Britain’s place in Europe.

The press has happily rushed into the vacuum left by the Tories. “The press is the only opposition Blair’s got,” says Robert Worcester, chairman of the MORI opinion-research firm. The newspapers have “supplanted Parliament,” says Roy Greenslade, media commentator and ex-editor of the Daily Mirror. “Parliament has become a waste of time.” The press is unapologetic. Says Charles Moore, editor of The Daily Telegraph, a million-circulation paper and an influential Conservative voice, “It’s easier for us to be full-blooded in our opposition than it is for the Tory Party. The Tory Party is afflicted by self-doubt.”

Like his fellow editors on the right or left, Moore is not, especially when it comes to his take on the Blair government. “It’s unpatriotic, anti-British, overly metropolitan and obsessively politically correct,” he says. The Telegraph’s news columns faithfully reflect Moore’s views. Witness the headline on a long March 29 article dissecting the government’s handling of Britain’s recent foot-and-mouth crisis, which prompted Blair to ditch his preferred May 3 election date: how it took 37 days to ruin the country.

Blair and his powerful press spokesman Alastair Campbell have to contend with 20 national papers. The only dependably progovernment, pro-Labour paper of the lot is the Daily Mirror (2.2 million circulation); The Guardian (400,000) used to be considered Labour’s house journal, but is now a frequent attacker, especially on matters of social policy. In full oppo mode, the papers can feel like a “flail of scorpions,” as Andrew Marr, former editor of The Independent, once put it.

There is nothing that Blair and his top aides grouse about more than their difficulties with the press. Campbell, a swaggering former tabloid political editor (at the Mirror) and in Worcester’s appraisal Britain’s “shrewdest press adviser in over a century,” despairs about getting the government’s message across to the public as much as Moore delights in frustrating him. The press, says Campbell, “can act like a barrier. We often are communicating to the people through the media and not via the media.”

To some, Blair’s fixation with the press is a sign of weakness. “The key word about New Labour is ‘insecurity’,” says John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde. There is something to that. Poll ratings aside, Blair is no longer the walk-on-water Third Way leader that the European center-left so admired in 1997. Even Blair admits that Labour has yet to deliver on health care, education and public transportation and create the “new Britain” he promised in his first campaign. Managing the news is part of the effort to keep up the momentum. What the papers decry as “control freakery” is really Labour’s self-preservation instinct at work, says strategist David Hill: “We’d lost four elections in a row [before 1997]. We’ve never won two full terms in a row. Yes, we have a decisive majority [of nearly 180 seats]–but we achieved it against the backdrop of the Conservatives being the country’s governing party for most of the 20th century.”

That explains why No. 10’s press operation has been on the spin cycle since day one. Within three weeks of his election in 1997, Blair told his cabinet ministers in a “Press Handling” memo that they had to clear all policy statements to the media. Every program and policy emerging from his government must pass the test of the Blair inner circle’s preoccupation with presentation. The documentary maker Michael Cockerell spent weeks inside Downing Street last year to produce a special series about government news management. He said Campbell treats the press the way he does in order to counter Fleet Street’s own sensational excesses. Cockerell says Campbell told him: “I have a drawer full of [news] cuttings going back three years, each of which says, ‘It’s Been Blair’s Blackest Week’.” Cockerell says that in the battle of message versus messenger, Blair & Co. “see themselves as more spinned against than spinning.”

A government under constant attack has trouble producing the “intellectual steam,” as Curtice calls it, to keep its agenda on track. So, while Blair and Campbell never counted on shifting the Telegraph, they did try to win over the Mail (circulation 2.4 million). It’s the only big-circulation success story in recent years, a midmarket tabloid with wide appeal among upwardly mobile middle-class suburbanites, Britain’s “soccer moms.” They succeeded only in their earliest days. Then, after a speech in 1999 in which Blair sought to blame a host of Britain’s problems on “the forces of conservatism,” the Mail declared war. One recent example: welcome to government by gimmick railed a headline on an article about the administration’s use of “idiocies” and “stunts” as vote-seeking alternatives to “genuine ideas.”

Blair’s inner circle had considerably more success with The Sun. The country’s best-selling daily (circulation 3.5 million) likes being in the winner’s corner. When The Sun does take a swipe at Blair, it’s usually over his pro-European views, which run counter to those of most Britons.

The Sun’s Euroskepticism is traceable to its owner, Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-American media mogul, just as the Telegraph’s views on Europe and other matters are traceable to its owner, the Canadian press-baron Conrad Black. Together, Murdoch and Black control six newspapers with a total circulation of 25 million in a country of 58 million people (sidebars). Privately, Blair’s inner circle expresses deep annoyance at the influence of absentee owners like Murdoch and Black. In principle, for instance, Blair is in favor of joining the euro zone and has promised to hold a referendum on the issue in the next government. But he’s afraid of what the warring press will do to him. There’s a risk that at some point soon, prime ministers may not only be thinking in headlines, but governing by them as well.

title: “Blair Vs. The Press” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-06” author: “Bryant Quear”