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'TIS THE season of spies and spin doctors! Barely have we thumbed through the secret files in The Metrokhin Archive - and absorbed the terrible truth of the Stasi lecturers among us - than we are promised not one, but two biographies of Alastair Campbell, press secretary and eminence grise to the PM. This spin cycle is programmed to begin on Sunday, when a TV documentary dealing with the life, times and apercus of Gordon Brown's former Mephistopheles, Charlie Whelan, coincides with the first night of the Labour party conference. Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by!
In fact, this elision of the worlds of the spy and the spin doctor is not of my own invention; it is the idea of one of Campbell's biographers, Peter Oborne of The Express. In a worrying article in this week's Spectator, Mr Oborne suggests that Campbell (and, before him, the now-deceased Peter Mandelson) have engaged in a plot - now coming to fruition - to subvert the Conservative Party. The idea, according to Oborne, was "to edge the Conservatives away from the middle ground of politics and turn it into a hard-edged party of the far right, capable of being labelled extremist". The denouement of this story is to be the almost imminent return of Michael Portillo, representing, as it does, "the culmination of much that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell have been working for over the past two-and- a-half years".
Bleedin' hell! We all know how hard it is to transform your own party (it took New Labour 14 years), so how on earth did Campbell manage to do it to someone else's party? Charm plays its part, as far as I can tell from Mr Oborne's almost homoerotic description of what senior Tories like about Alastair. They are attracted, apparently, by "his urbanity, arrogance, cynicism [and] worship of power". Mention is also made of his "cold-hearted ruthlessness". All that, and the long nose: it's enough to cause tumescence in even the most unsusceptible bearer of the blue torch.
Campbell has, Oborne claims, put his advantages to good use. For, "just as any communist spymaster of the Cold War had his useful idiots", Oborne explains, "so Campbell has for many years now run a network of agents of influence within the Tory party". Now, with Labour in power, Campbell - in something dubbed Operation Hoover - has seduced moderate Tories such as Patten, Clarke, Goodlad, Garel-Jones and Heseltine, by giving them government jobs and thus depriving the Tory centre of its natural leaders.
It is a peculiar spymaster, of course, who gradually persuades all his agents to desert their posts in this way, but then Campbell is - it seems - not only a Tory dreamboat, he is also almost omnipotent. At the same time as he was seducing the moderates, he was also encouraging the Eurosceptic ultras. He and Tony "actively fostered this tiny coterie, both before and after the last election".
Largely, apparently, by having tea with the editor of The Daily Telegraph.
It looks as though Oborne is serious about all this. This week's serialisation of his book suggests that we can expect further revelations about how Campbell won the general election; how Campbell won the war in Kosovo; how Campbell is the second most powerful man in Britain; how Campbell invented cunnilingus. God! We'd better all go out and buy a copy!
At one level this is simply another reminder that many on the right still cannot come to terms with the scale of their defeat 30 months ago. On the left, we always used to blame the CIA and its money, or the monopoly press and its power, for inculcating the masses with a stubborn false consciousness. The alternative explanation was, of course, that they thought our ideas were potty, and that if Derek Hatton was the answer, it must have been a bloody stupid question. The right's mythology of defeat centres on what are called the "black arts" of presentation and media manipulation. It is Labour's lack of scruple (compared with their own naive honesty) that has gulled the people of Britain into supporting Tony Blair deep into mid-term. And the necromancer in all this, Merlin at the glitzy (but flawed and insincere) court of Camelot, is the spin-doctor in chief.
Well, I agree with Peter Oborne about one thing: spies and spin-doctors do have a lot in common. And the most important characteristic they share is that their significance has been hugely over-rated. The book, The Metrokhin Archive, turns out to be interesting and dispassionately written, for all the hype. But it suffers, I think, from one big flaw. Which is that it uncritically accepts that all the stuff in the KGB archive is both accurate and important, just because it's secret. Raymond Fletcher MP may have had a KGB code name, and a "contact" may have reported conversations held with him, but why on earth would a Soviet agent resign from government (as Fletcher did) almost the second that he was in a position to gain any useful intelligence?
The truth, of course, is that the intelligence agencies have always had a huge vested interest in exaggerating the vital nature of their own activities. Watching the BBC's The Spying Game last weekend, I was reminded of Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, in which a vacuum salesman passes off his Cuban acquaintances as agents of influence or informers, in order to pacify a demanding MI6. There were these Stasi men floating around the nicest cities of Europe at state expense, "operating" pathetic agents such as the Hull academic Robin Pearson, who contributed absolutely nothing that wasn't available from public sources. The former CIA operative Edward Shirley (a pseudonym) recently wrote that, within the Agency, "bottles of champagne were awarded to case officers who generated the most intelligence reports". Most of this information, he added, was in fact better gleaned from libraries, newspapers and books.
But that doesn't make a good story; it doesn't sell many books. When Oborne praises Campbell's presentational gifts, as over Kosovo, he is really praising Blair's strategic clarity over the objectives of the Nato action.
It is a common journalistic perversity these days to attribute the substance to the shadow, rather than the other way around. But it is a perversity that allows a concentration on people, rather than on abstracts such as strategy. Like the CIA, many journalists still believe that five lines of nonsense gleaned covertly are worth more than 10 pages of analysis gleaned from material in the public domain. "News is what someone doesn't want you to know," goes the old adage.
Sometimes this preoccupation with secret trivia is merely boring, especially when it comes together with totally inconsequential and tedious stories, such as how The Times stiffed the BBC and The Spying Game over the case of Melita Norwood.
But electorates aren't daft, and nations do not rise and fall because of spies and spin doctors. All hacks, all politicos, all spooks should have over their desks, their conference rostrums, their secret recording equipment, this one simple motto: It's the politics, stupid.