Campbell admits Labour was spinning too much

Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's communications chief, has admitted that the Government has given the impression that it cares more about spin than policy.

Mr Campbell said that the government tried to manage the media too much in its first term, sometimes reannouncing policies to attract media coverage with "a new wheeze".

He admitted that spin had become "huge". "Sometimes we gave a sense that we were more worried about what kind of press we were getting than what a policy was going to do over time," he told The Times. "We can now be more confident because policies we have gone through have made an impact."

The director of strategy and communications said that the Government had "hung on to some of the techniques and ways of opposition for too long".

"I don't know if things could have been done differently to prevent the spin thing becoming so huge," he said.

Mr Campbell, who announced changes last week to the way Downing Street briefs the press, said the public was suffering because of the way politics was reported. "You want to report everything as if it's 100 miles an hour in the fast lane, but most people are living in the middle lane and don't want to go that fast," he said, adding that there has to be a way to "make this process more relevant to people".