Alastair Campbell: Evidence as convincing as a Karzai election victory

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 12 January 2010 at 17:05
Tags: Alistair Campbell, BBC, Broadcasting

Six years after the Hutton Report brought BBC journalism to its knees, Alastair Campbell’s testimony to the Iraq Inquiry sounded as convincing as Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s summer election victory.

Campbell said: “I defend every single word of the dossier, I defend every single part of the process.”

He even refused to show a shred of contrition for the Prime Minister’s statement in the foreword to the September 2002 report that he believed that what the intelligence “has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons” and that he was “in no doubt that the threat is serious and current”.

Whilst being grilled about the wording of the dossier, Campbell told the inquiry: “I don’t think we would be having this exchange if it was not for the controversy that subsequently existed.”

That last sentence in itself is justification for Andrew Gilligan’s 6.07am Today Programme broadcast of May 2003.

Campbell insisted in his evidence today that no-one at Number Ten had any involvement in “sexing up” the dossier, as Gilligan suggested.

And he condemned the way the media still portrays the Hutton Report, which cleared him and broadly condemned Gilligan, as a whitewash.

But isn’t it a plain fact that Blair did exagerrate the case for war by saying that the WMD issue was beyond doubt? Obviously it wasn’t. And as one of the inquiry members said today, intelligence is – by definition – never beyond doubt.

Gilligan made mistakes – he took sparse notes of his crucial conversation with Dr David Kelly and admits the phrasing of his report was misleading.

If Campbell could own up to mistakes on his side too he might help repair the breakdown in trust between government and media that the whole dossier episode caused.

Campbell diaries: what do you think?

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 9 July 2007 at 18:45
Tags: Alistair Campbell, Journalism

Alastair Campbell has scathing insults for his sparring partners in the press as revealed in his diaries published today.

A quick trawl through the 750 odd pages has revealed that some journalists will not find surfing the comprehensive index for mentions of themselves to be a nice experience.

According to Campbell, media commentator Stephen Glover is a “deeply unpleasant man”, columnist Simon Jenkins “a total wanker” and Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre simply “evil”.

Perhaps most significant in journalistic terms are Campbell’s revelations over the way Tony Blair courted Rupert Murdoch and the direct sway Murdoch then apparently had over his then editors – Stuart Higgins at The Sun and Peter Stothard at The Times.

Update: The Guardian has some responses from Matthew “little shit” Parris, Andrew “behaving oddly” Marr, Piers “absolutely fuming” Morgan, and Seumas Milne, George “FT had gone mad” Parker.

The Independent, meanwhile, says Campbell has told its readers that Tony Blair should not have singled out the Indy out in his “feral beasts” speech about the media:

“I certainly think the Mail is the worst of the lot. So does he, but perhaps he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing it,” he said. And Mr Campbell admitted: “He and I had our differences from time to time, and one was that I felt he should have done more earlier on to highlight the culture of negativity, and the impact of the changing news media not just on politics but on what we are and how we feel as a country.”

The Scotsman notes that Campbell referred to Scottish media as “whingeing Jock journos”. The paper also gleefully reports that it is “mentioned five times in Alastair Campbell’s diaries, mostly as a source of irritation for scuppering the spin doctor’s best-laid plans.”

What do you think of the Campbell diaries, or of the man himself?

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