Cackling

Prologue
Frost in the air and I’m on the morning train to Brighton. To sit there through a Liberal Democrat conference speech on pensions. The prospects of any one of us getting to that stage seem slim, getting ever slimmer. It’ll be hard to concentrate today, I can see that much.

Cackling
The office was quiet at just gone 8am yesterday, just me on the phone to the one decent contact I have in government. And he was cackling, just couldn’t stop the laughter. I’ve never heard a grown man giggle in that way. It was fascinating and horrible. The sound of a person close to coming off the rails.

“He beat them all, that’s the thing, he beat them all. They never had a chance. Alistair has won,” he said. No attempt to suppress the glee. It’s one of the things that makes me trust him - in terms of believing he believes the things he tells me, which is the best you can hope for. I don’t think he acts too much. He cackles. He knows I’m not gonna name him. He knows I know we both know the rules in this.

“Alistair beat them all and made himself a fortune. He is simply the best there is. You can say what you want, but he’s the best there is.”

Alistair Campbell. Outgoing director of communications to Tony Blair. One of the chosen men who has brought us to where we all now find ourselves.
The previous day he’d been up before the Hutton inquiry, his second appearance, and he’d dealt with everyone in the sternest sense.

The morning’s papers were covered with extracts from the extracts of his ‘unpublished, not for publication’ diaries. I always start the day going through all the papers. The FT comes first for largely superstitious reasons; on it’s pink front page “GH and I agreed it would fuck Gilligan”. All the other papers had similar, The Times splashed with it in the headline, blanking out to f*** for reasons of decency. As if the truth wasn’t indecent enough to require some kind of censorship for the good of public health and morality.

“Fuck Gilligan”. That’s why I had a cackling man on the other end of the phone.
“Alistair won. He saved Blair, he pushed the blame onto himself and Hoon, he’s beaten the BBC and he’d made himself a fortune! All in a days work. You’ve got to admire that.”
And when you consider the rules of this game, it is hard not to. One rule only; win at all costs and it seems Campbell had. That’s what my man was telling me and I had no reason not to think he had a point.

Campbell is still utterly loyal to the Prime Minister and he had to make sure the PM came though this in the clear – at least technically, at least in so far as official hand washing is concerned. It looks like that will now happen.

Blair said he took full responsibility for everything when he appeared before Hutton, which you could take to mean he put his hand up to what parts of the apparent suicide were made up of the pressures Kelly felt himself buckling under.

But the Prime Minister didn’t mean it that way, and Hutton will not take it like that. It was a leadership gesture, not something he actually meant. He said it meaning it was the damned fault of the fucking MoD. But he held up his hands without quibbling; such courage and dignity in the mire! A true leader of men, happy to bear the weight of his fallen soldiers.

But then A[listair] C[ampbell] appears with his diaries and it turns out that AC and G[eoff] H[oon] wanted Dr Kelly’s name out in the open to fuck-over Gilligan. But Tony Blair worked to hold them back.

Disregard the fact, for the moment, that his name came out anyway, meaning the PM eventually overcame his inhibitions and let the attack dogs of the leash. Yes, ignore that and the Rt Hon Tony Blair looks even better.
No, despite the mud and sticks, it’s hard to see Blair being buried by Lord Hutton when he finally reports on the death of Kelly and the on-going, painful death of something bigger.

Blair is technically in the clear, from a certain perspective; because his spy chief says Downing Street did not sex-up the dossier. Because he tired to avoid naming the now dead Kelly.
AC has done all he can to save his master, painting a flattering portrait.

On the phone, the cackling continued.
And AC did it by sucking all the blame onto himself and defence secretary Hoon. But really it is Hoon that counts. Campbell had no friends in the media anyway, so now couldn’t give a shit about what they say on him. He’s quitting the damn No 10 communications job. He’s out.

No, blaming himself was really, politically, blaming Hoon. Hoon, the ex-lawyer who had sat in the law court that same morning, fought a lawyers fight. He left the Royal Courts of Justice before Campbell appeared, before Campbell buried him alive.

The diaries said it in black and white, despite the absurd government disclaimer that the record they contained was not AC’s ‘considered’ judgement, just his ‘immediate’ reaction to events at the end of each day.
Hoon wanted to force Kelly’s name into the open, believing it would fuck Gilligan over. Gangster talk in a gangsters’ world. Naturally, this was only a partial success and helped prompt the chain of events which has seen the reputation of this government, all governments, all politicians, all spies and all journalists, dragged beautifully through the slime.

Yes, AC buried GH, I’m certain of that.

And AC, who fought the BBC like his life depended on it, has managed, in a stupid and massively destructive manner, to get half of a kind of apology from the broadcaster over the whole Gilligan story.
Still cackling.

AC’s notoriety is also now assured, together with a huge personal financial fortune. That appearance in court, those diaries, will be sold for a massive sum of money, probably more than you and I will ever earn in our lifetimes. And the sexing-up stuff pinned on him has dropped away in the battle and now hangs on JIC chairman John Scarlett.

Checkmate Campbell. That’s what the cackling man seemed to be saying.I said: “Absolutely. There is no question, Campbell is a genius. At least twice as smart as the people he’s up against. None of them had a chance.”

Down the phone the voice said: “You’ve got to love him. I love him.”
The conversation ended.


EPILOGUE
There is only one problem with saying Campbell has won, which in a way he clearly has: it falls down because the Hutton inquiry has given us an incredibly damaging picture of a morally corrupt government which at base doesn’t give a shit about people in this country or abroad. Dead or alive, it’s all the same.

And the reason we know this is because Alistair Campbell decided to take on the BBC. Some fairly trivial points of accuracy were on his side. But the whole truth never was.

He helped make the New Labour party, which has dug the filthy shell-hole in which we now sit. And he has started to pull in the soil on top of us all, his friend and master Tony Blair included. Suffocation coming on.

Live by the sword, die by it, like the cliché says.


But worse for the govt. Not so much cause for cackling.