Tonight:
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THE disgraced former Downing Street spin doctor, Damian McBride, broke his silence on Monday by giving interviews in print and on radio in an obvious attempt to rescue his reputation.
“I'm sorry for the damage I did to Gordon [Brown] and the reputation of No 10,” he said. “And I'm sorry for the offence I caused to various people by writing those emails about them.”
Well, charity demands that we should all accept the sincerity of sinners — and spinners — who seek to repent. Whether he was being sincere and, just as importantly, whether the public believe he was being genuine, is not a matter to detain us here.
Of much greater significance is the door McBride opened on to the dark arts and the reasons he, and others, indulged in them. He admitted honing his “skills” during the internecine Labour Party battle between Brown, when Chancellor, and the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
It was a stark reminder of the way in which spinning had become part of the routine modus operandi by party apparatchiks. Spin, the manipulation of the news agenda in order to gain either positive or negative coverage, was used both internally and externally.
The wheels came off the New Labour spin machine many years ago during the Alastair Campbell era. His news management strategy that had proved so effective when Blair was in opposition gradually lost its value. Both he and his method became the story. Spin became a matter of public comment, thereby reducing its usefulness.
The major reason was its exposure by an increasingly hostile press. In fighting back against the manipulation from within Downing Street, journalists ensured that spin gradually became among the most loathed of four-letter words. Politics itself was identified as nothing more than spin.
This did not mean that it stopped, of course. The more honest of journalists at Westminster, and beyond, would admit that they benefit from “guidance” given by political Press aides. In every sphere, there is a complex and mutually advantageous relationship between PRs and reporters. Politics is no different.
Blair's resignation made no difference. Brown, the man who made so much about introducing a more transparent administration, was soon exposed in public as running a spin operation little different from that of his predecessor.
That was no surprise to those of us who had witnessed the way in which his cronies had been given licence to make Blair's life so miserable throughout his years in power. Too much of Campbell's time was spent dealing with the difficulties caused by internal dissent. For years the conflict between the Brownites and the Blairites dominated daily discourse within Nos 10 and 11.
It would be easy to see this as a case of the biter (Blair) being bit. Fair enough. But the dispute goes to the heart of the problem of overdoing news management (some of which, I concede, is merely a pragmatic response to the demands of an inquiring and sceptical media). Spin tends to become a zero-sum game. It leads inevitably to tit-for-tat activities in which the participants, trying to score points off each other, lose sight of what they should be trying to achieve. Once exposed, as McBride was in such spectacular fashion, it is no wonder that the public grows more cynical about politics.
Note how often people who take part in radio phone-ins or appear in the audiences of Radio 4's Any Questions or BBC TV's Question Time refer to spin in a pejorative way. It is how they perceive politics, viewing it as a shadowy exercise in which truth is concealed.
Note also that following McBride's appearance on Five Live, the BBC was inundated with complaints from listeners who argued that he should never have been given such a platform since, given what he had done, he couldn't be trusted to tell the truth. They were not interested in hearing from a man who, while apologising, also made a lame attempt to justify what he had done. He was not nicknamed as “McPoison” by Blair-supporting Labour Party members for nothing.
One corollary of the growth of news manipulation has been the close relationship between professional PRs, lobbyists and certain members of the Government. One instance, involving the outgoing communications minister Stephen Carter and the City public relations firm Brunswick, his former employer, was highlighted in yesterday's Evening Standard.
This is not to suggest that all, or even many, PRs do anything as dastardly as McBride sought to do in spreading false rumours about the Conservative Party leadership. But there is but a small step between issuing negative briefings to journalists based on fact to doing similar based on gossip.
So, are we to accept that spin is here to stay on the basis that it's a fact of political life we must accept? I may be in danger of overstating the power of the online world, but I do believe the digital media can help to make the political process, if not politics itself, more transparent and therefore more honest.
In my view, it was no accident that McBride's “Smeargate” activities were exposed by the blogger Guido Fawkes (aka Paul Staines), who has just been elevated by The Guardian to the nation's top 100 media players. Internet journalists do not rely on the patronage of Westminster insiders, many of whom depended on McBride for stories.
That is not to say that mainstream journalists would have failed to expose McBride if they had been handed the information (and some of them do feed Guido with stories anyway). Their problem is that despite their intense dislike for spin, they depend in the spinners for information.
That relationship explains why news management has been so successful for so long.
