J'accuse!

To the Leveson Inquiry and on the stand the much maligned Alistair Campbell.

He offered some poignant examples of the Machiavellian arts of the press while he was Tony Blair’s press secretary which subsequently shed more light on Campbell’s ‘war strategy’ for New Labour. It reminded me of the film 'The Untouchables' when grisled vice cop Sean Connery explains the facts of life to principled flatfoot Kevin Costner. “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue!”

Campbell, appeared as the Professor of Spin. No-one has seen the media quite the way Campbell has. Except spin is not the original sin here. It is a ploy for turning a story on its head or getting a narrow aspect to be the common focus but its creation was to counteract the deceit, invention and intellectual corruption of the tabloid press.

Naturally he had a vast amount of strong examples. The best, on the theme of invented quotes, was a Mail on Sunday piece on the recent appael court verdict of the Amanda Knox trial in Italy. Clearly the hacks had been told to prepare for either eventuality but had miraculously inserted reaction quotes. This much suspected practise was exposed when the wrong version went on-line by mistake.

The implications for these editors obsessing about subjects could have more disturbing consequences. The teenage like gasping about MMR and its non-existent link to autism was fuelled by the Mail and the Express and led to a huge drop in vaccinations. Not just idiotic but “dangerous to public health,” he said. Blair’s refusal to engage with the media about his son Leo’s jabs led to headlines implying it was proof there was something suspect about MMR. Tabloid hysteria can often trump scientific fact as we have seen for many years with drug policy in UK.

Campbell’s submission was a more like a treatise setting out eloquently the history and process of the descent of the newspaper industry into the "culture of negativity". It hinted at times at a diagnosis of the flawed psychology of the tabloid editor.

But ultimately it was a depressing and disturbing picture of the evolution of the press desks of Murdoch Dacre and Desmond into news machines seeking to forge the nation’s consciousness into one based on fear, xenophobia, jealousy and contempt.