He who lives by the spin will inevitably die by the spin
The era of the too-present, too-public, too-vocal spin doctor, too eager to grab credit in public for the success of a political client.
He who lives by the spin dies by the spin. And, just as one of the most brilliant American presidents is likely to be remembered most for a sleazy episode with an intern, the real danger of the Campbell/Mandelson axis is that one of the most brilliant British prime ministers may be portrayed by history as a product of public relations practitioners, rather than as a fine mind driving towards the achievement of the public good.
The mystery is why Tony Blair ever allowed the incremental build-up of this public perception.
The tragedy is to see him perform ably at the Hutton Inquiry and have the excellence of his performance acknowledged by media as if he'd been on the stage, or a contestant in a reality TV programme: Blair saves himself from walking the plank.
Worse is the layered truth emerging in the hours after his performance: the realisation that the British public could admire the skills demonstrated while not believing the man.
They don't believe the man because they have learned to see him as a confection, a product designed, manufactured, updated and sold by others.
It should never have been that way. Tony Blair didn't make it because of spin. Tony Blair was the right man at the right time.
He was a personable, charismatic, clever and diligent politician, refreshing the central ideas of politics after the rigid right-wing dogmatism of Margaret Thatcher and the shadowy earnestness of John Major.
The very length of the Tory time in power meant that Labour's old guard had moved on, some of them to retirement, some of them to journalism. Many of them had died.
Times had changed and the public mind was ready for a phoenix to rise from the ashes of old socialism and redefine the mission in populist terms.
Blair was so obviously that phoenix that Mandelson's publicly-paraded box of tricks was, at least in the beginning, a tolerably entertaining side issue. Except that Mandelson's messing became more poisonous.
Mandelson's broad-spectrum contempt took in, not just Old Labour, but the rank-and-file of Labour and the media. Accordingly, it seemed fair to infer both that his contempt extended to his master and was perhaps shared by his master.
Viewing your customers in this case, both media and the general public as easily manipulated morons is difficult to conceal, over the long haul. And when the customers cop on, they tend not to be happy about it.
Mandelson took care of his own destruction.
If Campbell had done the same, or had removed himself to the ranks of highly-paid lobbyists a couple of years back, he would have done Tony Blair the best service possible. Instead, he went to war with the media.
That's the problem with initial stellar success in political image-making. The image-maker forgets the truths that should be tattooed on his or her heart. First among them is the oldest axiom of all: never go to war with anyone who buys ink by the barrel. Sooner or later, too many spin doctors do it.
They do it when what worked for them in the beginning stops working. Instead of stepping back and changing their approach, they project the problem onto the other side and get into the business of publicly punishing media outlets and playing one off against the other. Media becomes the audience, not the conduit through which the general public is reached.
That, in turn, has an inevitable outcome. Media begins to talk to media, in print and on radio and TV, about the way they are being treated. A subtle but profound shift in perception results. The readers and viewers end up as unsure as Pilate about what actually constitutes truth.
Early on, it's fun to spot politicians or their advisers saying one thing but really meaning another.
But the fundamental yearning to believe is never satisfied. Irony is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.
It gets toxic after a while when everybody's a performer spouting lines tested on focus groups.
Politicians are suckers for spin-doctor claims. When their lobby-briefer tells them that the lousy coverage they're getting would have been much worse if it hadn't been for the lobby-briefer yelling at those "expletives deleted" and telling them where to get off, politicians believe it.
Most of them don't feel safe yelling at the media themselves (Michael McDowell and Charlie McCreevy are exceptions to this rule). So having an adviser do it for them feels great.
Prime ministers can no longer simply do their job. Their job is interwoven with media coverage of their every move and with the measurement of the effects of that coverage. Churchill was the last British prime minister to be able to comment that history would treat him pretty fairly, partly because he proposed to write a lot of that history.
Today's prime ministers stand under a Niagara Falls of the rough draft of history media comment all day, every day. As a result, they tend to overvalue the input of media "experts" and lose touch with their own convictions and values. They also fail to apprehend real shifts in public opinion. (Cherie Blair's recent photograph, having her mouth painted by an "adviser" whose presence in her life had already dropped the prime minister's wife in it more than once, is the quintessential example. The only possible reaction to such an action by a brilliant, able, charming woman is: "What possessed her?")
Tony Blair faces a grim winter as media commentators line up to spot what's missing in his performances in the absence of Campbell. But that's just one aspect of the problem.
The nub of it will be the probability that New Labour will decide that Blair is now the personification of all of their problems: The CJ factor.
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