Alistair Campbell: Public are tired of Brown criticism

THE only way back for Labour, both north and south of the Border, is to start defending its record more aggressively and taking the fight to its opponents, the Alistair Campbell – even if that means ignoring the "media's agenda" and going back to the basics of political organisation.

Speaking to The Scotsman yesterday after his sell-out appearance at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Campbell predicted that there could soon be a backlash against media criticism of Gordon Brown.

"I noticed that quite a few people came up to me after my event and said it was just so refreshing to hear somebody challenging the media's agenda about Gordon Brown. There's a sense that the criticism and levels of negativity about him are just becoming over the top. That will turn around."

Campbell – routinely described as the second most powerful man in the country when he was Tony Blair's communications chief – said that his advice for Gordon Brown would be not to worry about what the media was saying about him.

"He's got to ignore them and raise himself above it all. Because the public know that the media play games the whole time."

At the moment, he argues, the media "is letting the Tories off the hook altogether".

"They're just not looking at their compete lack of policies. David Cameron might be running around the country right now saying isn't it terrible how much we're having to pay for petrol, but who's putting his policies under examination?

"The other week, I had a meeting with a group of high-flying, well-informed businessmen in London who were sceptical about Labour. I challenged them to just give me three coherent policies David Cameron stood for. They couldn't. He's no policies whatsoever."

Admitting that the political situation is "a bit depressing" in Scotland for Labour supporters, he told his audience that at a reception in Manchester ahead of the Uefa cup final, "I saw Alec Salmond float into the room in a cloud of his own importance. There he was, loving it. Well, if people vote for him, that's what they vote for..."

Asked if he had a grudging respect for Salmond's political effectiveness, he said that perhaps Labour in the past had underestimated him as an opponent – "which is always a big mistake".

"These days politicians has got to be able to express themselves in a way that the person watching, whether they like you or they don't, they know what you're on about. At that level Salmond is very effective. I don't deny it.

"But prisms form and they are an exaggeration of the truth. The prism that formed about Gordon Brown both in his honeymoon as a hero is overdone, just as the zero is overdone. But these prisms that's forming about Salmond is that after years of being just a loud flamboyant politician now he's this great statesman and is going to lead Scotland into great new things.

"Life in politics is always more complicated than one simple truth. And while yes, Salmond has plenty of time to turn things round, there's plenty of time too for it all to go wrong. He's playing it quite canny right now, but people should remember that if they jump into bed with him, before you know it you're out of the United Kingdom. So they should think about these things, not just fall for the latest passing prism."

But has Labour anyone to match his effectiveness?

"People will come ... and never underestimate Wendy." The way she had been criticised over her "Bring it on" call about an independence referendum was, he said, "complete overblown b******s". "That's fine. She's trying to push on the debate, which the Labour party has to do, about independence."

"Labour has to start taking the fight to opponents much harder than we have been doing both up here with the nationalists and down there in England with the Conservatives. We just do not have to accept this argument about a pendulum of power, and to show that we have the energy and the ideas for the future."

The party's route back to popularity, he argued, lay in not forgetting that even in power it should be a campaigning party.

"We've got to show that we've got the best policies for the future, particularly in relation to the economy. And we've got to stop doing what too many of our people are doing, which is playing into the media agenda of politics."

Because of the media's voracious, round-the-clock appetite for news stories, Campbell argues, its political coverage has grown increasingly superficial. He cited the examble of the Sky news reporter who, with "just 17 minutes" to look at his own 1100-page Diary before going on air reported that it "contained nothing new".

With all the "media noise", he predicts, old-fashioned face-to-face campaigning and effective grassroots organisation is going to become increasingly important.

"That's the real reason the Tories won in London, because of their organisation in the suburbs not anything to do with Ken Livingston and Boris Johnson. It's about getting out and engaging with people. There were two areas in London where the Labour vote actually went up – because they'd been doing just that."