Today is the publication date for The Blair Years: Alastair Campbell’s Diaries. Yesterday I watched said Alastair Campbell on the Sunday AM Programme. Andrew Marr who usually doesn’t flinch the hard question didn’t ask it. The hard question is this:
If you have made a career out of public relations, spin doctoring, and shaping truth to attract public approval or deflect public criticism, why should we take at face value your edited diaries?
It’s hard to be both brilliant at obscuring, doctoring, editing, cosmetically face-lifting the truth, and at the same time claim to be convincing and compellingly reliable as a witness. So how far will the Campbell Diaries be airbrushed autobiography, how far edited personal journal, and how far political theatre?
If Alastair Campbell’s role for a decade was to mould public perception and political reactions by controlling and editing information, and the public are now alerted to the techniques and tricks of media manipulations, one price a spin doctor pays is the skepticism and even cyncism of the public directed at said spin doctor’s own account of things.
Which is the least of our worries – because the higher price is the loss of confidence in the politcal process, the cynicism about motivation in public office, and the apathy and complacency of a country heartily sick of being played as passive dupes. The so called fight on behalf of democracy ( a concept being promoted in the current alarm about security) may well have to focus on that democracy’s own wounded morale and weakened moral authority.
Trust. Confidence. Integrity. Truth.What the Old Testament might call Righteousness and Justice. If these are lacking what nation can flourish? Wonder if any of these abstract nouns, which describe the moral fibre of a people, appear in the index of Alastair’s Diaries?
I’m currently reading the new biography of William Wilberforce, a principled politician who declined high ministerial office, and whose motivation was refreshingly transparent. Maybe it isn’t possible in today’s media governed culture, to retain power and principle, or to persuade an increasingly cynical public that the exercise of power is compatible with….trust, confidence, integrity, truth, righteousness and justice. In which case maybe we do indeed get the leaders we deserve.
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