Alastair Campbell was not funny. He degraded and coarsened the level of political debate in this country and did so quite deliberately with Tony Blair’s tacit approval.
I would disagree and say that the late Tony Crosland* should take the Victor’s Palm for that.
That is not say that the case for the wretched Campbell is without merit.
(* Whose most famous remark for other readers was:-
“If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f*****g grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.”)
This article does not go far enough – the Guardian reported that “over the course of the last Blair decade, each year has seen an average of 2,685 new laws – the equivalent of almost seven and a half a day or one every three-and-a-quarter hours – said legal information providers Sweet & Maxwell..
Len Sealy, Professor of Law, University of Cambridge at the time stated:-
““We have lived in recent years in a blame/compensation culture which demands that somebody does something about every accident or bit of misconduct, and politicians and their departments feel obliged to react. Whether this is an issue of health and safety, consumer protection, discrimination, putting a regulation on the books or increasing a penalty makes a political point, even if not always followed up by adequate funding or enforcement.”
No wonder the judicial system is staggering and the mantra that ignorance of the law is no excuse has new dark overtones.
John Riordan
1 year ago
“Nebulous politics were hip, fading seamlessly into the wider cultural vacuity of Cool Britannia.”
It might have been culturally vacuous, but it was also a brilliant time to live through. The first New Labour term, with Gordon Brown not daring to diverge seriously from Ken Clarke’s budget plans (Labour had committed to matching the sound economics of the Tory brand) meant that really we were all living through the first years in which the hard slog of Thatcherism was finally paying dividends.
Cool Britannia might have been a typically empty New Labour slogan, but the point is that people bought into it largely because they themselves felt a new confidence in life generally. It wasn’t that the slogan worked, it was WHY it worked that’s interesting. The D-Ream tune from the 1997 victory “Things can only get better” is another example of the iconic character of those times: Labour supporters will of course ascribe the sentiment to the fact that their own tribe had finally won an election, but in fact the feeling that things really were getting better had been in place already for some time. I recall in the mid-1990s, when I was first getting into the routine of hard work, starting to notice that everyone, all of sudden, seemed to be getting busier, and this accompanied not by stress and frustration, but a drive for more of the same. I noticed it with estate agents, who seemed to be amazed at the surge in demand for their services, and as for plumbers, some of them started thinking they were rock stars as far as I could work out. The internet and converged-service mobile networks first appeared at this time too, and the cultural shift in which people realised that they could get a hell of a lot done without an office to be in started to take hold.
Anyway, we know how it all turned out don’t we? What was really happening was that Tony and Gordon were about to squander the gains made possible by almost two decades of fiscal discipline, and this followed by a series of Tory governments too lazy and scared to change course as required explains why we’re where we are now.
You didn’t need to read the runes to realise that the mawkish behaviour over the death of Diana was an all too obvious omen that disaster was at hand. QED.
It’s a funny old world. Major was pro-EU, pro-€, and in his attempt to promote them, pursued ERM. It failed, conspicuously unsupported by Germany. It was an economic crisis which seriously damaged the Conservative reputation for financial prudence. And yet, dramatically, the UK economy rebounded (the watershed was clear), so when B&B took power, they enjoyed a really healthy economy, and had the sense to persevere with Conservative policies, but only for so long. They couldn’t resist, so by the time the next financial crisis struck, we were already in familiar territory. Groundhog day.
Well, they’d promised the electorate that they’d persevere with Prudence but the implied promise to Labour faithful was that they’d open the purse strings and let ‘er rip once they got settled in.
Later attempts to roll back the profligacy were hysterically denounced as “austerity”, add a pandemic lockdown, and here we are.
Yup, the 2008 crisis caused by excessive free market policy was familiar territory for us in the Labour party; like most of the London financial elite we know our Keynes.
Sadly, the same couldnt be said of the Tories, with Osbourne making comical claims like “even a modest dose of Keynesian spending” could act as a “cruise missile aimed at the heart of recovery.”. Happily, the rest of the world ignored him and followed Gordon Brown’s lead. Most of the predicted dire consequences never materiliased thanks to the worldwide Keynesian response. It’s all in the historical record, with even conservative journalists like Peter Oborne praising Brown’s global leadership.
As Oborne said, it was Browns “finest hour”; he handled the global crisis almost as well as Tony would have.
Don’t forget the crowning achievement of 2008, Brown, Veggie Benn and Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act.
Totally uncosted, virtue oozing from every pore, unnecessary, unscientific, unachievable. Only 5 MPs (all Tory) voted against.
And thanks to Theresa May, doubled down as a parting shot for Boris, who accepted it gratefully as a present for Carrie. Not even a debate in Parliament. Soup to nuts in half an hour. After all, we (1% of World emissions) would lead the way – to the cliff edge.
You think the Covid response has been a total disaster?
Get ready…
Tony Taylor
1 year ago
“Dolce et gabbana est pro patria mori” – that’s very good indeed.
If you get the underlying quotation. After thirty years of massive university expansion with everybody down to the local road sweeper having a crappy degree from some tenth-rate redbrick (founded 2005), how many DO get it?
Oxbridge is just a bad, a veritable cesspit of chippy, woke drivel and outrage.
Had Thomas Cromwell* avoided the axe, these two ‘Gorgons’ would have ceased to exist.
121 Nobel Prize winners who’ve been at Cambridge. Not bad for a “cesspit”.
Cambridge is an international technology centre as a result.
If Thomas Cromwell had prevailed, that would be a big fat zero.
I beg to disagree. Cromwell’s plan seems to been to rid Oxbridge of the pernicious influence of the Church, and produce a far more Secular environment.
As it was for most of the 16th, 17th, 18th & 19th centuries Oxbridge remained a priest factory for the Established Anglican Church.
Had it not been so,Cambridge might well have had some 250 plus Noble Prize winners under its belt.
Exactly so. Attendance at university does not necessarily guarantee any education! One does not necessarily go in hand in hand with the other , I fear, and I am beginning to agree with Lady Bracknell.
“The whole theory of modern education is unsound. Fortunately, in England, in any case, education has no effect whatsoever”
Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest
Graeme Laws
1 year ago
Parties don’t win elections. Opponents lose them. Kneeler Stonewall Starmer, with his history of support for the momentum Corbynista faction, has probably already lost the next one.
Jeffrey Chongsathien
1 year ago
Untrammelled corruption and unpunished crimes.
AC Harper
1 year ago
I thought it was noteworthy that ‘Spitting Image’ did not run during the Labour governments. I originally believed it was Lefty authors protecting their progressive narrative, but perhaps Tony Blair & Co were too obviously a caricature to be worthy of satire?
I always assumed it was because the puppets were busy serving in Blair’s cabinets.
Andy Martin
1 year ago
“And a young, earnest, sexually-active prime minister was bound to provide a welcome target for satirists bored senseless by John Major and his dreary retinue at Castle Greyscale.” According to Edwina Currie’slurid confessions in her diary serialized in the Daily Mail, “John Major was a sexy beast. Trust me, I didn’t have to teach that man ANYTHING!” so not as dreary as he seemed.
Maybe that is why Major appeared so washed out and grey?!
Richard Heller
1 year ago
Made my own effort to parody New Labour in my play “Waiting For Gordo” a bleak existential drama of backbench life in Blair’s party. Commissioned by Today programme, performed at Brighton during Labour Conference 2005. High point was this speech, confected from actual words of Tony Blair http://www.richardheller.co.uk/2020/01/belles-lettres/blair-speaks/
Very clever speech!
Always wondered why I, a lousy judge of people, was so easily able to penetrate Blair’s, sanctimonious, shallow, insincerity (or should that be, Deep insincerity?). Thought I must be wrong; turned out I was so right!
You’re not alone. I wouldn’t claim to be a great reader of people either. But I was never in any doubt that Blair was a wrong un. I struggle to understand how anyone bought into all the “Third Way” nonsense, but they did.
I eventually came to see New Labour as something like a permanent public relations campaign.
Thank you. Speech was ominously easy to write. Tony Blair is now the Norma Desmond of British politics, an aging star living in a fantasy past, perpetually ready for a close-up.
Graeme Archer
1 year ago
It didn’t take Iraq to see that Blair and Campbell were a stain on public life.
Last edited 1 year ago by Graeme Archer
Lesley van Reenen
1 year ago
Just what I needed tonight… Tony and his bevy of English beauties.
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
Superb!!
Jonathan Nash
1 year ago
My first awareness of satire prophesying reality came with this writer’s series “2012”, where over its course the catastrophic misfires of the Deliverance committee started to anticipate what was really happening. It was brilliant.
Dermot O'Sullivan
1 year ago
That picture should have the caption:
WHERE’S WALLY
Last edited 1 year ago by Dermot O'Sullivan
Dermot O'Sullivan
1 year ago
Well, he did get the Good Friday agreement…and before you start, things are better than before.
Alan Hawkes
1 year ago
What we need now, or Russia needs now, are similar shows set in the Kremlin.
Alastair Campbell was not funny. He degraded and coarsened the level of political debate in this country and did so quite deliberately with Tony Blair’s tacit approval.
Agreed. One of the worst people ever to gain power and influence in this country.
I would disagree and say that the late Tony Crosland* should take the Victor’s Palm for that.
That is not say that the case for the wretched Campbell is without merit.
(* Whose most famous remark for other readers was:-
“If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f*****g grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.”)
And continues to do so. Why?
This article does not go far enough – the Guardian reported that “over the course of the last Blair decade, each year has seen an average of 2,685 new laws – the equivalent of almost seven and a half a day or one every three-and-a-quarter hours – said legal information providers Sweet & Maxwell..
Len Sealy, Professor of Law, University of Cambridge at the time stated:-
““We have lived in recent years in a blame/compensation culture which demands that somebody does something about every accident or bit of misconduct, and politicians and their departments feel obliged to react. Whether this is an issue of health and safety, consumer protection, discrimination, putting a regulation on the books or increasing a penalty makes a political point, even if not always followed up by adequate funding or enforcement.”
No wonder the judicial system is staggering and the mantra that ignorance of the law is no excuse has new dark overtones.
“Nebulous politics were hip, fading seamlessly into the wider cultural vacuity of Cool Britannia.”
It might have been culturally vacuous, but it was also a brilliant time to live through. The first New Labour term, with Gordon Brown not daring to diverge seriously from Ken Clarke’s budget plans (Labour had committed to matching the sound economics of the Tory brand) meant that really we were all living through the first years in which the hard slog of Thatcherism was finally paying dividends.
Cool Britannia might have been a typically empty New Labour slogan, but the point is that people bought into it largely because they themselves felt a new confidence in life generally. It wasn’t that the slogan worked, it was WHY it worked that’s interesting. The D-Ream tune from the 1997 victory “Things can only get better” is another example of the iconic character of those times: Labour supporters will of course ascribe the sentiment to the fact that their own tribe had finally won an election, but in fact the feeling that things really were getting better had been in place already for some time. I recall in the mid-1990s, when I was first getting into the routine of hard work, starting to notice that everyone, all of sudden, seemed to be getting busier, and this accompanied not by stress and frustration, but a drive for more of the same. I noticed it with estate agents, who seemed to be amazed at the surge in demand for their services, and as for plumbers, some of them started thinking they were rock stars as far as I could work out. The internet and converged-service mobile networks first appeared at this time too, and the cultural shift in which people realised that they could get a hell of a lot done without an office to be in started to take hold.
Anyway, we know how it all turned out don’t we? What was really happening was that Tony and Gordon were about to squander the gains made possible by almost two decades of fiscal discipline, and this followed by a series of Tory governments too lazy and scared to change course as required explains why we’re where we are now.
That’s why they were electable.
They stuck to their promise in the first term.
That’s why they were re-electable.
Then Blair handed over to Brown …
You didn’t need to read the runes to realise that the mawkish behaviour over the death of Diana was an all too obvious omen that disaster was at hand. QED.
It’s a funny old world. Major was pro-EU, pro-€, and in his attempt to promote them, pursued ERM. It failed, conspicuously unsupported by Germany. It was an economic crisis which seriously damaged the Conservative reputation for financial prudence. And yet, dramatically, the UK economy rebounded (the watershed was clear), so when B&B took power, they enjoyed a really healthy economy, and had the sense to persevere with Conservative policies, but only for so long. They couldn’t resist, so by the time the next financial crisis struck, we were already in familiar territory. Groundhog day.
Well, they’d promised the electorate that they’d persevere with Prudence but the implied promise to Labour faithful was that they’d open the purse strings and let ‘er rip once they got settled in.
Later attempts to roll back the profligacy were hysterically denounced as “austerity”, add a pandemic lockdown, and here we are.
Yup, the 2008 crisis caused by excessive free market policy was familiar territory for us in the Labour party; like most of the London financial elite we know our Keynes.
Sadly, the same couldnt be said of the Tories, with Osbourne making comical claims like “even a modest dose of Keynesian spending” could act as a “cruise missile aimed at the heart of recovery.”. Happily, the rest of the world ignored him and followed Gordon Brown’s lead. Most of the predicted dire consequences never materiliased thanks to the worldwide Keynesian response. It’s all in the historical record, with even conservative journalists like Peter Oborne praising Brown’s global leadership.
As Oborne said, it was Browns “finest hour”; he handled the global crisis almost as well as Tony would have.
Don’t forget the crowning achievement of 2008, Brown, Veggie Benn and Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act.
Totally uncosted, virtue oozing from every pore, unnecessary, unscientific, unachievable. Only 5 MPs (all Tory) voted against.
And thanks to Theresa May, doubled down as a parting shot for Boris, who accepted it gratefully as a present for Carrie. Not even a debate in Parliament. Soup to nuts in half an hour. After all, we (1% of World emissions) would lead the way – to the cliff edge.
You think the Covid response has been a total disaster?
Get ready…
“Dolce et gabbana est pro patria mori” – that’s very good indeed.
If you get the underlying quotation. After thirty years of massive university expansion with everybody down to the local road sweeper having a crappy degree from some tenth-rate redbrick (founded 2005), how many DO get it?
Oxbridge is just a bad, a veritable cesspit of chippy, woke drivel and outrage.
Had Thomas Cromwell* avoided the axe, these two ‘Gorgons’ would have ceased to exist.
(*died 1540.)
121 Nobel Prize winners who’ve been at Cambridge. Not bad for a “cesspit”.
Cambridge is an international technology centre as a result.
If Thomas Cromwell had prevailed, that would be a big fat zero.
I beg to disagree. Cromwell’s plan seems to been to rid Oxbridge of the pernicious influence of the Church, and produce a far more Secular environment.
As it was for most of the 16th, 17th, 18th & 19th centuries Oxbridge remained a priest factory for the Established Anglican Church.
Had it not been so,Cambridge might well have had some 250 plus Noble Prize winners under its belt.
Not brilliant either, given the sheer number of attendees.
I’m all in favour of elitism, but you do appear to be a bit of a snob!
Dear me, you haven’t even attempted to disguise your unalloyed snobbery there, have you Francis.
I enjoyed the Animal Farm riff at the end.
Exactly so. Attendance at university does not necessarily guarantee any education! One does not necessarily go in hand in hand with the other , I fear, and I am beginning to agree with Lady Bracknell.
“The whole theory of modern education is unsound. Fortunately, in England, in any case, education has no effect whatsoever”
Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest
Parties don’t win elections. Opponents lose them. Kneeler Stonewall Starmer, with his history of support for the momentum Corbynista faction, has probably already lost the next one.
Untrammelled corruption and unpunished crimes.
I thought it was noteworthy that ‘Spitting Image’ did not run during the Labour governments. I originally believed it was Lefty authors protecting their progressive narrative, but perhaps Tony Blair & Co were too obviously a caricature to be worthy of satire?
I entertained that idea also. My conclusions were that, like the Major government, it had run its course.
I always assumed it was because the puppets were busy serving in Blair’s cabinets.
“And a young, earnest, sexually-active prime minister was bound to provide a welcome target for satirists bored senseless by John Major and his dreary retinue at Castle Greyscale.”
According to Edwina Currie’s lurid confessions in her diary serialized in the Daily Mail,
“John Major was a sexy beast. Trust me, I didn’t have to teach that man ANYTHING!”
so not as dreary as he seemed.
Lucrezia Borgia eat your heart out!
Maybe that is why Major appeared so washed out and grey?!
Made my own effort to parody New Labour in my play “Waiting For Gordo” a bleak existential drama of backbench life in Blair’s party. Commissioned by Today programme, performed at Brighton during Labour Conference 2005. High point was this speech, confected from actual words of Tony Blair http://www.richardheller.co.uk/2020/01/belles-lettres/blair-speaks/
Very clever speech!
Always wondered why I, a lousy judge of people, was so easily able to penetrate Blair’s, sanctimonious, shallow, insincerity (or should that be, Deep insincerity?). Thought I must be wrong; turned out I was so right!
You’re not alone. I wouldn’t claim to be a great reader of people either. But I was never in any doubt that Blair was a wrong un. I struggle to understand how anyone bought into all the “Third Way” nonsense, but they did.
I eventually came to see New Labour as something like a permanent public relations campaign.
You absolutely nailed Blair’s vacuous drivel there !
Thank you. Speech was ominously easy to write. Tony Blair is now the Norma Desmond of British politics, an aging star living in a fantasy past, perpetually ready for a close-up.
It didn’t take Iraq to see that Blair and Campbell were a stain on public life.
Just what I needed tonight… Tony and his bevy of English beauties.
Superb!!
My first awareness of satire prophesying reality came with this writer’s series “2012”, where over its course the catastrophic misfires of the Deliverance committee started to anticipate what was really happening. It was brilliant.
That picture should have the caption:
WHERE’S WALLY
Well, he did get the Good Friday agreement…and before you start, things are better than before.
What we need now, or Russia needs now, are similar shows set in the Kremlin.