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Max Clifford was one of my interviewees for a One Show film on the growing stench around phone-hacking. Though Clifford has settled with the News of the World, he was clear that people more senior than the news editor would have known what went on, and that illegal activities were unlikely to be confined to one paper. The film crew was amazed to discover that Max and I hadn’t met before, and keen to know my impressions. I found him wily, but my main feeling was that his teeth are whiter and smoother than Simon Cowell’s, which I thought to be impossible.
It is more than a year since I appeared at the Chilcot inquiry, which has now finished taking evidence and will begin to write its report. With previous Iraq-related inquiries, despite negative coverage along the way, I made a point of not commenting on other people’s evidence. It has been difficult, however, to stifle a splutter or two at the succession of former mandarins seeking to distance themselves not just from the decision to remove Saddam but from the processes that led to that decision. Some of them, as I recall, held rather different opinions at the time. I always got on pretty well with the mandarins, but the picture of the senior Civil Service painted by witness sessions has not been a Rolls-Royce humming at the heart of the machine.
I confess to having suffered greater nerves than usual before doing the interview slot on Channel 4’s Ten O’Clock Live. As I remember from sparring with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, you can have the answers, but a good gag will always take the trick on a satirical programme. The C4 interview was almost exclusively about Iraq and I think David Mitchell felt even more nervous about trying to play it for laughs. But I was pleased to be able to get in facts about post-Saddam Iraq. I stopped short of using a factoid from a recent ‘happiness index’ which found Iraqis and Afghanis to be happier than Brits and Americans. True, but dangerous in the hands of a quick-witted satirist.
As Egypt follows Tunisia, and other Arab leaders look on with alarm, they could all do with some professional advice about the way social media is now used to organise political change. They would do better to engage with Twitter and Facebook, rather than trying to shut them down. But nor can the most advanced democracies claim to handle these matters perfectly. We learned the hard way in Kosovo that strategy must be explained constantly, and this appears to have been forgotten in Afghanistan. Nobody should be asking ‘Why are we there?’ about a war that has gone on for so long. That people do is a failure of communications, not military strategy.
The former journalists hired by Ed Miliband, Tom Baldwin and Bob Roberts, are already sharpening Labour’s message — but I must take issue with their demand that the media refer to the government as ‘Conservative-led’ rather than ‘coalition’. What’s with the ‘-led’? It is a Conservative government pure and simple, with a Conservative PM, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary, an increasingly irrelevant Lib Dem deputy PM and a Conservative agenda — cuts, sackings, no growth, no strategy for growth — across the economy and public services. This is well understood even by Conservatives. At a recent ministerial meeting, the token Lib Dem raised the ‘Big Society’, to which a more senior Tory replied, ‘Oh, do grow up. That’s just code for cuts.’
Power and the People, volume two of Alastair Campbell’s diaries, is out now from Hutchinson.
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