Spinning Out Of Control

Remember Sharon Storer and her tongue-lashing tirade against the Prime Minister and Britain's ailing health system? Well, I too was there, wrestling with a fuzzy camera boom, trying to get a glimpse of Tony Blair.

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The sight was surreal. The Labour leader's stumped stare was striking; his purple tie; uninviting. Not the "real" politician he's being made out to be, I thought. Not the "radical" leader his spin supremo Alastair Campbell wanted me to believe. And definitely not "a figurine, fake as Taiwan," the barbed one-liner that a Daily Mail columnist blared when I turned to him on the Labour campaign train and asked "So, what do you think of Tony?"

Wrong question, I quickly realized. Blair isn't the real issue in these elections; the bubble built around him by his canny public relations Houdinis is. Had the fracas that unravelled in Birmingham, England taken place at a hospital court yard in Birmingham, Alabama, the candidate would most probably be reassessing the strategies of his spin merchants. And Mrs. Storer? Well, in America, she'd probably be on her way to the U.S. Senate. Or, she'd be basking in the limelight of nation-wide fame. No less deserving of such praise, however, is the fuschia-vested, aggrieved wife of a cancer patient who broke through the cordon sanitaire that insulates the Labour leader from his voters, to complain about the National Health Service. Strorer single-handedly burst the Blair bubble.

For the media, there was ample cause for rejoicing. For starters, the incident injected the first bit of excitement into a general election said to be the dullest in contemporary British history. Secondly, it served the media with the greatest peg possible to address Labour's treatment of them. How so? Earlier that day, in the polished settings of the Birmingham International Conference Centre, Labour campaign advisors were seen approaching formidable television journalists, trying to woo them into pitching "favourable" questions to the Prime Minister. The carrot? Favourable treatment over competing media. No one took the bait. But the politicos didn't stop. Hosts of activists were seen in and out of the conference hall, manoeuvring like human cruise missiles, intercepting any and every attempt by the media to project images other than those intended.

Take what happened to a Channel 4 crew, for example. Its cameraman and reporter were ambushed by a platoon of flag-waving activists. As the crew moved to ask Blair some "real" questions outside the building, the activist blocked the camera's view. The reporter's questions were drowned with cheers. And in the end, the Labour loyalists admitted their so-called interception plan.

Is this New Labour media manipulation, I asked my British colleagues? Or public relations hard ball, a favourite game of politicos in every nation? No one had a convincing response. But on May 20, four days after the Birmingham snafu, The Observer weekly splashed a biting reply: "It's not so much spin per se that is New Labour's problem; it's not knowing where to stop." Blair's aides, it added, "should have more faith in Blair."

Whether Labour advisers heed such criticism remains to be seen. Blair, however, seems to have already taken the recommendation seriously. A week after Birmingham, this time in Bristol, the Labour leader bounced onto a campaign stage, ditched his pre-planned speech, prowled the platform and spoke off the cuff to an audience of several hundred voters. His campaign chorus line sounded no different than the ones that preceeded — "Yes, we have much more to do" and "Education needs reform" and "Let's renew our public services." Still, his style, even his deftly body-swerving routines, seemed real. So real, in fact, it had one woman crying in the aisle. That moment I missed.