It’s an extremely disconcerting feeling to find yourself glad to hear from Peter Mandelson, but listening to him on Radio 4’s Today show this morning, I found myself nodding along.

Asked about the dirty tricks campaigns dominating the run up to the election, Mandelson brushed the question aside and launched into a customary oleaginous rant against the BBC:

“I think the BBC would be much better advised to leave all this stuff well alone, concentrate on the issues as I say, not resume their demonisation of Alastair Campbell - we all know where that led before - and instead help the electors understand the issues.”

Obviously this is mendaciously disingenuous coming from the erstwhile Prince of Darkness who has torpedoed many a career with anonymous briefings to journalists.

(And you have to love that “we all know where that led before” crack. The reference being that people lost their jobs. Still at least in giving Alastair Campbell free-reign, Peter, nobody died. Oh wait a minute…)

But still, don’t get me wrong, I love a good dirty tricks campaign: Seeing someone as venal and lacking in class as Cherie Booth/Blair getting a kicking, as she got from Liam Fox in the Mail yesterday, gives me a naughty little shiver. Utterly contemptible people, after all, should be held in utter contempt.

And of course, personalising the political isn’t going to go away any time soon, at least not at the behest of a grubby little suit like Mandelson. But in goading the BBC for concentrating on what, at the end of the day, Alastair Campbell and Mandelson are paid to do, he might have started the media down the path of putting the pair, along with the rest of their nauseating ilk, out of business.

Take for example, the recent furore over the so-called anti-Semitic posters. This was extremely cheap publicity for New Labour - the posters didn’t appear anywhere but the party’s website. But at the end of the day, where did it get them? Nobody really gave a shit apart from journalists with columns and airtime to fill and politicians anxious to be featured in those spaces. It’ll be almost entirely forgotten by the election and so both Labour and the Tories have wasted a valuable opportunity to get their messages across. And the media seem to have realised they’ve been duped into giving that cheap publicity.

But even if the poster campaign has been forgotten, all this crapping on about dirty tricks, Freedom of Information request, how the taxpayer is funding - via Alan Milburn - New Labour’s election campaign is contributing further to the general background levels of contempt that the public feel for politicians. Which I feel can only be a good thing.

Sooner or later, politician’s are going to be so comprehensively hated or ignored by the public that something radical will have to be done whether it be electoral reform, more direct democracy or whatever. An even lower turnout at the election than last time might be the catalyst.

Of course, this is bad for democracy in the short term but it would mean politicians having to crawl out of their pits, stop flinging their crap around like so many ill-tempered monkeys and start re-engaging. The media complicit, as always, in the knifings and counter-knifings of modern politics and faced with plummeting interest in politics translating into lower circulation and viewing figures will have to tag along. Mandelson exhorting the BBC to ignore the dirty politics is - accidentally as far as he’s concerned - the beginning of this process.

So to Peter, Alastair, Liam Fox et al, I would say one thing: Congratulations, you’re one step closer to hitting bottom.

In the meantime, let’s enjoy the bare-knuckle boxing. More gut-churning stories of the Blairs’ adoration of cash? Knuckle-whitening tales of a passport-speeding, drug dealer-releasing Michael Howard?

Bring ‘em on.

Posted on February 7th, 2005 at 8:03 am

See also • Mandelson: party like it’s 1939 • Flatus Quo • Alastair Campbell: was Vernon Kay busy?		• Permalink • Trackback • Subscribe • Print
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