The ties that bind
The treatment of Andrew Gilligan blamed by the internal BBC inquiry while all his superiors escaped censure throws a little more light on the tightness of the New Labour network. Conducting the investigation was Caroline Thomson, the BBC director of policy, who is married to Roger Liddle, Tony Blair’s adviser on defence.
Thomson and Liddle, whose role as a lobbyist while on the No 10 payroll was revealed in 1998 by Greg Palast (see Lobster 36), are very old friends of Peter Mandelson. Thomson and Liddle were big wheels in the formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981 Liddle even standing as a LibDem parliamentary candidate in 1992 before joining the Blair team after the death of John Smith two years later.
Now working alongside Thomson in the upper reaches of the BBC is David Jordan, who has taken over the delicate role of chief political adviser from Anne Sloman, who has retired to Norfolk with a gong. Sloman will be remembered for sending the famous warning to BBC staff not to refer to Mandelson’s sexual preferences after his homosexuality was mentioned on Newsnight by Matthew Parris. Jordan is as long a friend of Mandelson as Thomson and Liddle.
As John Birt protégés, both worked together for LWT’s Weekend World programme alongside David Aaronovitch. Mandelson left LWT for Labour politics while Jordan and Aaronovitch followed Birt to the Beeb, the pair of them for years running a similar Sunday politics programme but renamed On The Record. Aaronovitch left that to climb high up the Birtist BBC executive ladder before becoming a columnist at The Independent and then The Guardian and The Observer. Jordan, who started working life in the General and Municipal Workers’ Union, will now have a key position alongside Thomson in guiding the BBC’s future direction.
Like Sloman before him, Jordan will also be deciding who can and cannot appear on the BBC during elections. He has not made a good start. In Northern Ireland, Eamonn McCann, journalist and Socialist Environmental Alliance candidate in the European election, is taking Jordan and the BBC to court for denying his party election exposure on the BBC there. The court action follows a meeting with Jordan after which McCann described the attitude of Mandelson’s pal as ‘arrogant and insulting’.
Exit, stage right
In Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian has an editor more interested in softer life-style material than the nitty-gritty of party politics. As its non-executive chair for some years it had millionaire publisher Lord Gavron, one of the big New Labour funders through the good offices of his pal, Lord Levy. In political editor Michael White, it has a figure with little experience of anything but the Westminster village apart from a couple of years in Washington. White’s deputy, Patrick Wintour, has been a faithful amanuensis to Peter Mandelson for almost 20 years, while its media commentator Roy Greenslade, the one-time Maoist who rose high with Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, is an old pal of Alastair Campbell.
So perhaps no one should be too surprised that the paper that still finds lectures by Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn news and non-attributable briefings by Mandelson worth more than a paragraph on a thin day, should have found its sales slumping in line with the fortunes of Blair. The question being asked by Guardian journalists as they contemplate a year-on-year circulation collapse of 10 per cent is by how many weeks will editor Rusbridger survive the departure of the Prime Minister?
The age of bullshit
Writing her first column for PR Week, the professor of public relations at the London College of Printing, Professor Julia Hobsbawm, told her readers:
‘What we do is as valuable as it is visible, because journalism is largely stuck in a time warp, regarding itself as superior to PR in the truth-telling department. In fact, both professions should be telling the truth about their failings as well as their strengths.’
And who is this evangelist for truth and transparency? No less than one of the creators of New Labour. Ms Hobsbawn, for many years a PR business partner of Sarah Macauley, the wife of Chancellor Gordon Brown, was one of the key figures in promoting the political project now so universally respected for its adherence to transparency, accuracy and straight dealing with journalists.
Hobsbawn was the organiser of the Washington Embassy party for her pals in the British American Project after New Labour’s election victory in 1997. ‘Big Swing to BAP’ was the headline on the BAP newsletter recording the result of the Blair campaign which Hobsbawn had helped fund and organise.
Send in the clowns
Things are now so bad for Blair that even newspaper columnists are beginning to notice the strange coincidences when a spot of bother threatens. Amanda Platell, ubiquitous supplier of thoughts to the media having lost her Tory Party spin doctor job a few years ago, offered this observation in The New Statesman in May.
‘I was vilified on BBC1’s Question Time by Estelle Morris for suggesting the government used decoys to divert attention from its problems. It was the week of Tony Blair’s U-turn on the EU referendum and, coincidentally on that day, 10 people were arrested in Manchester on suspicion of a terrorist plot to blow up Manchester United football ground.
I noted it was a coincidence that whenever Blair got into deep trouble, we had a terrorist alert tanks at Heathrow three days before the Iraq anti-war march; the fertiliser-bomb raid in Middlesex the day Beverley Hughes was forced to resign, and the Manchester arrests on EU U-turn day.’
And what happened? All 10 suspects for the Old Trafford bomb plot were released without charge and the tickets the ‘terrorists’ had at their well-publicised addresses were old, used souvenirs. When even Platell starts to wonder about these things, Blair’s grease paint MPs assure me he does wear make-up in the House must surely be wearing thin.