Alastair Campbell would have been wise to avoid the newspaper headlines this morning, writes the Iraq Inquiry Blogger.
I have a reputation,” Alastair Campbell told the inquiry yesterday, “for sort of worrying and obsessing about headlines.” Couldn’t be further from the truth he added.
He’s written on his blog that he gave the papers a miss this morning, and a quick survey suggests he chose wisely.
An op ed in his old employer The Mirror said Campbell showed no contrition: “A little humility might have been appropriate when considering the dire situation Iraq is now in but perhaps we’re expecting too much.”
In The Guardian Simon Hoggart felt Campbell was given an easy run: “We know Sir John Chilcot doesn’t want to turn his inquiry into a bear pit, but even so at times Campbell must have felt that he was being grilled, by contrast, at a teddy bears’ picnic.”
Matthew Norman was savage in his appraisal of Campbell’s questioners in The Independent. He wrote of “the admirably dogged Sir Lawrence Freedman, the not so dogged Sir Martin Gilbert, the reticent Sir Roderick Lyne [and] the sensationally useless Baroness Ushar Prashar.”
The Mail didn’t hold back either: “Quite the most striking aspect of Alastair Campbell’s evidence to the Iraq War inquiry is that most of it was untrue.
“Blatantly, breathtakingly untrue. … But then who will be surprised that Mr Blair’s bullying spin-doctor-in-chief has a problem with the truth? After all, haven’t we had years to get used to the fact that his default setting is mendacity?”
Elsewhere in The Mail Quentin Letts identified a problem: “It is hard for us blunt nibs of the printed press to write dispassionately about Ex-Commissar Campbell, the propaganda bully who himself once ran with our pack.
“He has long been so vehemently anti-media that anything critical we say leads to accusations we are taking a predictable line. Anything positive and Big Al ignores it to alight on some other, less favourable despatch to show how the wicked meeja has done him down.”
The Times said that Campbell’s performance was one “of controlled defiance that reflected a mixture of irritation — at being put through another inquiry — and relief over having a public platform to put his case.”
(Cleverly the paper also includes comment by the Iraqi academic whose research inadvertently formed the basis for much of the “dodgy” February 2003 dossier, Ibrahim al-Marashi: he regrets not having acted differently back at the time, saying “I should have said that if the British Government went to my article to pad out its dossier, then British and US justifications for the war were dubious. I should have raised greater awareness that Iraq might not have had WMDs before March 2003, when the war erupted.”)