Campbell Cleans Up

‘SPORTING a large bristling moustache, a beret and flanked by three identical looking minders, the Prime Minister’s spin-doctor Alastair Campbell sat before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Commons and went on the offensive.

A sexed-up Alastair Campbell

The Committee’s MPs, who had, most likely, planned to pin their man into corner on the matter of the two Iraq dossiers – one ”dodgy”; one ”sexed up” – found themselves on the receiving end.

On the question as to whether the dossiers’ contents were designed to justify Britain going to war with Saddam Hussein, the Times hears Campbell say how there ”was new intelligence which had been cleaned up for public use”.

How thoughtful of him and his men to change confusing words like ”opposition” to the more evocative and easy to understand ”terrorists”.

This was not done lightly, says Campbell, but at the behest of unnamed ”experts”, and not by members of his team looking to push a particular pro-war line.

Which is nothing like life at the BBC, where ”large parts” of the national broadcaster have an ”agenda” on Iraq, according to the man in the frame.

”When you have got this bad journalism amid the good, I think you have a responsibility to admit that,” the Times hears Campbell say.

”Something has gone very wrong with BBC journalism…and they better issue an apology pretty quick.”

And in a flash the bruiser becomes the victim.

The Independent hears Campbell go on at considerable length about the Beeb, which dared to suggest that the Government had sexed up the dossiers to win popular support for a military advance into Iraq.

It’s a ”lie”, says Campbell.

In the spirit of fairness, the paper hears from the BBC, which in a statement says: ”We do not feel the BBC has anything to apologise for.”

The sentence was then ”cleaned up”, with the word ”not” gone and ”anything” amended to ”everything”. And at once all was right in Tony’s kingdom…

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Posted: 26th, June 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink