One of the chief characteristics of New Labour, Blairism or the Project — they amount to the same phenomenon — is that many of the cheer-leaders began their careers not just on the far left of the Labour Party but so far to the left as to be outside the party completely. Peter Mandelson and John Reid belonged to the latter group; Charles Clarke, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Straw to the former. They then went on to serve Neil Kinnock with varying degrees of devotion. By and large, they had an unhappy time under John Smith, who tended to prefer old-fashioned Croslandite revisionists. But they return- ed to prosper under Tony Blair, whose most forceful critics were themselves in- clined to be old revisionists such as Roy Hattersley.
Into this pattern Alastair Campbell fitted quite snugly. His politics were formed by the treatment of Mr Kinnock by the predominantly Tory or, at any rate, Thatcher-supporting press. While Mr Mandelson was advising the leader and organising Labour’s election campaigns, brilliantly, so everyone said — though unfortunately Labour kept losing — Mr Campbell, for his part, was working as a journalist for the Mirror, in its Sunday and daily versions, and also for Eddy Shah’s Today.
Indeed, so devoted was Mr Campbell to Mr Kinnock, so determined to scatter his enemies and show him in the best light, that readers might have been forgiven for thinking that he had some private arrangement, whether with the party or with its leader. This is precisely what some people did think. After all, such arrangements were not unknown. Mirror journalists had sometimes been borrowed for party or even governmental purposes; George Brown had been subsidised by the organisation, while Hugh Cudlipp had designed and largely written Labour’s much-admired statement of policy for the 1959 election.
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