Always a murky business

Lance Price is better placed than most to write about ‘spin’ in politics, having worked as a BBC political reporter and as Alastair Campbell’s deputy in Downing Street.

Lance Price is better placed than most to write about ‘spin’ in politics, having worked as a BBC political reporter and as Alastair Campbell’s deputy in Downing Street.

In August 1997, Price was on duty for the BBC the weekend that the story of Robin Cook’s affair broke. In Where Power Lies he describes the ‘unusually rich array’ of other stories in the papers to choose from that weekend. A juicy item in the Sunday Times stated that Chris Patten, Governor of Hong Kong, could be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. Price says he telephoned Peter Mandelson, then de facto information minister, who confirmed it ‘off the record’. The BBC duly ran the item.

Within 24 hours the story was exposed as one of a number of bogus news items invented by Mandelson and Campbell to get the Cook story off the headlines. Which leads one to question why, shortly afterwards, Price eagerly acccepted the chance to work for Campbell in Downing Street.

For someone who was a senior press officer for Tony Blair when New Labour spin was at its height, there are disappointingly few personal revelations. If Price was ever tempted to pour even the smallest vial of hemlock into a lobby correspondent’s ear, he doesn’t confess here.

Price’s thesis is that spin and cynicism has destroyed all trust in the political process. Yet reading his account of relations between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Gordon Brown, one is struck not by how worse things are today, but how they have always been the same.

Witness the man Price says is entitled to be called the first Number 10 spin doctor more than half a century before the term was invented: William Sutherland, known as ‘Bronco Bill.’