 Good evening. I'm Jude England. I'm head of social sciences here at the British Library and I'm co curator of our brand new exhibition Propaganda, Power and Persuasion. What better way could there be to open our season with this conversation between Alistair Campbell and Steve Richards? I'm not going to introduce Alistair nor the event in detail. Steve will do that. But we did interview Alistair for the exhibition and he features in it as one of our talking heads. And I think in the middle of a sort of fascinating session we had with him, it was salutary to be reminded that when he left Downing Street in 2003, social media channels such as Twitter were a butter gleam in some techie's eye, hadn't been invented yet and now there are over 500 million users worldwide. So that's a massive change in that 10 year period. I'm going to introduce Steve. He's been the independence chief political columnist for about 13 years now. Also political editor of the New Space Statesman, worked for the BBC and various other political roles, political columnist roles, political commentator roles. But importantly, I'm giving him a plug now, he's starring in his own one man show called Rock and Roll Politics which runs from the 2nd to the 6th of July and that's at the Soho Theatre. And that's going to be a unique behind the scenes it says on the leaflet, behind the scenes guide, some modern politics and media. I'm going to hand over to Steve, get us underway. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Well, welcome to the session. What I thought I'd do in terms of structuring our conversation is look at how you approached messaging, propaganda, whatever we're going to call it, in the build up to power, labour in peacetime, labour in war and some reflections on the modern media since you stopped being press secretary and then we'll open it up to all of you. Before we begin, as this is linked to an exhibition on propaganda, the definition we just heard there I thought was a very fair one. Within that definition, when Tony Blair asked you to be his press secretary in the summer of 94, persuaded you actually because you had doubts about it. Did you think, right, I am becoming a propagandist as defined there? I think in political terms I already was because when I was a journalist, what I think if I, what is a fantastic exhibition, you and I would talk about this on the way out. I think the one thing that maybe is missing is the fact that actually I think in modern British politics the real propagandists are in the media and that has made political life much, much more difficult. I actually as a daily mirror political editor, I saw myself as an active supporter of the Labour Party who used my journalism to try to help the Labour Party. Now I know that's quite rare for a journalist to admit that but actually a lot of journalists are forced to think in those terms by the paper that they work for. I think in terms of how I saw my role when I then, as it were, jumped to the other side of the fence, I did see my role as being, I remember an old colleague of yours and a friend of mine and a friend of both of us, Don McIntyre, on The Independent. When I got the job I remember saying, God this is going to be good for me because I'm one of the few journalists that you get on with and I said Don you've just got to understand I no longer am a journalist and I no longer see myself as a journalist. I exist now totally to help the Labour Party get elected and that is how I saw my job. Now I don't know if that's propaganda or not but certainly for example you take something like Tony's big strategic pitch if you like was New Labour. We had to make New Labour real to the public so that people who hadn't voted for us before would vote for us so that we would then get into power. That's how I thought 24 hours a day. Well let's take that as a very interesting starting point. The invention in inverted commons of New Labour. Now I know you would argue and it's unquestionably the case, it was backed by painstaking work on policy and anyone who reads your diaries or any of the others, that's the case. But New Labour was partly a propaganda tool wasn't it? I mean it was basically saying this old Labour Party that lost elections is being consigned to the past. So was that your idea New Labour? Was it partly a marketing device, a propaganda device? I mean what was clear to me from the moment that Tony became leader of the Labour Party and indeed before that was that he believed that we were losing election after election after election because we were not facing up to change that was happening around us in the modern world. And that we were becoming too tribal, we were sort of in a sense just sort of talking to ourselves as opposed to understanding that most people are not inside the political bubble and they're looking for a different sort of dialogue with their political leaders if you like. And so he was unashamedly a moderniser, he was right out of the outer edge of modernisation if you like. Now he said in his own book that in a sense I was the person who as it were wrote New Labour, New Britain as our strategic framework but I think the idea of New Labour was kind of obvious from what he was talking about what he wanted to do for the party. But you do need labels, you need labels in politics. As you who devise New Labour, New Britain, right? And from that point if we build up to the 97 landslide win it's very hard in opposition to distinguish between policy making and projection because you can't implement any policies. So I remember you always saying well hold on a second, my power very flattering to you is exaggerated in the sense that it's Blair Brown and others who are doing the policy stuff on the whole. But you I know were very determined understandably to neutralise the sun and hopefully in your terms the other hostile papers. Looking back it must have had some impact on policy, how radical quotes left of centre you would dare to be when you're wanting to get the sun on board. The only thing I say about that is that I completely understand why you'd say that and as far as we get that relationship gets sort of trotted out it's usually about the fact Tony Blair quotes flew half way around the world to pay homage to Murdoch in the Heyman Island. If you go back and read the speech it was as clear an exposition of the New Labour pitch as you'd ever get including really challenging their Euroscepticism. So I think Europe is the example that I would look to did we as it were tailor our policy and our politics to suit the Murdoch agenda to get the backing of the sun. And I don't think we did I think what we did do was make sure that the essence of New Labour which was the idea that you just you didn't just bang on about fairness and better public services but you had to have an understanding of the importance of economic efficiency. There were certain parts of the some parts of the Thatcher agenda which you accepted that that in a sense was what signal to them that this change was real. But my concern and Tony's concern the whole time was less about the newspapers was about the public. But in opposition this is where you're absolutely right about the limitations of opposition in opposition all you've got is the media. You can't actually put up people's taxes or cut them you can't build roads you can't have a health policy that sees nurses and doctors doing operations only the government can have can have that an opposition can only communicate what it is saying. And let's be honest what percentage of the public will actually meet a politician in the course of a campaign very very small. It's through the media that you get your message and you and I talked about this a lot in Britain even though television is probably the single most important medium. The reality reality is in our country still the big newspaper groups tend to set the agenda for the news for the television radio is changing because of social media but it's still the case. Do you think I mean there's no doubt at all on those terms you were incredibly successful and just before we leave the opposition period where you famously got the endorsement of the sun and other newspapers. Just on a personal thing because if you read the diaries they're an extraordinary vivid account of many different things about what happened during that period but it was partly an account of your relationship with newspapers. And by the end it will come to that in a minute you really couldn't bear them at the point when you were getting this good press 97. Did you sort of quite like them I mean is it much is it or did you already basically think these people are a bunch of bastards out to undermine the Labour Party but they're being quite nice to us so I'll be quite nice to them or did you and others when they're being nice to you did you actually quite like them. Well back then you see this is this is one of the we generally have a very right wing press in this country. And the fact is that so at the moment for example I mean I would argue that David Cameron in opposition got a way way way easier ride than we did in opposition. Now it is true that in 1997 the start of the election the sun came out for us but just understand they did that because they knew we were going to win. They did not do that out of any conviction. And so I say in the diaries that I sort of I think I did resent that we even had to go through all this nonsense that you went through that it shouldn't they shouldn't have the now as I said at Leveson I think we should have done more about their power. Tony for reasons I completely understand felt that with all the other stuff that we were doing. And given that most of the media thought we did get a fair press and most of the public probably thought we got a fair press that actually to have thrown in. Let's change the relationship with the media and bring in new regulations so forth it just it wasn't realistic but I disliked some of them. It definitely got worse as time went on because I felt the culture and so much of which was shown at Leveson and so much more of which is being shown since Leveson where they're kind of you know continuing to live this sort of denial. Where they will conduct an opinion poll saying putting loaded questions you know do you believe that the Prime Minister should decide what the headline is tomorrow. Well surprise surprise 95% of people say no and they put that as a poll and somebody does a reasonable poll that says do you do you think Leveson produced a reasonable report which will now to be implemented. 75% say yes and it doesn't make a line in any single newspaper. That's what I mean about the power of propaganda. Politicians actually yes they have a lot of power. They do have a lot of power but I think that when I see particularly now you see the G8 you see Obama and Merkel and all on camera and the Chinese and they're all sitting there and they're always described as the eight most powerful people in the world. They don't feel it they don't feel it and a lot of them is because they're surrounded by this kind of propaganda these forces of propaganda against them by their respective media systems less so the Chinese. Do you think do you think given that success up to 97 I know you resented having to do it but you did it and got it and you got those Murdoch papers on the sun specifically on board and so on. I mean the way you're the least well equipped to answer this question but do you think Tony Blair became too dependent on you. He saw that the success you had in getting the message across to inverted commons hostile newspapers and suddenly he had power when policy became more important. But you the diaries are very clear you're with him all the time which is incredibly factoring so you're the wrong person to ask but retrospectively do you think he was here a huge landslide majorities power to make policy. It was you he listened to more than say I don't know some policy maker with experience of reshaping the economy or whatever. I think what Tony did very successfully was build a really really good team around him. Now I was the guy who was in the front line with the media every day and I think one of the reasons I got built up as much as I did. I'm not denying that I wasn't quite you know forceful interesting personality for them to write about but but one of the reasons that that was the case because they saw me twice a day. They saw me more than these other people and actually you are a fairly rare exception. Most political journalists are actually not interested in policy. They are they're interested in the personality and who's up news down and where's the next scandal coming along and you know God we really have to write about the health service. And so I think I think I got built up and maybe I could have handled it differently. I don't know but I think Tony see Tony wouldn't have listened to me on the reshaping of the economy. He would have listened to Gordon. He would have called in outside advisers. But the team around to you know Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan who I saw earlier today, Peter Hyman, David Miliband, Charlie Faulkner, Derry Irvine. The Tony's kind of that inner team. It was a collection of people who were used for different things. What I think he used me for most wasn't actually the media management side although I could do that. It was having a strategic mind and seeing how all this stuff could fit together. And it was also being absolutely totally blunt with him. Because you know a lot of politicians when they get to a certain level they lose that. And I saw the way that people talked to Tony differently after he became Prime Minister. And myself, Jonathan, Sally etc. we were determined not to. So I think that was a different function. I am not a policy expert. If you would say to me, I can answer the question what I think we should do about the national health service. But I certainly wouldn't recommend putting me in charge of it rather than Alan Milburn or John Reid or Alan Johnson or whoever. Moving on, I think one thing that did come across in your diaries. I think you've said it actually elsewhere. I'm looking at the post of the diaries by the way. They're all on sale outside. It's fantastically rich reading, but that was spontaneous. It was not propaganda. I wasn't planning to say that. I think you say in the diaries or I've read it in an interview that early on in government you carried on with the art of opposition. Now this presumably does relate to the theme we're talking about. You were still all very focused on the message because you had done it for the last three years or whatever in opposition. Do you know what, I think we ended up being punished for that the whole way through. I think for the first, you've got to remember we've been out of power for a long time. We've got a landslide victory that was bigger than any of us had predicted. I can remember on the election night being up in Sedgefield with Tony and we arrived at the counter and there was a TV on. There were seats falling to us that we hadn't even campaigned in. They had not even been on the list of target seats. There were MPs being elected and I was saying to Tony, who's that? We go after weeks without proper sleep and thousands of miles on the road and Tony goes down to see the Queen and you're inside Downey Street and he's suddenly been told how to use a nuclear weapon. It's like a pretty steep learning curve and meanwhile I'm sort of running this communications machine having gone from a very, very small tight-knit team. Suddenly there are thousands of these people all over the government. I think we were absolutely determined to keep that sense of message discipline, focus and all the rest of it. I think that it meant that we were a little bit slow to get into the different mindset that you need in government. The mindset that you need in government is not about the fighting day-to-day. You have to do that. I was still loving to brief the press every day and I was still loving to make the arguments and the rest of it, but much, much more important was, right, here's the key objective you're setting. This is what you're going to do in a year, this is what you're going to do in three years, this is what you're going to do over a parliament. I think eventually we got there, but funny enough Tony said in his own book that he felt that by the time he left he was at his least popular, but he's most effective. When he started, he was at his most popular, but maybe he's least effective. I think Cameron, I think he is still more about the communication than he is about the substance. People accuse us of that, but I think they do so because of that first six months. And I think the other reason, if I can be absolutely frank, is I think they do so because of Gordon's operation, in particular the way that Charlie Wienan operated. I think we paid a heavy price for the fact that all that triple counting and re-announcing and all that stuff, we paid a long-term price for that. This word spin almost haunted and came to torment you all, didn't it? Even when actual, minutely detailed policy was being announced, I would be in news meetings at the BBC or newspaper, all spin, all spin. Even when it was so obviously not. I don't know what this is. It's just like propaganda. That's why I'm asking it. Propaganda has developed a negative connotation. I mean, Jude sort of put the history and the case and actually propaganda is, it is the propagation of information to persuade, that's what it is. Spin is a deliberately pejorative word to say that anything that anybody in public life communicates, they're not actually saying what they think, they're trying to sell you something that isn't real. Now this is what I mean about the media being the real spin doctors, because that agenda is driving this the whole time. I'll give you an example of how it works. I can remember in the run-up to the Hutton enquiry, when I'd made a decision once the enquirer was caught, I just wasn't going to engage with the media at all. You may remember I was filmed out running every day and I never spoke and I just got on with my business and what have you. One night on Saturday evening I was at home with my sons watching a football match and the phone went and I answered the phone and it was one of the reporters outside the house, TV reporter, not you. I had a very, very brief chat in which I said absolutely nothing. I know how to talk and say nothing. I said absolutely nothing. Football finished, the news came on and then there's this report about the build-up to the Hutton enquiry and they go to the reporter outside my house who says and the spin behind me tonight is. Now what had I done? He'd phoned me without me wanting him to phone me. He'd asked me a question. I gave him a totally waffling, devoid of meaning response, said goodbye, watched the football and then the spin is. Now I always saw my job as being in the business of strategic communication. Strategic communication is the communication of an idea, new labour or a policy, whatever that might be, over time. It's never done in the moment because most people aren't listening in the moment. Even Barack Obama announces bin Laden's dead. That's a really big moment. What proportion of the world actually saw him announce that live? Not many. What proportion knew about it by the end of the day? Pretty much everybody. Now very, very few events like that. Most politicians, I think it was Philip Gould who had this line about most of the time we're playing in an empty stadium. Most people aren't listening. They're going about their business. They're not watching television. They're taking their kids to school. They're taking their mum to hospital or they're going to work, whatever. The communicator has to understand that, which is why you keep have to communicate in the same things again and again and again and again. The media, they are listening all the time. One of the most infuriating things for a politician now, let's say David Cameron makes a speech tomorrow. Let's say it's a rare Cameron speech and he's got something substantial to say. That was spin. Let's say he's got an announcement to make. Now, point one, he will get more coverage on the television and the radio if they brief it in advance to the newspapers. We used to get accused all the time why are you giving this stuff to the newspapers? So we stopped doing it. Do you know what happened? It wasn't covered. The broadcasters thought this can't be serious because it's not in the papers. It's this weird relationship they have. Until they see it in the papers they think this can't be important. So then what happens is the next day they sort of catch up with it. So then the speech will come along. Let's say he's doing the speech in the morning. So the today programme, which lots of the sort of chattering classes listen to, they'll have a discussion of that. And then you'll do the speech and it will be live on Sky and BBC News, BBC News Channel, not much watched by that many people. Then by lunchtime they might have three clips of this big speech and announcement. By the evening the media are absolutely bored rigid with it. So they'll have one clip and they might have Nick Robinson telling you what he meant and they might have Robert Peston telling you what he thinks that he meant. And so he goes on. And the politicians voice is completely, totally lost. And that's difficult. And the propaganda in that is not the politicians. That's my point. Nick Robinson and Robert Peston, they're doing their job in this totally changed media landscape. But it's made it much, much harder for the politician to get a point over time. I once remember, not a labour actually, when I was at the BBC, seeing a running order for the six o'clock news. It was a Lib Dem conference when Ashton was leader. And the running order was Ashton speech, two minutes. John Sargent two way, five minutes. That kind of slightly weird dynamic. There are times, aren't there, in this crazy relationship between media and politics where the person in your role has some really tough decisions to make. I mean one of the running themes through your diaries obviously is the Blair Brown relationship. And in the most recent volume you've got people like Tessa Jal coming up to you and saying, the Chancellor's bloody bonkers, you know, as you kind of. And yet clearly that has to be suppressed as a story. I mean the journalist wrote about it non-stop. But presumably there was no formula where you could say, look, yeah there is this problem, because the government would then implode. So there are moments when you do have to use a definition which, when this exhibition was pegged on the Today programme, the other person who spoke said one definition of propaganda is to mislead. And presumably at times you did have to. Well I think one of the quotes over there is Richard Crossman. This idea that spins that with me and Peter Mandelson is Richard Crossman. Would you say propaganda, you might want to tell the truth, but often you can't tell the truth and therefore you end up misleading. Now let's just take the Tony Gordon thing. The first thing we've got to remember, the relationship between the Chancellor, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor is kind of fundamental in any government. And what's more, it can move markets. You've got to be a little bit careful. Now where it was really difficult being the Prime Minister's spokesman was my knowledge that you guys who were sitting at the briefings, you were being fed this stuff. You were being told that Gordon thought this and that this had happened and this shouty match had happened. Now I couldn't sit there and say, no, that did not happen. I did have to say something different. So for example, if somebody came in and said, is it true that Gordon is trying to block Tony from spending more on the health service, for example. Now, the straightforward, honest answer at that time would have been yes. The answer I would have given was, well, we've got a spending review going on, we've got a budget coming on, coming up and the government is all working together to make sure we come to the right decisions about da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And if you remember what happened on that was Tony went on frost and just announced we were doing it. And as the dios record, Gordon went... Now, and then that was like, so in situations or the other thing which you will have seen me do hundreds of times will be newspaper leads on X and Y have had big fall out or whatever it might be. And I'll get asked about it. I'll say I'm just not going to get into the tittle tattle. I'm not going to get into the trivia. I'm going to focus on this that's happening today because it's more important and more serious. And they would sort of know that is what is called a non-denial denial. And therefore they would feel justified to go and write the story because you can't actually lie. You cannot. If you do, you're finished. You're absolutely finished. And that's why I used to put myself through the same pressures for my briefings as Tony put himself through for Prime Minister's Questions. One of the reasons I used to run the system really, really hard is I wanted to be able to answer any question. Now, to answer it, if you like, in a qualified way, you do need to know the truth. And you need to know the whole truth. Some of the worst messes we ended up with were when we, as the spokesmen, were put in positions where we said things which turned out not to be true. Peter Mandelson's second resignation, The Bristol Flats. Now, if you get a situation like that, and they were the worst to deal with when it was actually not about policy, it wasn't about anything that was fundamentally important. It was about Tony and Cherise kids and where they were living at university. That's the sort of story the papers love. Maybe the public do, I don't know. But the papers certainly love that sort of story. And we have to deal with it. Where can we go to get the facts about that? You have to go and ask the people. And if you get told things that turn out not to be true, then you're all hell breaks loose, as it did. Talk it all hell breaking loose, Iraq. And then we'll look at the modern media and then open it up. With Iraq, when Tony Blair decided, whenever that was, to back President Bush in America, did you then think, right, I'm now the equivalent, and him actually, of a lawyer. We've got a lawyer with a case. We've got to convince the Labour Party, win the House of Commons, hopefully win over the public. We have just got to find every ounce of material to back that case because if we don't win over the Labour Party, the House of Commons, the media, the public, we're stuck because my leader wants to go with him. And was that the mindset from that moment on? And can you see in retrospect how that mindset led to some of the difficulties that arose with, say, using the intelligence and so on? No, I don't buy that. I'll tell you why because I think the last volume of the diary starts on 9-11. And there's no dam, this phrase that kept being used at the Chilcote Enquirer, the calculus of threat, changed. It did because I think things that people were prepared to tolerate, not just our governments around the world, suddenly they weren't going to tolerate. And the thing about, if you read not just the diaries, but all of the emails and the memos that were published at the Hutton Enquiry, and I think it's very, very hard to make the case that this was a government that was sort of, you know, rooting around trying to find the material that would make a false case to Parliament, which in the end is what we were accused of. Not a false case, but anything unwelcome like nuanced intelligence, well, you know, let's not make a case. This is all about the September 2002 dossier. And if you go and read it, and if you go and look at the coverage at the time, it was, I can remember, the guy Gilligan who ended up causing the whole sort of, the subsequent controversy that led to David Kelly's death and the Hutton Enquiry. On the day, because at the time it suited him to say this, on the day that we published the dossier he said there's nothing new in this, there's nothing we don't know. This is the guy who later said that this was what made the case for war. Adam Bolton, who was that video showed, he and I had our ups and downs from time to time. I can remember he had very much to say, I'm not criticising for this, because I think it was quite a dry document. It wasn't this sort of, you know, it's been reinterpreted in the light of what's happened. I mean, if you read it, I think it was careful and cautious. And what is true is that Tony wanted to persuade the Labour Party and Parliament and the public. That is absolutely true. But I can remember the day, I mean look, the Iraq march, the march against the war, I can remember the date, but you know, you just have to look out the window to see what that was like, how many people were against it. If you're a Prime Minister who is preparing to stand out in the next election, people could say he didn't listen, he did listen, and it was quite a loud noise coming in his direction. But ultimately he was in a position, he particularly, but also the government, but he in particular, of having to make a decision. And in the end that was what it was about. The controversy about Iraq, to my mind, it's not about a dossier, it's not about who said what to whom, it's actually about a decision that a lot of people disagreed with. And will disagree with well into the future. And so I don't accept the premise of your question. I totally accept why it's put because that is how this debate is developed, but it's not how it felt at the time, it's not how it was at the time. Let's move on to look at the way the media has changed because you left soon after that particular drama. And so you, your period, which if you read the diaries, I mean just relentless non-stop, 24-7 as the cliche goes. Well, since then there's Twitter, I don't think you were there for blogs, were you? No, I think, do you know what Nick Asunder, who used to be on the express, he worked with Fiona at the express, and then he was one of the first people to work for BBC online. I can't remember what year this was, but he came to see me and he said, I'm shifting to do this kind of online stuff. And I said, what's that? Oh, it's kind of internet. And he said, you really ought to start thinking about this because this is like going to be the next big thing. And oh yeah, fair enough, okay. And I can remember thinking, you know, it's just, I didn't even understand what it was. And so by the time, I mean, one of the kind of, you talk about the Hutton inquiry, one of the things that came out of the Hutton inquiry, which people thought was really weird, all kind of conspiracy in this, is that there were no emails from me. That's because I never sent emails. I used to, my secretary used to print out everything and I'd scribble on the top. And so even email I hadn't caught up with at this stage. And it's like when Tony, when he left, I've told this story about his first text message. But Tony didn't even have a mobile phone, which when it came to phone hacking was good news. So when he left in 2007, and he has to sort of rejoin the real world, my very first text message for him just said, this. And that was it. And then another one came through and said, this is amazing. And the next one said, you can send words at everything. So the world had moved on. I really like social media. And I don't think the politicians have anything to fear from social media. I don't. But I think our politicians are very, very slow to catch up with this. I was interested over at the exhibition that the most retweeted tweet in history was that four more years. Obama. Now actually I don't think that was a very, I'm really surprised that was, I don't think there's any political power in that. Because actually it's a single fact and it's like the Obama bin Laden announcement. Once you know it, you know it. So that was in a sense about a mood. But I'll tell you, if you are a politician and you say something or you catch the moment with something and it is then retweeted and retweeted and retweeted and retweeted and it's happening there and now, you're taking away a lot of power from these newspapers. That's why they hate it. So if you were say Ed Miliband's press secretary now, what do you think? Why was that? What would you be, let's take UKIP first of all. What would you be telling him in terms of messaging to respond to UKIP or would you be saying to him, this is pretty good for you Ed. It's going to split the Tory party like the SDP did with Labour. Keep off UKIP. Let's just let them have that little battle and we'll pick up seats because of the split vote. Or would you be saying, right, we've got to develop messages here to sort this out? Well, I mean, I do see Ed and I talked to Ed and the thing is I wouldn't look at it in those terms. I think Cameron has made a terrible mistake strategically with UKIP and with Europe. Cameron doesn't want Britain to lead the European Union and he's right not to want Britain to lead the European Union. He's got a political problem and he's created a process over which he's losing control and that is, I think, really, really dangerous for him. I think with Ed, the thing that is, I've read a piece in The Guardian today where they were talking about the policy development process, ultimately, for all that we're talking about communication, it is totally about policy. It's all about what policies we bring forward between now and the election and how the debate develops around them with the public. In a really difficult period, difficult economically, difficult politically because politicians aren't popular, difficult because people feel let down by the banks and they feel let down by most of the modern, the big institutions. But ultimately it will be about policies. I would be saying all the time, look, I understand why you're holding your fire, I understand why you're not bringing stuff forward, but ultimately that is what is going to decide. At the moment Labour's lead is very much about the fact that the government are not thought to be terribly competent and they're doing quite a lot of things that they said they wouldn't and the country doesn't feel very good and it's not going in a very good direction. That's fine, it is not enough. Ultimately it is about the public saying, okay, this is back to what I said about 1994 to 1997. You can spend all your time, one of the reasons we got a reputation for being the whole new Labour control free thing is because if you know people are going to vote for you, that's fine and great, they're there. But to go from opposition to power, you have to have people who haven't voted for you before and often they're people who don't think about politics, don't care about politics, but you're not going to get them to come and vote for you simply by the other lot being not up to much. That is what will fuel the UKIP phenomenon, that's what fueled the STP during the period when they were there. And I think if Cameron had treated UKIP in the same way as the major parties used to treat the STP, in other words they're going to get big and bold during the election, they're going to win by elections, we'll fine, let them. Ultimately if you start pandering to their arguments rather than taking them on and defeating their arguments they're going to end up at more power, no more power, not less. So I think Cameron's going to reap a whirlwind on this. And what about images is a very obviously part of the theme of this exhibition. I've got some doubts about the image of Ed Miliband on the soapbox. What do you think of that as an image? I think it's fine, I think it's fine. What depends back to the point about strategic communication being the communication of ideas over time is about what he says over time. And the image stuff will get analysed to an nth degree. Because of John Major and beating Neil Kinnock, it wasn't down to a soapbox, it was down to what happened in the five years prior to that. And so it all depends on, I'm not saying that stuff's not important. I'm the guy who, when we had the 97 election campaign we had three campaign buses and I was the guy who wanted the slogans to match up so that if anybody saw the three buses in a convoy it made sense. I'm not saying it's irrelevant, but it's not that important. What is important is what are you saying over time? What are the key messages and what are the policies that drive that? And that's in the end why, look images are really, really, really important. One of the best things about the exhibition I think is the kind of power and the variety that you can see as history has taken its course of how things have changed. But ultimately in all of those powerful communicators it's down to what they say in the end. And just finally then we'll open it up. There are times, and this must be very complicated for you when you have to project a message which you yourself are not entirely happy with. Famously with you I think it was education wasn't it? You disagree with Tony Blair on I think it's basically his entire, well not entire but quite a lot of his reforms in terms of schools. And you were the one who had to put the case for them. I mean that must be really difficult and challenging. It is difficult and challenging and actually on most policies stuff I didn't have a problem. I'll tell you when I found it, I don't know, I think it was probably about 2000, 2001 when I finally realised it was absolutely pointless me sitting in briefings and saying that I had the utmost respect for Claire Short. But on policy stuff it was difficult, it could be difficult. But in the end this is back to the point about, I know people don't like to believe this, but actually the power was his. If I'd have gone out and said, I'm not very good at hiding what I think. So for example, I'll give you another example, the whole Lib Lab thing. Tony was very keen on this Lib Lab. I was a little bit sceptical. And the truth is the press all knew that. And so I would have to go a little bit over the top in terms of communicating this. People do read other people. Part of the exhibition is about the Falklands and you have that guy McDonald who was the... The civil servant who was sort of speaking clock. Now that time was thought to be the right thing but let's be absolutely frank, in the modern television age the public are not going to listen to that sort of voice. They're just going to channel hop and they're over to the next thing. So the communicator has to communicate a sense of conviction and authenticity. Even if the audience is a very sophisticated group of political journalists. So they could sense if I didn't believe it. 95% of the times I had no trouble at all. When it got really difficult, it was more the personal or the political stuff. That was when it got difficult. I can well imagine. We've covered modern media pre-97 onwards. We can now open it out for some questions. So the lights are going to go on a bit so I can see. And I think there will be a microphone coming, won't there? So if you could put your hand, I can see a hand there. If you'd like to start. If you say your name because I think there will be quite a few questions if you keep it as short as possible. Thank you. I have a question about the speed of communications because with the age of social media and with anyone being able to be a publisher on Twitter or on a blog, then communications are speeding up. Do you think that because of that messages have become more sensational in order to get the pickup particularly from the mainstream media where there is actually still a very limited space and lots of people are sort of clawing for it? The reason why I think social media is good for the politicians is because if you like, the control over the agenda is dissipating. The public can have a much bigger say in what is now genuinely newsworthy. One of the things I look at on Twitter, I go on Twitter, I don't know, five, six times a day just to have a quick look and I dip in and out and I tweeted a few pictures from the exhibition because Jude told me to and said it's fantastic and all that. But I like to look at what's trending. Now, if you're watching Manchester United against Chelsea live on Sky, seven out of the top ten trending topics are going to be from that. So park that when it's just like a big sporting event that's going on. If you're looking at a massive event like Margaret Thatcher's death and that's going to sort of drive huge traffic. But what I find really interesting is seeing those occasions and they happen a lot where stories that are not getting up, picked up much in the mainstream media, aren't on the news, are suddenly being trending on Twitter. And then what I know follows from that is that journalists see that as well and they sort of think actually that we should be doing more about this and then you'll turn on the news the next evening and there's a report about it. And I think that's an interesting... Now for the politician who's got a strategy, who's got a strategic message, then it's great because you can just keep saying new things that are applied to your core message. Ashley Obama does this really well. He did it really well during the election campaign as well. I think the very few British politicians I think have yet got the hang of Twitter. It's interesting that... I don't know if it's still the case but I think the two most followed people in British politics on Twitter are me and John Prescott. Now, I think it's fair to say we're both a couple of Hasbeens. So especially him. Please somebody tweet that. You'll get a response before the end of the day. And I'll get a abuse all night. But I think Boris might be up there, I don't know. I bet he is. If you think about it, you go through the cabinet. Now look, the cabinet, they're really important people. They are. They matter. They make decisions that affect all of us. And yet they're not engaging in a way that's making people think actually it's worth listening to what they're saying. But Steve will tell you, I'm pretty on message. I'm pretty on message. You won't find me criticising Ed Miliband. Even at balls. There's a bit in the diaries. No, I think it's about the voice. I can remember this thing about message control. I can remember about a year after I left. This is about 2004. I was driving up the M6 to see Burnley. I spent a lot of my time doing that. I won't say who it was, but a member of the government came on the radio and did this interview. And I promise it was so bad. I almost crashed the car. I was screaming at the radio. Because this person who should be nameless, she said the same thing eight times in answer to the same question. She? How many she's were there? There's quite a few. There were more then than there are now. I'm being heckled by my daughter here. Anyway, I ran into her about a month later and I said, by the way, I've heard this interview you did. I just had a very frank word with her. She said, but you always told us. Make sure you get the point across. And I said, it's not the same thing as saying the same thing. Do you know who used to do this? Do you know who used to do this brilliantly was John Reid. John Reid and Jack Cunningham. You could brief John Reid and Jack Cunningham five minutes before they went into the studio about quite a complicated situation. And they'd go in and they'd speak, but it was like they thought about it. They had. They thought about it. They'd absorb the argument. If you just put out somebody else's argument, the public pick up on it like that. I might be able to guess the answer, but why is it that the reputation of politics in many democracies, including this one, is it such a depressingly low ebb? I think it is. Honest, I don't know all of the answers. Look, if you go back a bit, how many people have been to see the exhibition? OK. But one of the things that's quite interesting is just to see how things have changed, how the pressures. I mean, I've just read this amazing book about Churchill's relationship with De Gaulle. Now, if you read it, there's lots of stuff in there where they are saying things in public, OK? Which were they subject to the level of scrutiny that politicians today are subject to, they'd have been in real trouble. But there was a sort of understanding that particularly in times of war, war leaders could kind of go out there and frankly not just be economical with the truth, but propagandise to their heart's content. And you could say that actually, when you look back at those periods, you think of some of the huge figures in our history, Churchill being the most obvious. I think people look at politicians now and because they see more of them, television, they are maybe less respectful. You then say, you can throw in things like the controversy over Iraq or MP's expenses and so forth. Now I happen to think we have the least, amongst the least corrupt politics in the world. But that has defined our politicians in a certain way. How many people here can name an MP who did not fiddle their expenses in any way whatsoever? Not many because hardly any of them got any publicity or any coverage. But actually loads and loads and loads of them. You look at their entry and it gets a zero. Or it's a few stamps. So I think that is all built up. I think the other thing is that the work, the challenge to politics has become a lot harder because the problems are much more interconnected now. It's very, very difficult for individual governments to kind of solve all of the problems that we face. But I think your point about democracy, I'm not arguing here for an end to democracy, but I think we do as democracies have to face up to the fact that the non-democracies, China and those that are pretend democracies, Russia, some of the developing democracies, they have got massive and built advantages against us at the moment. That is something which I think the public have to face up to as well. You all being here tonight suggests that you've got an interest in politics. Let's be honest, a lot of the British people take no interest in the world around them whatsoever, other than as a sort of place to whinge about what's going on and blame other people. Individuals have to take responsibility for politics as well. Now I would bring in all sorts of things. I would definitely lower the voting age. I would teach politics in school from a very, very early age. I would teach it just as we teach sport as a positive. Politics and public service should be treated as a positive as well. Over a generation you might change things. But at the moment I think it's a real worry about what people think about. The sort of people are going into politics. What I mean by that is the sort of people who would not think about it because of what they know will happen to them. That their family gets turned over, that you don't go into politics to get rich, that's for sure. I think that a lot of people who might have thought about politics in that Churchill generation, they wouldn't even given it a moment's thought now. I think we should worry about all of this. Let's go to this side yet. The mic just there in the third row. I'm currently studying for my GCSEs and in one of my English information and ideas lessons we studied a conservative poster. That made me think, what do you think makes an effective piece of propaganda? What was the poster? It was the, I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS poster. That turned out well, didn't it? Parked me internet memes. That is really interesting because that was the one that became famous for being called the airbrushed poster, wasn't it? David Cameron, and apparently it wasn't airbrushed. There's something extraordinary about Cameron. He's in his forties, but he really doesn't look like he doesn't shave, isn't it? It's kind of weird. I'm just making an observation. He's got no wrinkles at all. It's kind of weird. That poster, I'll cut the NHS, I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS. Sorry, I'm saying what he's done rather than what he said. That was a really interesting example of how things work because they launched that poster and I think it was the Daily Mirror who first used the word airbrushed. Airbrushed just went round the sort of social media and it became a really, really, really big thing. If you want a really good laugh, it's still going I think, somebody set up this website called MyDavidCameron.com where you could post your own version of this airbrushed picture and there were thousands and thousands and thousands of them. When I knew that poster campaign was a total disaster for the Conservatives, it was a picture in the times of that poster on display on a billboard in Guilford, which you thought was fairly safe to be honest, but anyway, they've got the poster there. Somebody had gone up in the middle of the night because the strap line was we can't go on like this. We can't go on like this. Somebody had gone up in the middle of the night and they painted Elvis Presley's hair on David Cameron and they'd added down the bottom and said, we can't go on like this with suspicious minds. All I'm saying is that was better than the real poster. My favourite poster that we ever did was the one I had in the film. This is what was so interesting about Mrs Thatcher's death and all this eulogising and all the rest of it. 2001 election, we basically won it by saying we don't want to go back to Thatcher. So we put Margaret Thatcher's hair on William Hague and said, vote Labour on Thursday or they get back. It's interesting isn't it, how that was seen as a vote winner then in the build up to the funeral. She was seen as the magic waving of the wand that could get them votes again. It's interesting. Let's go further back. Further up on the right, the guy in the jacket, you'll come to him now. My name is Stephen Green. Don't you think it's rather interesting if you think of our postal prime ministers, possibly the man whose reputation as best of the test of time was Clematon, who as far as I can see couldn't care less about public relations and presentations. There's a very famous story about him on the day that the election campaign started when he was walking down, he went for a walk at lunchtime and a Times reporter bumped into him and said he couldn't believe his luck in bumping into the athlete on the day the election campaign was called. And he said, is there anything you'd like to say to the Times about the forthcoming election? And he said, no. And he walked on. Now, the first thing to remember is he only won one election. The second thing is it was a total two. It's not two terms. Sorry, you're absolutely right. Two terms. But the other thing to say is that these were total different times. But also, Steve Swords about Mrs Thatcher is important. Because now, she's a very, very controversial figure. And I think, you know, to be honest, I think the kind of the centre of gravity of the coverage just got a bit out of kilter. Because I think the propaganda is interesting. I hope Judith will forgive me for pointing out that there is a section about that just funeral in the propaganda exhibition over the road. And I think the Conservatives did go out of their way to use it. And it became very, very difficult. I mean, you know, Ed and the Speaker and everybody else, they were put in an impossible position. But I think that it is interesting that her reputation that was best controversial while she was in power, and as I said from the way that we used her in our campaigns, seen as a negative by her own party and by us for quite a period out of power. And death, when people make her, if you like, a broader, possibly fairer judgment, seen as a huge figure and truth, she was a huge figure. So I think that that goes back to my point about strategic communication being about communication over time and you never stop and you just keep going. History is very important in that as well. Yeah, yeah. I must ask you a question about recent history. Yeah, the guy will go from side to side, so to speak. Y Llywodraeth. What are the things that the public does not want to hear? In other words, things that are true, but if any politician says it, then they're out of power. OK. Well, it's not they're out of power, but I mean, for example, in my previous answer to the gentleman over here, I sort of criticised the public a bit. That's always quite tricky. But actually, I think politicians should do it much more. I really do. You know, for example, the whole thing about people's complaints about the public services that they make. The fact that, you know, or they only get engaged with talking about a public service when they go out to criticise it because something has gone wrong. We all of us have a vested interest, I think. You take something like the National Health Service that was sort of proclaimed as part of the Olympics opening ceremony and all the rest of it. At the moment, there's a demonisation going on of people who work within the health service. And I think, as members of the public, rather than play into that, as we all tend to do, and sort of join the herd, stand out against it. So I think that the politicians who criticise the public, that's always difficult, I think that sometimes the public do not like to be told that what they deem should be possible is not possible. But again, I think politicians have to be much more honest about saying that. Because back to the point I made earlier about politics now becoming more complicated, the idea of an election being a place where you say, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this. It's not as easy in a way as it used to be. Even back in 1997, you know, we had a fairly limited, the famous five pledges. Cut class sizes, and we did it. Cut the NHS waiting times, and we did it. The new deal for the young and employed, they were not saying they were easy, but it's much more complicated when your economy is now so interconnected, when what happens in the eurozone profoundly does affect what happens in our economy. Life's just got a lot more difficult, I think, because of globalisation. There have been upsides to it, but there have been downsides as well. And I just wish the political debate was more open and honest about that. And then it becomes about values. You actually start to vote for party A against party B because of what they believe and what they stand for as much as for the kind of, here's the detail of how I'm going to cut the deficit, not the NHS. Nice, easy promise to make, he's failed on both. Okay, let's go to this side. Yeah, what about the... I'm feeling for these guys over here. Lady, you've got our make over here. Okay, we'll move there next, we'll move over there next. We might have to take two or three at a time and get a few in. Hi, if I can return to what you were saying earlier about the images of politicians as opposed to what they're actually saying. I mean, my English teacher's going to have my head for this, but how much overanalysis do you think there is in terms of, you know, Edmine Abandon's soapbox and all of that kind of stuff, because I am quite sceptical about how much that stuff really matters. And what is your English teacher think? Well, everything's analysed to, you know, the T, basically. And everything has about 100 meanings, or if everything does. Right, because if I go around the place and people, as they do, just come up and start to talk to you about politics and stuff, people do talk about the way politicians look and they do talk about the way politicians sound and they do talk about the way politicians dress. Now, it's really annoying, but it's real. For example, when we were having a cup of tea backstage and I said, why does David Cameron always wear a blue tie? Have you noticed that? He only ever wears a blue tie. Now, maybe it's his favourite colour, maybe it's a political statement. I don't know, but there's me, as like, you know, who would like to think of myself as quite a well-educated, sophisticated political thinker, and I'm saying to Steve Richard, why does David Cameron always wear a blue tie? No, it's not going to change the way I vote, because I'm not going to vote for him if he's the last person on earth. Well, I might, if he was the genuinely last person. Tweet that, Alice Campbell might vote for David Cameron. No, no, no, no, no. If he is the last person on earth. I mean, we used to, you know, it's like, I can remember, oh, when was it? You're talking about phone hacking, right? Back in 1990-something, when it was all about, what do they call those? Pages. Oh, pages. Well, they're pages, right? My page number was 01523523523, and the number was 8973223. Famous page, if that was. You definitely too young to remember this, but our pages got hacked. Do you remember this? Yeah, pages. So the BBC did this story about the messages from our pages. And the one that they used was Angie Hunter sent a message to me for dot, dot, dot, dot, apostrophe S, sake, do something about his hair in capital letters. Because we were out somewhere, the wind was blowing and Tony's hair was kind of all over. Now, why does that matter? Because if he's on the television saying something and his hair doesn't look like you expect his hair to look, you're going to think, what's wrong with his hair? Won't listen to a word of what he's saying. And you won't hear a thing of what he says. Gordon Brown used to have a terrible trouble with his tie. And the number of people who would say to you, why can't Gordon do his tie straight? Gordon was like a big brain, right? And he probably, he wouldn't care less about his tie. He'd be happy if he'd never had to wear a tie. But if you're on the television and your tie is a bit over there, it's just the way it is. When did you notice people got their hands up? This guy, that guy and that guy. Do you mind, we'll take... OK, let's... What do you think the long term, the future is for left-of-center media, such as it is? Left-of-center media. One certainty about the next election is that Labour and Ed Miliband will be in the dark. There will be stories accusing of being a traitor, vicious, nasty, personal stuff and all the rest of it. And I suspect these people are already fishing around. They've already probably got a bank of stories that they're going to use at the next election. And it'll be very much a pro, you know, what a wonderful person George, the Chancellor has been sorted out the mess that Labour left us. The other thing that worries me is that the next Conservative manifesto will probably contain a clause for the privatisation of the BBC. And the news part of it will well be delivered to their friends in the media, you know, the Barclay brothers or whoever. And we might end up with, you know, Fox News UK over all the media, if Sky will go pro-conservative. OK. Sorry. It isn't very interesting point about the next election actually. Clearly it's going to be a bit like 92 when they went for Neil Kinnock. And, well, I suppose your question is on that front, is should, do you think they will? Is there a media counter to that? Or do you think basically the Guardian and others are sort of almost dying in front of our eyes? Does that worry you? Well, the thing is, maybe this is wishful thinking. This is obviously quite an educated, sophisticated audience. No, January. So how many people here, show of hands, if I may, thought there was a sort of grain of truth in what that gentleman was saying in terms of how our media is and is likely to be. So I think you see there is greater public awareness now that that is kind of what they're about. I think the way that they've reported and handled the Leveson inquiry has been a further blow to their own erosion of their own credibility because they are trying to be both spectator, player, and commentator in the whole thing. And I think the public are onto that. When you look at the polls that are not published, people have a very, very different view of the press than they used to. And I'm not saying that doesn't mean that if they, just that they're lighted upon lines about Neil Kinnock, the Welsh windbag, or the last person put the lights out, and all that. I'm not saying that might not have had an effect. But I don't think the British people are stupid and I think they can, some may be swayed. Some may be swayed. I do think that, for example, in relation to Europe, I think that the press has driven a lot of the agenda to the position where we're at. But it's Cameron who has now pushed it into the place where you could be running around it. In respect to the newspapers, haven't the slogans, as we're here pegged to an exhibition on propaganda, they've been quite good on slogans about the recent past, which is always a dangerous area. Don't give the keys back to the guys who crashed the car. That kind of thing, quite accessible. Rhedda didn't take off. But what are the equivalent? New Labour are very good prudence for a purpose, for the many, not the few. I'm not saying this is the most significant thing in politics, but as we're here talking about messaging and propaganda, I can't think of any counter to those at the moment. Very snappy, accessible. That's why it's backed. You see, I've said before that I think that part of the... While we were busy electing a new leader after we lost the last election, the Tories were very, very disciplined and systematic in laying this message down about the mess we inherited. Let's forget the fact it was born in the subprime mortgage market in the United States. Let's forget the fact that this affected every single country in the world. Let's just get it absolutely pinned on Gordon Brown. They've been pretty good at that. We have not pushed back hard enough on that. I completely accept that. Now, but in terms of what happens come in the next election, will the papers have that ability to shift opinion in the same way that they may have done in the past? I go back to the point I made about the sun-backed Blair. We led that. That was not them shifting their readers. That was them recognising their readers had shifted. I think that too many politicians... I once had an interview with Clinton about this stuff, and he said too many politicians define their reality according to the media as opposed to use the power that they have as politicians to create the framework in which the media then has to operate. I think it's turning... One of the reasons they hate us still, and still would happily bury Tony Blair if they could, is because we did actually set the agenda. You have to set the agenda. At the moment, I don't think Cameron is setting the agenda in so far as he is. He's been pushed around. Between now and the election, Ed has got himself in a position where if they do throw that kind of stuff that you're talking about, the public are thinking, well, I know why they're doing this. Now, let's see. OK. These two are the longest... OK. OK. The mic's coming down here, and then I promise you... Up there. It's sometimes said, if propaganda is effective, people may stop believing it. I sometimes wonder, maybe I've seen too much of Ori Bremmerer, but do you think there was a danger that you're so affected with what you did that maybe people began to think there was been? Then moving on to Gordon Brown, he was not effective enough. With Gordon Brown, I thought, does he actually believe what he's saying? There seem to be mixed messages coming, at least with Tony, you knew what you're guessing with him. That's interesting. I remember Jack Straw saying that he thought that just as sort of yes, Prime Minister, kind of got that era and spitting image kind of did for thatcher in terms of the authoritarian figure David Steele in the pocket of Owen and the rest of it. He thought that the Rory Bremmerer sketch with me and Tony sort of did for Tony in a way, and that's what led to the thick of it and all the rest of it. Now, I don't think that mattered in the end because I think there was a grain of truth when people often say, you recognise yourself in the Malcolm Tucker character, and I say, what, you mean the psychotic Scottish spin doctor who feels he has to control the politicians and the media? But I think that the Rory Bremmer, that sort of sense of, look, if you think that spin is what I define as strategic communication, then it's real. I would defend, I wouldn't just defend it as being important and essential, but also as totally legitimate. A legitimate party, particularly in a democracy, you have to have a very strong strategic communication function. If you don't, particularly with our media, is you get blown away. And this idea that politicians shouldn't sort of fight for what they believe in and argue and try to win the next election, it's part of what they're there for. Just on the Gordon Brown example, it is interesting, because he was, you all know much better than me, but I know a bit, he was pretty obsessed by the media, actually. And rightly so, they mediate. No one watches politics 24 hours a day, so you depend on the media. So given his obsession and interest in it, why could he not convey a message by the time he became Prime Minister, do you think? I think he could. Let's remember, if you look back at the last election, when I went back to help, Gordon was particularly in relation to preparing for the TV debates. If you look back at that election, I mean, the playing field was absolutely made for David Cameron. Economy not going well and Gordon getting the blame. Expenses are defined in the last parliament and Labour MPs were going to jail. The war in Iraq was back in the headlines because of the inquiry. Afghanistan was going not going well and Gordon was copying it for that as well. The press were giving Cameron an absolutely easy ride and he didn't get a majority. We had the whole bigger gate thing and we won in Rochdale, we won in Rochdale, where that happened. So I think that Gordon, he could communicate at his best, Gordon was a really powerful orator. Some of the best conference speakers of our time were him really sort of delivering, delivering a message and he was a driver message. But I sometimes think that Gordon would have been, I talked about the previous era, not just the pre-television, but pre this 24-7 relentlessnessness. I can imagine Gordon with the qualities that he has and with the strengths that he has and with some of the weaknesses that he has, I can see Gordon in the Gladstonian era as an absolutely massive political figure. But there's something about the relentlessness of 24-7. Another one who's interesting in this who also figures in the propaganda exhibition is Bush. Now Bush, there's America where you think that's the biggest, most difficult democracy of them all in terms of campaigning and all the rest of it. So Bush has won two elections. He's got to have something about him. He's got somebody who was much, much, much more impressive in private than he was in public. Now how do you explain that? The minute the cameras came on, something happened to his... and he just became like a different sort of person. Weird. It is interesting. Now where was the... up there, I promise? Do you think it's good, bad, even dangerous for a party when their political spokesman, their press secretary becomes a media personality, a celebrity in its own right? Celebrity? Look, I didn't do top gear when I was in Downey Street. It's not good, but it's very hard to avoid. I mean, at the moment, there's a lot of talk about this guy, Lyndon Crosby, the Australian guy. Now, and it's true, when I left, for example, I was replaced... This is going to sound really boastful. I was replaced by three people. But the job that was given to the guy who was doing the briefings, Toba Kelly and Godric Smith, was in a sense to take the heat out of the briefings, to make them less of an event. Fine? One was a civil servant, wasn't it? Both. That happened, and it calmed things down. When Gordon came in, he said, we've been damaged by sleaze and we've been damaged by spin. Now, once you say that, and you say that as your framework, you've got to be really careful because if you accept the sleaze agenda, you stop doing the fundraising that you need to do to fight campaigns, and that happened, and if you accept the sort of... it's all spin agenda, you stop communicating. And that happened as well. And so you've got to be... I can remember, I used to get a little bit worried about this, and I can remember Tony saying to me, look, you've got to understand why they're doing this. They're building you up in the way that they do, in the same ways they do with everybody, so as they can try and knock them down. But they're also doing a relation to you because they're trying to build up the line that I can't cope without people like you around me. And he was big enough not to worry about that, because he knew that ultimately it didn't... it didn't ultimately really matter. Have you ever met anybody who said, I'll vote you Tony Blair, but I'm not going to vote for him now because of that Alistair Campbell? I bet you haven't. You might have said I'm not going to vote for him because of your rack, I'm not going to vote for him because of spin, and then when you probe it, it would actually be about issues. I've just finished a book about Ireland, about my diaries in relation to Ireland. Tony's written a piece for it, and he said really, really, because he is quite a thoughtful guy, but one of the points he's made is actually when people think back about his time in government now, people do actually think about the things that are important. I mean, I could throw... if you go through those diaries out there, there are frenzies, there are so-called crises, there are scandals that I promise you, 95% of people in this room would have totally forgotten. At the time they led the news for a week, they just don't, they're not important. So the thing about me as a character, a personality in the government, I was there, I was a real person, I was doing the job that I did, and I attracted a lot of heat. And don't forget, the other thing is that it's important, in those positions, top guy, they do need lightning conductors. Sometimes it was me, sometimes it was Peter Mandelson, sometimes it was Derry Irving, sometimes it was Charlie Faulkner. That was part of the job. And it's part of the fact that you need to have a team of people who are frankly taking the hits. And I didn't mind doing that. Cos I genuinely reached a point where I really, really didn't care what the papers said. And I don't know. No, that's clear from the dice. And this will be the last one I'm afraid, just because we've run out of time. Right in the corner. OK, right in the corner, you've had... Top right. The mic is coming. Oh, this build up, so exciting. It's better be a good question. Alistair, you've spoken about democracy and you've spoken about political education and touched on the deficit. Alistair, would you accept that new labour, or just the Labour Party in general, tends more to use public spending at all than other parties? And secondly, did you at the time have any worries about the long-term sustainability of that? There's a good question. Very pegged to this exhibition, yeah. I certainly think that for a period, we, and I think particularly Gordon who were in charge of that side of things, I think that we did think sometimes that announcing that we were going to spend money on things was of itself a good thing to do for our political purpose. So, you know, if you think about the spending reviews and the budgets, people know you have to kind of, you have to outline the state of the economy, you have to say where you're going to raise money, and then you have to, you know, they usually end at even George Osborne as to end it with some sort of, you know, he didn't see that one coming, but I'm going to spend money on this. Now, I think that, and let's be absolutely frank, this is why I think we've said to the gentlemen earlier that I think we've not pushed back hard enough on the kind of the Conservatives' message about our time in power, because let's just remember we did have 10 years of growth and prosperity, growth and rising prosperity, and we were spending more on the public services, and it ended badly. And it ended badly not to my mind because Gordon Brown spent too much, but because there was the financial crash that hit the whole of the developed world. And I think we should be saying that far more often. But in direct answer to your question, did we see that as politically useful to us? Did we successfully over that period of time frame an argument so that the Tories felt when they came to the election, that we had to say we won't cut the NHS, otherwise they felt they'd never get elected, then, yeah, that part of the question I'd agree with the premise. Is that what you meant, or did you also mean using public spending for actual, formal kind of government messaging, advertising and things? Oh, I see. I don't know. Which did you mean? Just putting the case for public spending and forming a headline. That's also a spectrum between long-term gain and the next week politically. So did you see that spectrum much at the time? No, if you had a headline saying, Labour to spend £40 billion more on the NHS. That would, let's just say, and let's say that was true, and that was what you wanted to communicate from that announcement. That is, of itself, useful to have. Useful in a microscopic way. Far more important is then what happens to that money being spent and whether it delivers better healthcare, more hospitals, more nurses, more doctors. So I don't think, look, you want in government or in any project you want a sense of, let's just take this exhibition. You had a launch yesterday. You invite the media. You get out and do radio. You get on television. You try and get the public to come in. You want to send some momentum behind that. You then want people tweeting, say, been to this exhibition, really enjoyed it. And then other people go, and that's, you know, in any project that's happening. So that's happening in government as well. And it's happening in every department in government. It's a small part of what they do. Far, far, far, far more important is actually what they do with the money and whether that project is working. And one of the problems I think this government has got is the extent to which they keep announcing things and doing things, and then these reviews come along and they say that hasn't actually happened. I mean, most of what we set out to do, if you go and read the 1997 manifesto, we actually delivered. We did deliver it. Won't it mean after my time? No, I think that's a fair point. Okay. And on that note, we've got to end the meeting. Thank you all for coming along to go to the exhibition and indeed read the diaries. But most of all, for now, thank you, Alistair Campbell.