Alistair Campbell’s emotion on the Marr show

On his BBC Andrew Marr  interview this morning (Sunday), Alastair Campbell paused significantly for breath and in order to constrain tears when asked about Tony Blair’s honesty. For The Evening Standard’s Paul Waugh this was a repeat of Campbell’s C4 moment, when the latter stormed the studio shortly before the news and demanded to be allowed on, then subsequently took part abrasively in an interview with Jon Snow.  Campbell’s clearly a man capable of high emotion, surprisingly human to some, yet he’s also a master of media management.  Today’s moment was not a repeat of the C4 moment, it was its antithesis, in some ways even the antidote.

Campbell’s selling a book now. And it looks like he might in future join the ranks of journalists who have gone on to have very successful careers as authors (a la his mate, the excellent writer Robert Harris).  A lot of people have great respect for Campbell’s professional skills, yet those very skills have made him (unfairly, I think) hated by a lot of people who might otherwise buy his books.  He has to soften the latter if he’s going to be successful as a public personality in his own right.  That means making a virtue of necessity.  He made a big point of stressing ‘authenticity’ in his interview – a major theme in social media and, actually, in real life for most folk.  So he allowed his emotional side to come through in a way more helpful to his own interest.  Not the blustering and aggressive (for a journo) emotional bloke, but the sensitive and thoughtful emotional bloke, easier to like, easier to enjoy his books.

So, three things from the Alastair Campbell interview.  First, the emotional bit will ensure huge coverage.  Second, his book’s going to get that too and people might start to like Campbell a bit more.  Third, OK, I’ll probably buy the goddamn thing and contribute to his superannuation fund.  And I bet a lot of you will too!

On being banned by the MoD

Watching the largely pointless thing which is the Chilcott Inquiry, it’s hard to avoid, I recollect my own time defending the government line on Iraq when nervous ministers were unable to make it up the stairs of the studios. It’s a funny thing, well actually not that funny, that when ministers defend an unpopular policy, people give them some personal wiggle-room – they’re only doing their job after all.  During the Iraq War, some leading politicians on all sides were unhappy but stayed loyal to their party line in the name of the wider collective effort. Supporters would say that if you wanted decent folk in high places then from time to time they’d have to swallow stuff they didn’t like.  Politicians in such circumstances are usually as quiet as they realistically can be, ambiguous in their utterances if they’re forced into making one.

On the other hand, if you’re a backbencher supporting something unpopular because you’re asked by your leaders to, then no slack is cut for you.  There’s no ‘decent person in high place’ defence.  There’s a profound danger you’ll look hateful.  As a new MP, I certainly did that. I behaved more like the soldier I had just been than the new MP I was.  And the hate I attracted, personally, casts its gloom still. Luckily, though, I cleverly limited my exposure to preposterously frequent appearances on Newsnight, Channel 4 News, any news programme, any anything…… you get the idea.

Loyalty is important in politics.  But mindlessness is ultimately punished, and frankly so it should be.

I’ve spoken a fair amount, albeit less than some Tories, about Defence over the years. Recently, though, I’ve had reservations about some aspects of government policy (in areas where the government and opposition are pretty much on the same page).  I think we should be out of Afghanistan sooner than later; I think we give to much too the Americans for too little in return; and I tend towards thinking we shouldn’t renew Trident.  In many ways, that’s all pretty uncontroversial and I predict that regardless of who’s in government in 2012, Trident will be extended rather than renewed.

Uncontroversial to most, maybe, but not to one Defence minister who has ordered The Defence Academy at Shrivenham in Wiltshire to ban me from their premises.

As MPs often do, I was due to speak to officers there tomorrow alongside an opposing Conservative MP, at an event organised by the Academy and  the excellent Industry and Parliament Trust.  When the organisers sought clearance from ministers for guests to enter, always previously a technicality, the minister singled me out to be ‘denied admission’ on the grounds that I may not reflect his views, and suggested an alternative MP.  This seems to me a pity, especially since the government today issued a green paper on Defence which is designed to facilitate public discussion.

I don’t believe for a moment that the prime minister and defence secretary have have anything other than good intent as regards discussion about future defence policy.  But it does seem a shame, and rather odd, that a junior minister should wish to so blatantly gag an MP.

Still, we live and learn. We sure do that.

John Terry, Andy Murray: a moral story?

Was watching BBC Newsnight (may not have been on Newsnicht) last night and former ace Scots footballer Pat Nevin captured perfectly what I haven’t seen written anywhere about the John Terry business yet (but that’ll be my reading rather than rubbish sport journalism, most likely).

Nevin (you might not remember him, but I do) was completely unmoralistic, felt Terry should remain in the England team, of course, yet subtly and very effectively pointed out the unbelievably corrosive effect of the captain’s relationship being with a team-mates partner.

For a lot of people, probably not big football fans, morality will come in to it.  But if it truly does, how could anyone be a fan of any team sport at all, any public entertainment, without being a hypocrite?  Who knows what other members of the England ensemble, bosses included, have got up to in the past?  Never mind the fans.

That’s not to deny the possibility of morality in public or private life, I really don’t mean that. But it’s fair to say that if the talented people we all rely on to entertain us were subjected to a moral audit then music, sport, pretty much everything would the the poorer for it.  To say the least.

For many serious team sportswomen and men, the problem for Terry is that he’s in charge on the field.  That’s important.  He can’t be in charge of you if you think he’s going to tup (in the Shakespearean sense) your partner.  On the same programme (BBC Newsnight), the writer Toby Young typically described Terry in the visceral terms of battle, ‘a snorting, priapic bull’.  That’s why Terry’ll resign as captain, I guess. Today, there’s a commercial pressure on managers to make ’stars’ captains.  In truth, that’s far from the way team sports work. It’s far from the way life works, if you ask me (which, I grant, you didn’t).

But, for me anyway, it’s also a story of how team sport is soooo different from individual sport.  I remember Tim Henman saying he really didn’t care much about the ‘Henman for Britain’ thing – he just wanted to win matches and tournaments. It was a remarkably honest statement for an ‘individual’ sportsman in the throes of national attention.  He knew that in saying that, he ceded (morally, in the broadest sense, at least) the right to special status as a national representative.  Of course the media took no notice, undersandably. But it was important, all the same.

Henman, like Andy Murray today, didn’t have team-mates to let down.  He could be haughty and Murray childlike, neither particularly apealling public personnas actually  (but lovely in private, I’ve been assured) and it doesn’t matter to most folk. People don’t superimpose their lives upon these unbelievably talented people – they just want them to entertain and quite like it if ‘their’ guy wins.

The chatterati media are full of the liberal implications of John Terry’s gagging order on the media (and they are so right to be.  The Guardian deserves special credit).  Yet for most people, I sense, that’s of a lower order of importance.  The larger question, the one which drives a multi-million pound industry, is how the Terry, everyday, story can be accommodated in the context of a team sport which is set to enthral the world in a few short months.

It’s a game of two halves. Terry scored on Saturday – yes, queue the puns.  And England will do well (but not win) at the world cup.  Terry isn’t  supercool, anymore than the rest of us.  It’s just that he does what he does, so naturally and brilliantly.  He’s a professional (and, as it happens, smart) footballer. The red-tops, and the Mail, will pretend the morality thing.  But that’s just more sport of itself.  They don’t mean it.

I don’t think there’s room for morality in sport.  Is that a metaphor with wider implications?  I don’t pretend to know. I do know how much folk spend on Sky Sport subscriptions, though.

Most people put sport in it’s rightful place. It’s fun at least, inspiring at most, but its heroes are like the rest of us of the field.  The real heroes, the ones in Afghanistan, have their poor pay, and their medals disgracefully constrained by Whitehall.  Yet people don’t, on the whole, feel visceral about the latter.

Journos often use the sport/war metaphor – but it isn’t a good metaphor. It’s just sport.But it is what makes a lot of people happy.

Political blogging is really quite nice

@caronmlindsay has just alerted me to the fact that Scottish Roundup and has just published the result of a wee vote they’ve run on scottish Political blogs. I’m on it at no.6. Fair enough, my colleague Tom Harris is at 4 but you can’t have everything.  I’m pretty chuffed, actually.  Thank you very much to folk who put in a word for me – it’s very nice, I must say.

These polls are quite fun although they’re obviously meant to flag up the fact that there’s a lot of great political blogging going on in Scotland – most of the best ones get missed out of most lists.  I think there’s a trend towards blogging (and Tweeting too, actually) which recognises that we can have party allegiances but also be big girls and boys about it all.  And the more I learn from everyone else who engages in social media, the more I think that cheap knocking-copy doesn’t work here at all.  Folk just turn off.  In addition, while no-one wants to create a kind of oddball political class love-in, it’s pretty clear that living and letting live yields more for everyone.

One of my favourite blogs, for example, is Subrosa.  It’s vehemently SNP and anti-Labour, but it’s intelligent and says things which make me think sometimes about my own position on things.  There are also interesting poll-questions there, like the one on the front page now about MPs pay where the most popular outcome is the very sensible idea that MPs should be tied to a civil service pay scale (this has been broken now and I’ve no idea how the new overseer will decide, but I do know his decisions will continue to be controversial).

A lot of the key political areas and issues, like Euthanasia or Foreign policy, drive debates which aren’t party political in nature.  Sure, parties then have to fashion their own responses to them, but it seems to me that we often get the cart before the horse – taking up party lines before we’ve even thought about the issues for ourselves.  If parties are to be a bit more ‘bottom up’ then political dialogue shouldn’t be constrained by blind loyalties; not in the first instance anyway, surely?

Whatever, I’m not going soft and of course i want Labour and not the Tories to win the General Election in the UK.  But I do think that social media has opened up a huge new space for intelligent thinking, agreement and disagreement.  And long may it last.

ipad, @stephenfry, Steve Jobs, advertising

I have an imac and an iphone and find it hard not to be anything other than really enthustiastic about Steve Jobs and ipad. But I’m surprised with Stephen Fry’s posts on Twitter about imac this evening. Why?

Stephen Fry is a national treasure; a TV polymath for the ‘Countdown age’. He remembers lots of stuff.  Everyone loves him, including me.  He’s followed by a million people on Twitter, a medium which many experts say isn’t right for hard advertising.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Apple is launching a product which looks like it could feasibly put Amazon out of business (it’s Kindle is very smart, yet it might be dead by June).  Apple is pushing the Iraq Inquiry off the news tonight.  And tomorrow too (check BBC’s Today Programme tomorrow morning).  Make no mistake, tonight marks the beginning of a war to kill off Amazon.

Stephen has been Tweeting like a mad thing about ipad all evening –  here I am mentioning it, by default, again.  I don’t doubt he’s as enthused by it as the rest of us.  But if you have a million followers on Twitter (and probably 20 times more on Facebook) then thats a different matter.  For most,  you’re doing it for money.  I truly think Stephen Fry is a genuine bloke who doesn’t give much of a toss about the cash.  But it’s clear that those who guard his brand, the media professionals, now see it as good for selling stuff. Stephen Fry’s the vanguard in tonight’s advertising campaign regardless of what’s been said recently about Twitter not being a good platform.

Me?  For what it’s worth, I’m up for imaginative advertising if it buys me in and, important, makes me laugh. Check out @Aleksandr_Orlov (meerkat/market campaign).  But the Stephen Fry effort is just the easy and cheap selling of a national treasure’s candlabra.  I’m a politician.  Everyone hates the folk who get elected, right?  That’s life now.

But lovely Stephen Fry? Everyone’s going to love him until the next time his advisers sell that funny and lovely man for whatever is next.  Then there’ll be nothing left to make us laugh.  We’ll all be wondering what he’s selling.

Stick to being lovely, funny, clever mate. It’s what you’re brilliant at. Up to you, though.

Vodka stats and the Scots

A lot of media outlets have this week covered a story that adult Scots drink an average of nearly one bottle of Vodka, or nearly three bottles of wine, per week each.  That’s apparently a lot more than in England, so everyone there is having a giant laugh about alchie Scots today.

This story is based on the amount of pure alcohol sold every year in Scotland and across the UK. In a nutshell, the key comparative figures seem to be 26 units per week for each adult in Scotland as against 22 units for England.

But hang on a minute, isn’t there a difference between how much is bought in Scotland and how much is drank by people living in Scotland?

The UK (population 61m or thereabouts) had about 32m visitors last year.  Scotland (population just over 5 million) had over 20 million.  Over 90% of visitors to Scotland come from the rest of the UK but of course the number of Scots going the other way is only a fraction of that.  So net visitors to Scotland per capita dwarfs net visitors to the rest of the UK per capita.

And does it seem reasonable to assume that people on holiday are more likely to consume more alcohol on any given night than people not on holiday?  Of course it is. And has anyone spotted that Whisky is Scotland’s most famous export, and that much of the rest of the spirits made in the UK are made by Diageo in Scotland – so quite a lot of folk on holiday take a bottle or three away with them?

Without boring you with too much quantitative detail (about total overnight stays in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK), at a rough stab it looks to me that tourist visits and personal ‘export’ ( folk taking a bottle or two back to England) could alone account for around a third  of the differential between Scotland and the rest of the UK.  Perhaps the gap is still relevant, but it seems to me bonkers that the raw sales figures should be being touted by the whole UK media as domestic consumption figures without any analysis at all.

Unlike most media outlets, the BBC does point out that there’s a battle going on around minimum alcohol pricing in Scotland.  The SNP government here, and the medical establishment, want  minimum prices – the opposition (and the public) don’t and in Scotland that means it won’t happen.  The SNP has a minority administration, so they can’t pass legislation the other parties don’t agree on – this means they work hard to dominate the media agenda by other means.  And there’s a big election coming up, right? So…

This ‘new’ research is in fact sponsored by NHS Scotland, controlled by the Scottish SNP government.  Health warning required, then, surely? Not in terms of raw stats,  but in terms of presentation.

Some politicians, and many amongst the Scottish middle class establishment, seem determined to present Scotland as full of drunks. They say ‘we’ but usually mean ‘them’: the less well-off.  So, everyone else in the UK and quite a few people around the world, if you look at the links, are laughing at the Scots.

It’s hard to swallow.

Labour’s failed leadership coup (not coop)

I received a lot of emails on the back of my last blog post about last week’s failed leadership coup by Geoff Hoon and Pat Hewitt.  Thanks for those. You can also listen to more of what I said about it on R4’s Today program. The Scotland on Sunday asked me to write a piece on the subject so I thought I’d flag it up  here and reply to any comments anyone might have. I’d appreciate any thoughts, as ever.

Eric

So, who were The Chickens?

Thought I’d share a few thoughts about today’s wee excitement.

Pat Hewitt and Geoff Hoon sent out an email laying out their thoughts about the need for a ‘clearing of the air’ by the means of a Parliamentary Labour Party vote of confidence, or otherwise, in Gordon.  No, they wanted him to go.  There was little ringing ’round, as far as I can see (they didn’t ring close colleagues).  But, whatever, perhaps the most interesting thing was that quite a few members of the cabinet stayed quiet to see how it panned out. Ed Balls stepped up right away to attack the attackers, then Sadiq Khan, Jim Murphy and Shaun Woodward, yet that highlighted how the others were hiding.  The most benign analysis, and the one which served both Downing Street and the silent ministers, was that they were getting on with the job of government and were too busy to deal with the ‘fluff’ of Pat and Geoff.  I guess the moment of relief from Downing Street was when Jack Straw came out before the six o clock news to tell us; “nothin’ ‘appenin’ ‘ere now, it’s all over, just move along please’. It was all over.

So, what happened?

Well, Scotland’s political ecology is such that where there’s a threat to Labour seats it’s mainly from the SNP.  There are a lot of what folk across the UK would (complacently) call ‘heartland’ Labour seats.  MPs with Scottish consituencies aren’t best placed to judge the best thing for tight marginals in the South East.  I had emails from members in my constituency supporting Gordon very strongly.  Most regular folk in Scotland see Gordon for what he is – a decent man who wants the world to be a better place, especially for the less well-off.  There are quite a few Labour MPs in Scotland.  Labour is good for Scotland and current poll figures reflect that, for what that’s worth (ask ‘Yougov’ directors).

Meanwhile, back at the south-eastern ranch, a lot of potential Labour voters (yes, still) don’t see it that way.  I don’t have to do the whole pseudo-analysis thing here, but it’s pretty clear that those undecideds won’t be swayed by the same things as doughty, decent, public-service oriented Scots.  So, what to do?

As far as I’m concerned, in this case the Labour politicians best placed to judge are those in marginal seats in England.  Today, two things happened.  MPs like Steve Ladyman voted for Gordon.  Harsh reality this, but Geoff and Pat would say that doughty Scottishness isn’t going to win his seat better than whatever alternative is on parade.  So perhaps Steve et al think supporting Gordon is the right thing – there’s no law against it.

The other thing was that the cabinet ministers who’d held back, and of course the couple who’d pledged to act – Geoff and Pat aren’t daft – bottled.  Their (the two ministers) weakness was ridiculous – as are they.   A lot of people know who they are, including Gordon.  Not the media, for some reason.  If Nick Robinson knows, he’s not sharing. Near history will record it all, though.

Ultimately, Pat and Geoff said they way they think it is.  Some suggest that they might have said it when James Purnell did last year, or in 2007.  But there it is.

The air is cleared now, alright.  Labour faces an election where the Tories offer is far from fleshed out, less so sold.

But today’s most newsworthy detail was that two cabinet ministers created a flap in the pigeon coop, but turned out not to be foxes but chickens.

A Bit More about Chinook Crash

Having read today’s papers on the Chinook crash (e.g. Michael Settle’s piece in the Herald), I thought I’d post a short follow on comment from my blogpost of yesterday (see below).

First off, if I were Mike Tapper, the father of pilot Jonathan Tapper who was tragically killed in the crash, I’m pretty sure that like him and any Dad I’d have spent years trying to change the verdict of the MoD.  His single-mindedness is truly commendable.  And it’s quite possible that his comment that the problem is now one of lack of leadership from Labour was made on the spur of the moment. Yet I think it’s important to understand something about the politics, if I can call it that (and with a small ‘p’), of the MoD.

I’ve spoken personally to a number of former Labour Defence Secretaries about this. They were all extremely engaged with the issue and naturally feel strongly for the bereaved families (all 29). Boards of Inquiry following accidents, though, are very much ‘hands-off’ for ministers; and who would want it any other way? It’s very much about experts making expert judgements, just like command decisions in the field.

The fundamental problem for senior RAF officers is that once it’s been accepted that visibility on the day was patchy and that there was no radical loss of height before the crash, then it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that the pilots should have been flying well above, or around, the obstacle, as per standard operating procedures in poor visibility. Regardless of whether there was a technical problem or not, the fact remains that the aircraft would not have hit the Mull of Kintyre if the aircraft hadn’t been flying low.

David Davis MP, quoted in the article above, seems to be aware of this key point and calls for the MoD to look again at the ‘gross negligence’ decision, rather than suggest that the board made an error in determining the height of the aircraft as the key factor.  He has an arguable case, but it’s one with wide military implications and that really can’t be a matter for politicians to crudely overrule experts.

Ministers can, at best, hint about what they’d like to see happen (and it’s pretty obvious what that is) but there’s an important line they mustn’t, and don’t, cross.

And it’s worth considering this.  Once it was accepted that the pilots were in the wrong place, it would have been possible to have an open and intelligent analysis of why that was the case.  Were they subject to fatigue?  In which case perhaps work routines had to be adjusted.  Were there other pressures upon them?  Generally, for example, it’s more comfortable for passengers to fly high. But it’s not unusual for occasional passengers to want to fly low for other reasons and for pilots to oblige where they judge it’s safe. In all of this, it’s important to remember that 27 of the dead weren’t pilots and their families will have wanted to know why their loved ones died.

For my own part, and as a politician and Dad, I feel the same as David Davis. Military folk take great risks on our behalf and perhaps ‘gross negligence’ is too harsh a verdict. If senior officers can alter this, then that would be fine and appropriate.  But I’d counsel strongly against trying to falsely interpret the whole thing as party political – since that would imply that if the Tories win the election (which I hope they won’t) they would immediately intervene in operational military matters.  That would be a disaster, and I imagine it’s why Liam Fox MP, Shadow Defence Secretary, has kept his own counsel on the matter.

I truly hope all the families get the comfort they deserve, but it mustn’t be done by politicians acting as armchair Air Marshals.

Mull of Kintyre Chinook Crash and the MoD

I served as an Army staff officer in Northern Ireland in the early 90’s and left shortly before the 1994 Chinook helicopter crash at the Mull of Kintyre , in the news today , claimed the lives of  29 intelligence personnel and aircrew.  The scale of the tragedy was such that many of us serving in NI at the time knew someone on the aircraft.  Following the disaster, an RAF Board of Inquiry found the pilots, Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper and Rick Cook, liable for the crash.  This verdict has been hotly disputed over the years by campaigners including the officers’ families, former Defence Secretary Sir Malcom Rifkind and former Defence minister Lord Chalfont.

As I see it, the objections to the finding extend from two arguments.  The first is that there were shortcomings at the time about the aircraft’s FADEC software system and a number of highly qualified experts have attested to that.  It is hypothesized that something went badly wrong with the aircraft  which the pilots could not control.  The second argument is that in the absence of a clear causation, the equivalent civilian authorities would not have found pilots in that situation liable, whereas the practice at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is to do the opposite.  Some argue that this is unfair on the pilots, and of course their families.

Taking the first argument first; some people have suggested that following the emergence of the misgivings by experts about the FADEC system, the failure by the MoD to change the verdict over the years amounts to a cover-up.  However, I think this misunderstands the reasoning behind the original verdict.

It is accepted by all parties that the Chinook was gaining height very fast as it approached the Mull of Kintyre; indeed it very nearly made it over and the debris was scattered over the land and not in the sea.  It’s also accepted by most parties, although some do dispute this, that visibility was patchy on the day.  The RAF ruling, as I understand it, was based on the fact that since the visibility was patchy the pilots should have been following standard operating procedures and flying at high altitude (around 10,000 feet), or should have turned away from the Mull of Kintyre (but also, for balance, see Alex Thompson of C4 News).  Had they been doing so then regardless of whether or not there had been a cataclysmic failure of the aircraft, it would not have hit the Mull of Kintyre.  The inability of the inquiry to determine the technical cause of the crash (there was no ‘black box’) did not, for the Board of Inquiry, negate that fact.

The second argument, that it isn’t fair to blame the pilots when an equivalent civilian board may not do so, seems to me potentially a more political one (mainly with a small ‘p’).  The MoD operates enormously varied and complex equipments and human beings often bear great risk.  It’s essential that correct lessons are learned from Boards of Inquiry, even ‘though that may be painful for all of us (and particularly the families).  It is perfectly possible to argue, of course, that the consequences of civil disasters are every bit as great yet the civil authorities still feel able to err on the side of benevolence when no precise and conclusive evidence exists about the cause.

Some might argue that civil aircraft all carry black boxes, so it is rare for no conclusive evidence to exist; while military operational tragedies are frequently unaccompanied by clear single causations.  Nevertheless, this is the area most likely to yield a solution which campaigners might find acceptable, if indeed any is possible.

My own feeling, for what it’s worth, is that the Board of Inquiry was right to regard as critical the fact that the aircraft was flying low in patchy visibility, but that it might be possible to amend the options available to Boards of Inquiry to include learning the appropriate lessons yet erring away from blaming the pilots unless conclusive evidence about the causation is available.  (and see this for an interesting thought about the legal side of ‘gross negligence’) As I understand it, this was the recommendation of the two senior officers who conducted the pre-inquiry report, although this was overturned by the more senior officer who chaired the Board (who would clearly have hated having to reach that decision).

If the MoD changes its position it will, I think, be on that basis.  But it’s a very tough call.