Johann Hari: Campbell's diaries make a twisted sort of sense

Alastair Campbell's diaries have been filleted over the past week for any headline-grabbing potential: the Diana factor, the locking-Gordon-Brown-in-the-toilet anecdotes. But few people have read them word for word. So before the most insider look at Tony Blair we've got - until the ex-Prime Minister' tapeworms publish their memoirs - are tossed into the dustbin of history, it's worth looking at them in a less rushed way to ask: do they give us a hint about what went wrong, and what went right, with New Labour?

One morning in 2001, the Downing Street switchboard called Campbell, asking cheerily how he was. "Both homicidal and suicidal," he replied flatly. That distills the 794 pages of his diaries into a neat sound bite. Campbell does not just rage; his book shakes with a pure volcanic fury that you fear will singe your hands. Every single day as Tony Blair's Press Secretary, Campbell woke up in a mood to hammer a hack. And as the book progresses, it's not hard to see why.

The vast majority of Campbell's time (and this book's endless words) focus on mind-numbing trivia that he was forced to talk about by "the babble industry" - the Westminster lobby. It's a refresher course in all the most pointless non-scandals of the 1990s: Derry Irvine's wallpaper, Jo Moore's email, Peter Mandelson's mortgage, Robin Cook's affair, David Blunkett's love child, all amounting to nothing at all. A paradigmatic sentence is: "Virtually the whole day was taken up dealing with Humphrey the Downing Street cat."

Campbell is trapped, simultaneously feeding this cretinisation of our politics and lamenting it. There is a blackly revealing moment when he goes to a focus group in Watford: "A woman called Georgina said she didn't like [Blair's] smile, and they spent 20 minutes talking about whether they liked his smile or not." He leaves in despair at the "ignorance", but goes on to fuel it, believing there is no other way.

But the diaries begin in the wrong place to understand how Campbell became like this. His fury at the press was born with the media massacre of his close friend and hero Neil Kinnock in the 1980s and early 1990s, when he concluded that the British press consisted of little more than poisoned propaganda. His flaws were born there, fighting their flaws. He became the mirror-image of their distortions and lies, in order to serve his team: Labour.

Fighting against what he accurately calls the "evil" of the Daily Mail, Campbell begins to replicate their lax attitude to truth and raw tribalism. And spending all day dealing with presentation, the mask begins to devour the face, with Campbell coming to believe that presentation is more important than reality. He approvingly quotes Bill Clinton: "Achievement is less important than definition in the information age." Really? Only Gordon Brown pops up to query this, insisting that "policy is the answer".

But then, in the middle of all this obsession with artifice, looms The Real World in its most hellish form. Like the shark-fin in Jaws, Saddam's Iraq first surfaces in 1998, when Blair first declares "nobody should underestimate Saddam's determination to develop Weapons of Mass Destruction".

The diaries stir only when they reveal Blair's internal motivations, on Iraq and everything else - and they are almost unfailingly depressing when they do. Blair's rage is invariably directed against the left, and most notably trade unionists. They "just aren't serious people", he declares.

In contrast, Blair fawns on the right. As Thatcher passes by, he says in awe, "God, she is so strong." Rupert Murdoch periodically descends into Downing Street from the clouds above to be praised unquestioningly and to offer his benedictions. Revealingly, Blair frets about the degree of Murdoch's vast undemocratic influence being revealed: "[Blair] said he didn't fear [the press] coming at him about me, but about the relationship with Murdoch." Campbell cavils: "It was faintly obscene that we even had to worry what [he] thought", and Blair gets "really irritated" at Murdoch's more antediluvian right-wingery - but they never even consider challenging it. His power is taken as supreme.

And so is that of the US. While Blair is clearly motivated in part by disgust at Saddam's regime, he is also determined to side with the US on virtually everything. When Jack Straw raises the prospect of not going with the US into Iraq, Blair says "it would be the biggest shift in foreign policy in 50 years". What? This is bizarrely ignorant: Wilson didn't send troops to Vietnam. But Blair "said he believed it would be folly for Britain to go against the US on a fundamental policy, and he really believed in getting rid of bad people like Saddam". It is revealing he placed them in that order.

Once the war is launched and the WMD turn out to be non-existent, Campbell embarks on a vast act of displacement. He begins to harry and hound the BBC to correct a minor error, while all around him the rationale for the war - and his life's work - collapse. It is like a soldier in a trench on the Somme obsessing about a missing button on his uniform.

It's a black, bleak picture: of politicians performing political fellatio on right-wing billionaires while jeering at trade unionists, and following the US government blindly. But perhaps the most depressing picture is of the British press itself: trivial, stupid, focusing on fripperies while disaster looms, pressing the government on nonsense and letting real disasters pass unchecked. At the end of Campbell's roller-coaster of rage, it turns out that in his contempt for so many of our journalists, he made a twisted sort of sense

j.hari@independent.co.uk

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