Disappearing lords

‘I don’t like him looking daft,’ growls Alastair Campbell to the camera as Bafta-winning documentary film-maker Molly Dineen shadows Tony Blair for the 1997 party election broadcast. The warning is clear. Forty hours of footage became a mere ten minutes of spin, but it’s testament to Dineen’s rapport with the member for Sedgefield that despite its brevity the film was described by the late New Labour strategist Philip Gould as ‘probably our most effective broadcast’.

Twenty-five years after her acclaimed debut Home from the Hill, Dineen’s collected works now fill three double DVDs. The third volume, just released by the BFI and an excellent Christmas gift for the politically inclined, includes what is humorously referred to as Blair: The Movie as well as 1999’s Geri, which follows former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell during the tabloid madness that attended her split from the band, and 2007’s brutally unsentimental look at the crisis in our countryside, The Lie of the Land.