Top of the range page 1 exclusive in today’s Observer, courtesy of of their Chief Political Commentator Andrew Rawnsley, whose Cambridge education certainly hasn’t been wasted.
Tony Blair, we’re breathlessly told… Wait for it… Swears! Well fuck me who’d thought it? Politicians swear? I’d never have believed it if The Observer hadn’t told me. What next? Journalists drink? Footballers break the speed limit? Models don’t eat? Where would we be without lazy Oxbridge liberals filling up space in Sunday newspapers?
The story is really an excuse to run a blatant puff piece promoting their friend Alastair Campbell’s new diaries – he swears too y’know! Blair, we’re told, has censored his swearing in the diaries because it may affect his “image” and apparently we’re all so stupid we believe what we see on TV.
Unfortunately then we won’t get to hear about the time Blair called Roy Hattersley “a cunt” or his description of our friends from the celtic fringe as “the fucking Welsh”. What a loss…
Rawnsley – “I’ve been known to swear myself” (who’d o’ thought it)? – is very keen however to promote the tedious Alistair Campbell myth and help him flog some books.
He plugs away for Campbell, “[the book] is bound to be riveting and revelatory about the heart of New Labour. He was at the centre of events for many years, he spent more face-time with Tony Blair than anyone else, he has the eye of a tabloid journalist for good stories and the ability to write them up with colour and verve.”
Utter bollocks. Campbell, it’s well-known, was an utterly ordinary journalist and writer. He once spent three years as Political Editor of The Sunday Mirror without once getting a front page exclusive.
What he was was a first class brown-noser who understood his job was to keep his head down and always do as he was told by Maxwell and the Labour leadership. And he met them via the Hampstead Labour Tribune set of Bob Millar – his long term partner Fiona Millar’s father – who he courted assiduously.
Campbell is nothing but an ambitious and skilled social climber. Loyal to his “superiors” to the very end, his diaries will tell you nothing.