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As the fever child at Downing Street wrenches his well-spoken facilities in to an countenance of Churchillian gravitas and tells us that the all so horrible we competence as well dedicate mass hara-kiri, theres one man who looks in few instances cheerful. Hes a self-confessed depressive. His partys out of power. And hes obviously carrying the time of his life.
Alastair Campbell is everywhere. In the weeks heading up to the election, he was a articulate torso on telly all the time, dark and derisive and pronouncing and predicting, staid and ready to pounce on flitting newscasters to discuss it them who"d won the leaders" debates, and because the polls were wrong. He was, in alternative words, in excellent attack-dogform. You feel that if he could have wrestled each voter in to the polling counter and used a small Chinese burn, or a small poke at the kidneys, to convince them to put their cranky in the right place, he would have. But he couldn"t, and they didn"t, and the outcome (you can suppose him saying) is that the Tory nancy boys are back.
Even this doesnt appear to have wiped the grin thats some-more similar to a sneer off that more-famous-for-sneering face. For if the people have valid some-more foolish than feared, at slightest they"re great for something. They"re great for punishment books. A supervision falls, a mental condition collapses, a "project" lies if not in hull afterwards in a state where it looks flattering far from electable, but hold up goes on. There are the novels, of course, (about stupidity and celebrity, from one who knows whereof he speaks) but the the new, improved, and right away with combined acrimony, diaries that the open is, apparently, great out for. Now that they"ve lost it, we"re authorised to know the law about how New Labour muscled the approach to power. And it certain aint pretty.
It wasnt that flattering before, essentially all those cameos of Tony Blair in his underpants, all those fights, all those rows, all that Anglo-Saxon. "Is it true" a Times publisher once asked Campbell, "that you used to headbutt cigarette machines until they broke?" "I"m fearful so," Campbell replied proudly. Where Harold Macmillan sought condolence in Sense and Sensibility, the New Labour boys cold out to Arsenal and the Arctic Monkeys, or Burnley and Blur. Except that they didnt chill out at all. Like hyperactive toddlers fed wholly on E numbers, they raced around, screaming and fluttering and cheering and groan that Peter had been horrible and Gordon had been a bully. And right away we know utterly how horrible and utterly how most of a bully. Paranoid and young about sums it up. As, indeed, does Blairs outcome on Harman: "What a stupid arse!"
But the bullies and the underpants have (but not, one hopes, literally) gone. The grown ups are in charge. They dont have process meetings with bare cupboard ministers in the bath. They abstain from the clamour and the glottal stop. And if they cant occupy the disobedient step for their foul-mouthed untamed predecessors (or give them 100 lines) they can adopt an air of metaphysical calm that would, in a obtuse mortal, prolonged ago have cracked.
Its the same tinge you find in the new Prime Ministers Questions, the "no, no, after you"s, the "what a great point"s, the tasteful regard of wicked imbeciles who took the nation and wrecked it, but manners are manners and you were brought up never to flog a guy whilst he was down. Its the tinge you find in the programme for supervision too. "This is an ancestral document" we"re told in the foreword, one, the clear, in that correct courtesy will be paid to propriety, and unfixed articles. "Tackling the necessity is essential," we"re told, "but it is not what we came in to governing body to achieve. We stood for Parliament... with visions of a Britain improved in each way." A politer Britain, presumably. A calmer Britain. A Britain that doesnt display the effervescent of the Calvin Kleins.
The calm, it has to be said, wavers a small as the happy integrate go on to supplement to their innumerable vows one of "era-changing, convention-challenging, in advance [and never intentionally understated] reform". And, indeed, in their enterprise to "build a new economy from the rubble of the old". I"d utterly similar to to win a Nobel Prize, heal cancer, and wed Barack Obama, but my mom regularly taught me to cut my fit according to my cloth. But the over-all thesis is clear. "We both want" we"re told "a Britain where the domestic complement is looked at with admiration, not anger. We have a common aspiration to purify up Westminster and a integrity to manage a in advance redistribution of power".
Well, isnt that lovely? And the not only the half-educated half-wits on the antithesis benches who good from this remarkable escape of blue-blooded largesse. We do too! Like determined truants at a on-going prep school, we"ve been quietly sensitive of the minute to the parents, and the more-in-sorrow-than-anger thrashing that will follow. But, if it helps, we can manage the thrashings of the associate pupils. We can even assistance organize them! We can form committees on thrashings, we can pitch them out to the in isolation zone and sub-contract them. There will be pain, for everyone, but at slightest we can means some, too.
And there will be transparency. Lots of transparency. "We will" we"re told "extend clarity to each area of open life". We will, in alternative words, have certain that open zone workers who arent sacked are pilloried for their salaries. If everybody knows how embarrassingly small we, the budding ministerial partnership, earn, we"ll have damn certain that those who consequence some-more are publicly punished. Obviously, the friends consequence most more, but we"re not articulate about the friends. We"re articulate about the new, improved, "era-changing, convention-challenging" British Government.
There is, however, one worker of the British Government, and thus the British taxation payer, whose income has not nonetheless been revealed. His name is Andy Coulson. His pursuit pretension is Director of Communications at Downing Street. His prior pursuit pretension was editor of the News of the World.
Poor Andy has had a little decaying luck. While he was at the News of the World, trying, no doubt, to convince his colleagues to embankment the sex scandals and the stings in foster of essays on mercantile impulse and the destiny of the euro, they, it incited out, were contracting in isolation investigators to "blag" bank accounts, cheat military officers and penetrate in to the voicemail messages of the stately household. And bad Andy had no idea! If their responsibility claims were authorised, and he was the boss, and the bureau was open plan, well, he still had no idea. The former showbiz match was so repelled he quiescent the impulse he listened that his stately reporter, Clive Goodman, had been jailed. Thus ensuring that the PPC didnt have to confuse any one by receiving it any further.
Luckily, the hoodie-hugging Tory personality believes in "giving people a second chance", quite when they occur to be most appropriate friends with the editor of The Sun. So Dave brushed off Andy, and scooped him up, and put him in assign of "communications and planning". And if bad Andy was pang from post-traumatic highlight disorder, or at slightest mental recall loss he told a name cabinet of MPs last summer that he had "no recollection" of the events at the News of the World at slightest his contacts book was still intact. By the third day of the Labour Party Conference, The Sun had come out (for the Tories) again.
Andy Coulsons income on recruitment was at large reported to be "in the segment of" �475,000. When I asked Downing Street for a organisation figure, they refused to give it. The salaries of "special advisers" would, they told me somewhat untransparently, be voiced "soon". When Coulsons income is publicly announced, it will, no doubt, be lower. But given the Government wants the recommendations for cuts, heres one to flog off with. Sack Andy Coulson.
c.patterson@independent.co.uk
More from Christina Patterson
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