"Pretentious?....."
Nicola muses on the payscales of gigolos nowadays.
Alastair was becoming increasingly accustomed to being the news himself. As early as summer 1998 there had been disquiet in Parliament about the role he played in government and his style of media management. Not for the last time, there were calls for his power to be curtailed.
But another day, another troll-fire to put out....
The Kosovo war was arguably Alastair's finest hour. The conflict began in March, with three weeks of bombing by NATO forces in response to Serbian persecution of ethnic Albanians. Arguments could be made that this was an illegal action taken against a sovereign state, and so Milosevic was gambling that Western public opinion would eventually swing against continued action and cause a split in the NATO alliance. Because of military constrictions, and red-tape at the Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers in Europe (Shape), Jamie Shea, the NATO spokesman, would often find himself facing a 300 strong press corps, with only stale news to give them. Belgrade were thus able to steal a march on the propaganda front.
The allied military had no idea of the importance of the media in the conflict: NATO's only images were from fighter planes and were uninspiring. Reporters on the ground were sending back pictures of devastation, and these captured the imagination of the public; so much so that NATOs supreme commander, General Wesley Clarke, accused the media of trying to 'satisfy their masters in Belgrade'.
The worst atrocity was the bombing of a refugee convoy near Djakovica by US planes on April 14th 1999. 80 civilians died, and despite NATO's insistence that there were military vehicles in the convoy, no evidence of this has ever been found. To make matters worse, General Clarke accused the Serbs of attacking the convoy. It was only five days later that NATO admitted the truth, and by then there were suspicions of a cover-up. Blair and Clinton realised that the press operations were a glaring weak-point in NATOs armoury; especially dangerous as some members had been ambivalent about the project from the start. Another PR disaster could spell the end for the campaign. Blair called in Alastair Campbell
Alastair set up a Media Operations Centre (MOC) in Brussels, staffed with experienced government aides and senior soldiers from the US and Europe. Each day they would identify and respond to misinformation broadcast by Tanjug, the Yugoslav news agency. In a variation of New Labour English, they would draft catchphrases to be used by NATO officials in press briefings. They monitored both Allied and Serbian media, and ghost-wrote articles for the press to appear under the names of NATO leaders. There were twice-daily calls between Brussels and the key capitals to ensure that NATOs leaders were all on-message. They bypassed Shape, creating resentment in some quarters. There was also unease about how presidents, prime ministers, generals and foreign secretaries were having their public pronouncements and their time-management directed from the MOC's offices at Nato. "Alastair Campbell's arrival tainted Nato's credibility," said one disgruntled officer. "The same apparatus that can win an election can't win a war." This was echoed by a Ministry of Defence official, ""Our war strategy seems to consist of getting ministers on TV. Everything else is of secondary consideration. Hours in meetings are devoted to deciding who will appear on TV and what line to take."
There was some truth in this view. For instance, at the end of April, Tony Blair announced that additional Harriers were being sent to Gioia del Colle in Italy. That was the first the RAF commander at the base knew of it. Diverting the aircraft carrier 'Invincible' to the Adriatic was "piling on the pressure": but its harriers didn't have the precision targeting equipment necessary to participate in bombing raids, and its anti-submarine helicopters were most notably used to fly George Robertson to Albania for a photo opportunity.
In Britain, the daily press briefings gave the impression that our forces were an integral part of the conflict and were making a major military contribution. In fact, Alastair was our biggest contribution to the war effort: only around 20 of the 1000+ aircraft involved in the conflict were British.
But the MOC team proved its value and their optimistic assessments of damage inflicted by allied bombing took the wind out the sails of those pushing for a ground offensive. It helped that General Clarke was a big Alastair fan. "The right way to fight a propaganda offensive is not with more propaganda. It's to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and do it as rapidly as possible. But you need some smart people who can tell you what piece of truth you are looking for." Campbell's team were "people who understood which pieces of information were important to provide to the public." And Campbell was worthy of an invitation to Clarke's chateau in Belgium.
Once Milosevic was beaten, NATO had to admit that it had been optimistic in its assessments of tanks and artillery destroyed, but of course, by this time the truth didn't matter anyway. Attempts to control media reports continued. Two weeks after the liberation of Kosovo, two ghurkhas were killed. Downing Street's line was that they had died clearing a Serbian minefield, and the KFOR press and information centre in Pristina was urged to stick to this story. Accounts from the scene soon emerged blaming unexploded NATO cluster bombs. British officers were not allowed to comment until a carefully worded statement had been agreed with Alastair. This referred only to "NATO weapons", avoiding any mention of their origin, as to admit they were British or American would cause 'friendly fire' headlines likely to be embarrassing to President Clinton who was on a visit in nearby Macedonia.
And all of this impressed Clinton no end. During the conflict Blair had often left Alastair to decide matters with Clinton directly. He's often boasted since that the President offered him a job. It's certainly true that Labour spin-doctors were present at a Florida meeting in June 1999 when Hilary Clinton decided to run for the Senate.
The Clintons weren't the only one to appreciate Alastair's multiple and obvious charms. Nicola Pagett, an ageing actress best known for her role in 'Upstairs, Downstairs', had fallen for the Beloved One after seeing him on a TV programme. In her weirdy autobiography 'Diamonds Behind Her Eyes' she depicts him as 'The Stranger' and writes, "His face was strong...beautiful. I didn't want to meet him. I just wanted to tell him how clever he was. I think that probably, if I look down deep into my soul, I just fancied him rotten, but I was too old and too married...." So far so understandable. But that wasn't enough for our Nicola, oh no. She went on to send him loads of letters full of politics, religion and (yeah, you guessed it) sex. And a cheque for £6 billion. Signed 'moi'. Oh puhleese! Nicola, you'll give stalkers a bad name! And that's without mentioning the dancing in the underwear whilst fantasising about him. Oh, ok, I'll give you that one, we all do it. But if Alastair's sending me messages through a teensy earpiece, I'm afraid I'm not receiving them: and if he's got a camera hidden behind my mirror, well I'm just plain sorry for what he's had to see.
So before the Labour Party Conference of September 1999, the headlines belonged to Alastair for all the wrong reasons; especially irksome as he'd previously said, "What I don't want is the start of Labour conference dominated by a great deal of hoo-ha about Labour spin-doctors".
Lauren Booth's description of Alastair's arrival at the conference cannot be bettered:
"[Piers] Morgan could hardly contain his glee, and stood rubbing his hands together as everyone in the room waited for Campbell to arrive. Diverting the week's news agenda away from Labour Party spin was just a happy by-product of the story-what the hacks wanted was a humiliated Campbell to appear with his tail firmly between his legs."
"Suddenly, above the music, a buzz went around: 'He's here!' All conversation stopped, and Campbell strode to the centre of the room. Then, with a dramatic gesture, he pulled a mobile phone from his jacket, holding his hand high in the air to silence the muttering: 'Shhhh, you lot,' he shouted. 'It's Claudia Schiffer...' He spoke into the phone: 'No, darling, don't do it...don't kill yourself; I'm just not worth it.' He clicked the phone shut, and then immediately opened it again. Holding it in the air, he sighed: 'Now it's Cindy...No, Cindy, I can't be with you. I'm in love with someone else; it'll never workout. I'm sorry'. "
"He switched off his phone and walked off, leaving the journos crestfallen."
Unfortunately Alastair's sense of humour was to be the cause of a minor scandal that same month. On September 15th, a piece appeared in Matthew Norman's Diary column in the Guardian revealing Alastair's affair with Jill Dando, the TV presenter shot dead in mysterious circumstances in April 1999. The next day's paper carried a letter from Alastair refuting the claim, and an apology from Matthew Norman. But this wasn't to be the last that was heard of the incident. Gossip junkies like me may want to read the whole set of Guardian Diary pieces here
