Six weeks or so ago I was bemused to receive a furious letter from John Lloyd, contributing editor to Prospect. It accused me of various crimes and misdemeanours, and demanded reparation. I was pondering how to respond when, shortly after lunch, the phone rang. It was Lloyd again, still in a state of outrage.
He was aggrieved by an article I had written for the Mail on Sunday in the aftermath of the Iraq war. This article argued that Downing Street was using military victory over Saddam to repackage the prime minister as a wizened, grey-haired war hero who had been to hell and back. I felt that, at the end of a war in which 31 British soldiers (at that time) and thousands of others had died, this was indecent and improper.
There was plenty of evidence to back the thesis. Within days of the end of the war Tony Blair gave a vainglorious interview with the Sun, in which he made the questionable claim that he had been ready to quit had he lost the pre-conflict Commons vote.
The case of former Times editor Peter Stothard, embedded in Downing Street with a photographer for the duration of the war, also cried out to be taken into consideration. This was an unprecedented operation, though characteristic of a government which has always regarded presentation and substance as identical. Stothard has since published a book about his experience, in which he is too modest to mention the fact that he had recently received his knighthood courtesy of Blair.
I also mentioned the profile of the prime minister in the new Financial Times Magazine, which is edited by John Lloyd. I felt that it departed from the scrupulous, astringent, sceptical reporting that the paper has always aspired to. A hagiographical piece was accompanied by some photographic portraits of Blair striking a pose like some heroin chic supermodel.
I wrote that "none of the interviews or articles have come about by chance. All have been choreographed." It was these sentences that inspired Lloyd to fury and caused him to accuse me of lying. According to Lloyd, I "exist in and further a culture which privileges excitement over accuracy, defamation over an effort to get at some part of the truth and politicised prejudgement over an attempt at sketching reality."
This is nonsense. And I stand by every last word of what I wrote-as I was attempting to explain to Lloyd when he slammed the phone down on me. That FT Magazine interview was indeed "choreographed," to use the metaphor I carefully employed. There were two pieces of evidence for this assertion. The first was the special access which the FT gained from the Blair inner circle in the preparation of the profile. The author, James Blitz, made much of this, emphasising that he had spoken to many friends of Blair "including one who has not previously spoken to the press."
There is nothing wrong with this kind of intimacy. Indeed it lends extra authority, and the FT piece made good use of it to bring fresh information into the public domain. But the prime minister's inner circle never talk freely to reporters without consent from Downing Street. This is true of any government, but no government has been half as aware as this one of the value and use of access. I have made checks and confirmed that the FT Magazine article was indeed written with the co-operation of No 10.
This was self-evidently the case with the accompanying photographs. John Lloyd complained that the Mail on Sunday news story claimed that the prime minister "had a say in the poses, angles and lighting." Of course he did! Blair could have refused to clench his fist sternly in front of him. In my view he would have been well advised to avoid the melodramatic poses presumably urged on him by the photographer. He joined in of his own free will.
The prime minister only poses for portraits on rare occasions. He agreed to do so for the profile approved by Lloyd, who enjoys a (wholly honourable) reputation as a pro-government commentator. It was part of a package of postwar favours to media friends, mainly but not exclusively connected with the Murdoch press.
This is what I meant when I wrote that Downing Street had "choreographed" the postwar management of Tony Blair's image. Lloyd represents me as claiming that "the FT Magazine had obeyed an instruction of Downing Street... to make Blair look beatific." I made no such claim. A choreographer arranges the dance; he does not carry out the pirouettes himself.
Lloyd is right to say that journalists should be accountable for what they write. Over the past few months Lloyd has been developing a thesis, well expressed in his elegant essay on "media arrogance" in last October's Prospect, that newspaper journalists and broadcasters have become a destructive force in British public debate. It was powerfully put and contains some insight. But Lloyd did not dwell on New Labour's own success in using and suborning a complacent British media to create its own version of the truth. There are numerous examples of this. It happened, as we are now starting to learn, in the run-up to the Iraq war. And it happened again in the immediate aftermath. A number of newspapers, of which the Financial Times was one of the less egregious offenders, were happy to join in with a Downing Street-abetted attempt to create a fresh story and new iconography around the prime minister. I felt then, and still feel today, that this was worthy of comment.
