Blair's fabled spin reels out of control
By Lyndsay Griffiths
LONDON (Reuters): The American art of spin doctoring risks dying a death in Britain unless Prime Minister Tony Blair can convince voters there is a message behind his stuttering media machine.
A steady drip of bad news turned into a deluge for Blair on Monday when newspapers splashed a leaked memo in which the Labour leader shows himself a prisoner to public perceptions.
It revealed a government as worried about image as its detractors had long claimed.
"If you live by spin, you die by spin," Bernard Ingham, who was spokesman for Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during her tenure at Downing Street, told Reuters.
"The biter is being bitten, and it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch."
The memo detailed Blair's fear that his government appeared weak on everything from crime to family values to defense.
"All of this, of course, is perception," Blair wrote in the April memo, going on to propose a counter-attack with two or three "eye-catching initiatives".
"All of these things adds up to a sense that the government, and this even applies to me, are somehow out of touch with gut British instincts," Blair was quoted as saying in the memo.
"I should be personally associated with as much (of this counter-attack) as possible," concluded the man who had been the envy of other Western leaders when he won office in 1997.
The embarrassing leak caps a dreadful summer for the government, which has flailed in the face of an opposition that has started to find its feet. Blair's large opinion poll lead of more than 20 points last year has been halved and there is now a distinct whiff of pre-election panic in the air.
"It is panicking because this is a government which has been all about image and suddenly this image is falling apart and there is nothing behind it," said Conservative chairman Michael Ancram.
Blair is seen calling a general election next year, even though his term does not end until May 2002, but few expect the sort of landslide he won last time around.
"Tony Blair got used to being thought of as walking on water. Now he's got his feet wet and he doesn't like it much," said Bob Worcester of MORI polling group.
Indeed the "Blair project" -- the premiership that appeared to have glitz, glamour and an unassailable parliamentary majority -- is in danger of being undone by the Clinton-esque powers of persuasion that helped to create it.
Nor is it just the opposition baying for blood. Plenty of loyal Laborites are aghast at the elevation of message managers over policy advisers.
"How will Tony Blair be remembered? Possibly as the prime minister who made malicious gossip an everyday tool of modern British government," Labour supporter and novelist Ken Follett wrote in a tirade against the spinmasters this month.
Calling them "the rent boys of politics", Follett said Blair seemed to lack a core of strong convictions.
The Guardian said the cost of the Strategic Communications Unit had risen to 839,440 pounds (US$1.25 million) from 77,633 in 1997/1998. Ingham said the Blair government had transferred 25 of the top 44 government information officers, all civil servants, in its first year and now had 74 paid advisers "spinning like tops".
"Tony's problem is he increasingly sees the world through spin doctors' eyes and although spin doctors have done him a great service, they may yet prove to be his downfall," leftist Labour MP Diane Abbott told BBC radio.
As for the mood inside the oven, Ingham remembers it well.
"This is not a happy morning in Downing Street," he said.
"On a day like this you need a sense of humor and a cool nerve, neither of which this government has. Thirdly, you need some concrete answers. Remember, they have only spin."