They keep on imploding. Soon only Cherie will be left

So farewell then, Alastair. You were, in the memorable imagery of Andrew Mackinlay MP, questioning the late Dr David Kelly, a kind of fall guy.

Alastair Campbell says of course that he was always going to go, but this cannot be the way that he wanted it. Tony Blair’s communications director had been doing what had to be done. His boss could stay clean but dirty work was needed, and now that the doing of it has stained Campbell’s own reputation indelibly, he has to go. He always knew this day would come; and knew, too, that after it had, his old master would not forget his debt to him. He will be looked after.

I, too, knew this day would come, and had expected to enjoy it. I have had a run-in of my own with Campbell, and he seriously scared me. Interestingly, he used the very tactics that he has more recently been employing against Andrew Gilligan. He spotted a small and arguably irrelevant factual slip in what I had written about him in my autobiography and went nuclear. A storm of Downing Street faxes started. He demanded a retraction and correction. He wrote to the Letters page. This quickly undermined my confidence and I came close to forgetting that the burden of what I had written about him was true.

I had been rather relishing the likelihood that this chapter in Campbell’s life was to close in a less than glorious way.

But now that we know it will, I feel little but regret that it will be reported unfairly — as though for Tony Blair this communications director was the problem. But Campbell has not been the problem: he has been the solution. The problem has been the essential dishonesty of the product he had to sell: Blairism. There was no honest way to sell it, so Campbell was hired to sell it the only way he could. This, in the end, destroyed him.

One by one they fall, the outriders for Tony Blair’s new Labour project. Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers, Estelle Morris, Alan Milburn, Anji Hunter, Fiona Millar. Who next? The supply of crash dummies is running short, and Tony Blair may have need of a couple more after Lord Hutton reports. Who is left in his entourage to blame? Ah yes: Geoff Hoon, Tom Kelly, Jonathan Powell. The Prime Minister still maintains a few degrees of separation from the thing he dreads: taking personal responsibility for the vacuum at the centre, into which all friends’ careers finally implode. Soon only Cherie will be left.

The announcement yesterday that Campbell is to go will be greeted by a predictable flurry of commentary over the next few days. Much of it will centre on two assertions.

It will be said that Alastair Campbell was to blame for the mess the Prime Minister is in over the Kelly affair. And it will be said that his removal will usher in a new and spin-free approach to new Labour’s politics. Both assertions are wrong.

In the most superficial way this crisis is of Campbell’s making, but on the deepest level it is not. Yes, Campbell overreacted badly to a couple of stray phrases on the BBC, and if his boss had had the command to calm him down the Kelly tragedy might never have happened. So you can say the crisis is Campbell’s fault, but only in the way that if you give a nightclub bouncer a pickaxe with which to impress unwanted customers someone’s head will sooner or later be broken and it will be — if you like — his fault.

If the Kelly affair had not blown up, then something else would have, because the Prime Minister is fundamentally weak and needs a bully to protect him. Campbell has protected Blair in the best way a servant in his position could. Aware that his emperor has no clothes — no compass, no plan, no new ideas of any sort — this communications director has from day one camouflaged the emptiness with a barrage of noise, colour and movement. Dazzle, distract, dismay. Campbell knew that what his master had most to fear was what any politician for whom momentum is all has to fear: being thrown on to the back foot.

So Campbell went on to the offensive and he stayed there. He led the news. When there was no news he made the news. When his master was attacked he attacked back so quickly and so hard that enemies retreated in confusion. He was very good at it.

And he established for himself a reputation for never losing a fight. This reputation mattered tremendously to Campbell, as it must to any combatant whose strategy is to frighten people. It explains why, having decided to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the Today programme, he fought with such seemingly irrational ferocity. The way Campbell handled the Gilligan affair was the way he has always handled media challenges to his Prime Minister, and it has usually worked. That is why I say that on the deepest level Blair’s communications director has not erred but has employed a particular technique of news management the only way it can be employed. It was just damn bad luck that somebody killed himself.

It is also why I say that the removal of Campbell will not usher in the new and kinder chapter in the Blair Government’s approach to communications. Crucial to that approach has been the impression that the boss himself — the Prime Minister — is a gent. Blair’s image as a nice guy, an honest guy and a sensitive guy has been terrifically important to his appeal, not least because it is not clear that he offers anything more. If this Prime Minister is not a decent and likeable politician, the question arises as to what he is in politics for. But of course you do not run a Government by being nice, so there is much brutal business to be done which this Prime Minister cannot be seen to do. The nicer Blair wants to seem, the nastier must be his bodyguard.

It follows that although at the party conference season this autumn there will undoubtedly be a great deal of empty talk and commentary about a new “spin-free” era in Labour’s communications, this new message will itself be only another kind of spin. Beneath it the real spin will continue — the ruthless kind — and the longer Blair stays in power without visible result, the more energetic the spin will have to become. Campbell leaves not as the need for this kind of media management recedes, but as it grows.

Blair needs a tornado to blow him along. Campbell’s replacement, David Hill, is not that kind of force. Campbell spent this summer in the hills behind Montpellier, close to Hill. Perhaps the baton was being handed on. Hill was a familiar figure in the Commons Press Gallery when I first worked there as The Times’s sketchwriter. Everybody, especially print journalists, liked him, and they and still do, because he is a nice guy. So it is no surprise that the press have been rather kind about him. And it is true that in a hack sort of way he is a real professional. But we are talking here about a shrewd luncher, not a dust-raiser. Hill will serve the Prime Minister well, but not without someone else to stir things. Perhaps nobody will be found.

Campbell was never really a Blairite. His career origins are to be traced back to Neil Kinnock, and his instinct for brutal news management was forged in the furnace that destroyed Kinnock. Real Blairites are more recent — they are emptier and less original people, time-servers and apparatchiks, most of them. They have not known trouble as Campbell has known trouble.

Blairites, in short, are not very good at defending Blairism, which is proving ineffective at manufacturing its own immune system. While Campbell the communications director has never lacked for competent lieutenants, new-minted in the Millbank Tower era, there must be doubts as to whether these types are capable of becoming field marshals.

Which leads me to give warning that Campbell may not be quite as finished this morning as he seems to be. Tony Blair has a track record here. We can all recall the name of one friend — another Kinnockite retread — whom Blair let go when his name became too hot to handle, and then, just when we thought it was safe to come out again, he picked up the phone. Peter Mandelson was re-employed. When he fell a second time many people assumed that this really was the end of his influence, but few assume it now. Peter Mandelson remains closely in touch. Who knows, he may be consulted even more regularly now that Blair’s Downing Street study looks set to become a lonelier room.

Campbell will never return to the position he has been holding, but I would be surprised if he and Blair cease talking to each other. If Campbell had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. Now he must reinvent himself. He could do worse than aim to become the new Jeremy Paxman. Alongside Campbell I interviewed Blair for BBC Breakfast News during the Labour leadership race in 1994. Campbell was brilliant — tough and fair.

He has seen it from all sides now, and nobody could grill a politician better. I am not persuaded that there is life after Alastair for Tony. But I am sure there is life for Alastair after Tony.

What I cannot (or can I?) understand in the whole Dr Kelly saga, is how those who exposed a spy (a mole, a weasel) in a state administration were wrong, and those who provided him with a cover to continue his underground activities were right?

The facts are as follows:

Dr Kelly was an official of the Defence Ministry with access to sensible and top secret information;

He was not agree with his superiors' policies and decided to blow the whistle;

There is an honest way to do this: you resign from your position and go to press;

He chose to go to press without resigning. It was dishonest;

When exposed as a dishonest person, he appeared to be honest enough to commit suicide.

Of course, one cannot expect something like this from the journos.

Which still leaves unanswered my original question.

It was dishonest to go to the press clandestinely.

It was also a potential security breech.

It seems more likely that it was the press which dishonestly distorted his comments or even wholly contrived some of them to advance an agenda against the government.

It was fully appropriate for the government to release his name because he had committed a breech.

In the matter of his suicide, the government stands innocent for three reasons: Kelly himself had intitiated the events which led to his suicide by breeching his obligation of secrecy. Kelly was sentinent and made his won choice - it is not up to a government to weigh the possibility of suicide in protecting its policies against breeches of faith or hyper sensitivity to journalistic breeches of ethics. Finally, there is a line of press reports that his suicide was not occasioned by this press flap but that its promimate cause was his concern for Iraqis who trusted him who would be compromised in the event of war.

At the end of the day a fair person must say that the government is exonerated from "sexing up" the dossier just as Bush must be relieved of blame for the infamous 16 words. These are the important conclusions being lost in the welter.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.