Why the BBC cannot hold the right to account

Or how Alastair Campbell went from villain to hero as the BBC went the other way

The image of Alastair Campbell as a truth teller is hard to bear for those of us who remember the early years of the century.

But there is no escaping it. On TV just a few nights ago was the man who hounded the old BBC for asking legitimate questions about Labour’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, now putting questions to the pro-Brexit right that the modern BBC is too frightened to ask.

Brexit was “fundamentally damaging,” he said on the BBC’s Question Time as he confronted Nigel Farage. It knocked “five per cent of the economy”, left us “poorer, and weaker” and “hit our standing in the world”. Meanwhile, Campbell concluded, Farage has “never taken responsibility” for what he’s done.

That is hardly surprising when the BBC never made Farage or any of the other major figures behind Brexit take responsibility for their actions.

Nothing better illustrates the decline of a culture of accountability in the UK than the role reversal.

Who speaks truth to power now? Or even asks power the occasional hard question? The BBC or the former spin doctor?

Despite all the graduate courses, journalism is not hard. Much of the time it is a simple matter of asking about the promises of the powerful.

You said you would do X, why didn’t you?

You promised us Y, what happened?

In 2003 Tony Blair and the British intelligence apparatus promised the public that Saddam Hussein had sought "significant quantities of uranium from Africa" to make nuclear weapons. He would add them to his already terrifying stockpile of weapons mass destruction, which Saddam could deploy in 45 minutes.

So formidable was the threat it justified the UK joining George W. Bush’s war to overthrow him.

Campbell was Tony Blair’s spin doctor, a part of a government that made “spin” its leitmotiv.

Media owners are by definition wealthy. They are the natural enemies of centre-left governments. But Campbell had a level of control that no previous Labour government enjoyed, and that Keir Starmer can only envy today.

Blair reached a deal with Rupert Murdoch. In return for preventing regulation of media empire, Murdoch’s newspapers the Sun, the News of the World, the Times and the Sunday Times would go easy on the Labour government.

It was a corrupt relationship both for the newspapers and the politicians. Editors and journalists bit their tongues in the interests of maintaining Murdoch’s wider business interests. Few complained. They knew the score when they took Murdoch’s shilling. Meanwhile the Blair government gave business breaks to Murdoch in return for client journalism.

The pact with Murdoch “was always one of the things I was most uncomfortable about,” Blair said in 2018.

“On the other hand,” he added, as the memory of all that craven coverage cheered him up, “I have to say that in its early days it worked!”

The BBC was unbowed. It asked the hard questions the Murdoch press ducked.

There was an irony that few noticed at the time. The BBC is a state-funded broadcaster. You might expect it to doff its cap to the government for fear of losing its funding. But the BBC held the Blair government to account on the Iraq war while the supposedly independent Murdoch empire scraped and bowed.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam Hussein had used then to gas the Kurdish minority in 1989. UN inspectors had destroyed his stockpiles in the 1990s, however.

On and on the BBC went with the obvious question: why did you take us to war on a false prospectus? Did you lie or were you just stupid?

It all got out of hand. Campbell seized on a report broadcast at about six in the morning on the BBC Today programme and then expanded upon by the Mail on Sunday. Journalists alleged that Campbell had “sexed up” the dossier given to Parliament and the public on Saddam’s phantom weapons of mass destruction.

The implication was that Labour had lied to take the country to war.

The poor man behind the BBC’s report, David Kelly, a biological warfare expert and former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, committed suicide after being caught up in a hideous row between government and media.

There was an official inquiry by Lord Hutton a senior judge, which cleared the government and damned the BBC.

But public opinion did not accept its findings for a moment. Nor did I and other supporters of the overthrow of Saddam.

Everyone thought that the BBC was right to ask why we had been taken to war on assertions that were false. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell could never provide a convincing answer, and would never recover from the debacle.

Or so it seemed.

Today the question I am most likely to be asked by readers interested in the media is why has the BBC failed so miserably to hold the Brexit right to account. What on earth happened to the spirit of Iraq?

For Brexit was the Tory Iraq. A momentous national decision sold on a false prospectus. So brazen were Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings that they owned the furious libs by campaigning on a self-confessed lie that Brexit would save the NHS £350m a week.

They then promised that the fishing industry would prosper. It’s collapsed. They promised that farmers would flourish. They have been hammered. They promised that there was no need to believe Tony Blair, John Major and all the others who warned that Brexit would cause endless trouble in Ireland. Brexit duly went on to partition the UK and put an economic border in the Irish Sea. They promised that the UK would strike new trade deals with the US, China and India to compensate for the loss of the EU single market. No deals materialised.

And to cap it all, instead of the promised prosperity, Brexit did indeed wipe 5 per cent off UK growth, just as Campbell said.

Every day since we left the EU, I have turned on the BBC’s Today programme expecting to hear Mishal Husain, Nick Robinson and its other presenters demand answers from the Tories as John Humphrys demanded answers from Labour in 2003, and every day I was greeted with silence.

Sheer, naked fear has enfeebled BBC journalism

The right, and by which I don’t just mean the Conservative party but the wider right in the Tory press and think tanks, has done what Alastair Campbell never tried to do, and in all fairness to him probably never wanted to do: used the state funding of the BBC to castrate its journalism.

The Conservative government cut BBC budgets. The right-wing press harried it like hounds hunting down a fox and demanded its abolition.

The brutal truth is this: no Labour government wants to abolish the BBC or slash its funding. But right wingers want to do both.

As no good deed goes unpunished, the BBC is far harsher on Labour governments than Tory governments. Labour never threatens to close it down while Tories do all the time, and for that kindness Labour must suffer.

There are other explanations for why the BBC gave the Conservative a far easier ride than it gave Blair’s and now Starmer’s Labour government, which I must reject before highlighting the brute financial cause of the supine journalism.