Journalist bloggers - gamekeepers turned poachers?

This was an article written for Iain Dale's Guide to Political Blogging 2007 published recently by Harriman House.

***

Whether it’s a ground-breaking new band, an up-and-coming avant garde painter, or just the latest technological craze, there is always a tendency among groups of people who have discovered something new to want to keep it to themselves, to resent those Johnny-come-latelies who seek to get in on the act and jump aboard the rolling bandwagon.

That was, by and large, the reaction among internet political bloggers when, during the course of 2006, the UK’s national press and major broadcasting organisations belatedly woke up to the emergence of the new blogging phenomenon.

They were pejoratively dubbed “old media,” “mainstream media,” and worse of all, the “dead tree press.” They represented the smug, complacent old elite, the handing down of received wisdom from on high, the stifling of true debate in the name of bogus consensus, the past.

Bloggers, on the other hand, were the future, the pioneers of a new, postmodernist style of political journalism in which there was no truth, only opinion, and in which the views of Joe and Joanna Bloggs were as intrinsically valid as those of the most highly-paid political pundits in the land.

Thankfully for me, perhaps, I had by then left full-time journalism for the world of digital publishing, and although I continued to supplement my main income by writing political columns for various regional newspapers, the blogosphere tended to treat me from the start as one of its own.

But for other, better-known figures from the world of political journalism, it was a different story. The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh, the most influential “dead tree” lobby hack of the past 25 years, was deservedly ridiculed after his blog, launched in a fanfare of hype as “The Blog the Politicians Fear,” was updated only a couple of times before it swiftly died a death.

More enduring, but equally contentious was The Guardian’s attempt to capture the zeitgeist with the launch of its uber-blog “Comment is Free,” which sought to corral the best of the blogosphere and its almost infinite range of opinions under the already flourishing Guardian Unlimited brand.

It has performed a valuable function in providing a forum for people to interact with Guardian columnists and other guest writers, but its claims to blog-dom have always been hotly contested - for instance it still does not link out to other blogs and is too diverse to possess a true personality of its own.

But such developments were really only one relatively small facet of a much larger commercial game that is still ongoing – the reorientation of the newspaper publishing industry as it seeks to diversify away from print and respond to the fact that much of its business is now migrating online.

It wasn’t just blogging that suddenly became the flavour of the month. Newspapers and broadcasters also enthusiastically embraced podcasting, vodcasting, and other new technological gimmickry, while more and more news was being published on the web before it appeared in print.

In other words, the gamekeepers of the dead tree press needed to turn poachers simply to remain competitive in the new 24-hour news environment – but at the same time, some of the poachers of the blogging world have effectively turned gamekeepers as the profile and importance of the blogosphere has increased.

It might have been pistols at dawn to begin with - but the story of the relationship between political blogging and political journalism, over the past 12 months in particular, has been one of gradual and irresistible convergence.

So if Trevor Kavanagh was to blogging what Alastair Campbell was to objective truth, the BBC’s Nick Robinson was always a different kettle of fish, using his blog not so much to rehash his on-air prognostications as to amplify them, earning a reputation for a time across the blogosphere as the only MSM blogger worth reading.

Robinson’s success as a journalist blogger has been emulated in recent months by the Daily Mail’s Benedict Brogan, one of the youngest of the national daily political editors yet already regarded by his peers as one of the outstanding political journalists of his generation.

Brogan is not an old-fashioned story-getter in the sense that, say, Kavanagh or his Mail on Sunday counterpart Simon Walters obviously are, but he does have an instinctive feel for what constitutes an important political story, and it is this quality which makes him such a good blogger.

As a politics junkie – you don’t get where he is without being one – he is also fascinated by the kind of detail that would not necessarily be of interest to general Mail readers, using his blog, like Robinson, as a sort of “Politics Plus” channel for a more specialist political readership.

But at the same time as some of the leading political journalists have been getting into blogging, some of the leading political bloggers have become steadily absorbed into the journalistic mainstream, reflecting their increasingly high profile in the media generally.

Blogs such as Iain Dale’s Diary, Guido Fawkes, Political Betting and Conservative Home are now regarded as primary political news sources, and are reputedly read by most Lobby journalists and MPs.

You could make a respectable argument that their authors are now more influential media figures than, say, the political editor of the News of the World, and indeed The Guardian already has done, recently listing Guido in its media Top 100 “Power List” alongside national newspaper editors and proprietors.

As if to emphasise the fact that the old demarcation lines are now becoming increasingly blurred, the man behind the Guido mask, Paul Staines, has applied for a Lobby pass, while Dale has been given a column in the Daily Telegraph to complement his regular slots as a TV pundit.

Even the government, it seems, is now treating blogs as an extension of the mainstream political media. As the Financial Times reported last month, the COI’s Media Monitoring Unit is now considering how to add blogs to its regular summaries of government coverage in mainstream press or television.

The FT itself acknowledged that the move reflects “the growing media profile of the format and the fact some individual bloggers are moving from niche self-publishers to establishment opinionformers.”

Clarence Mitchell, director of the Media Monitoring Unit, was quoted as saying that although there was debate about the objectivity of some bloggers, several of them were taken “increasingly seriously” within government.

In this context, it is perhaps significant that most of the leading political bloggers – those most in danger of becoming “establishment opinion formers” - are people who had a pre-existing political commitment or background which had already taken them within the orbit of the Westminster Village.

So for instance Iain Dale has in his various incarnations been Chief of Staff to David Davis, a Conservative parliamentary candidate, and, before that, the proprietor of a bookshop known to, and at some time or another regularly patronised by virtually everyone in Westminster.

Likewise, long before he launched the Guido Fawkes blog, Paul Staines was a well-connected figure within libertarian right circles, supplying jokes for Mrs Thatcher’s speeches, and even working for the Iron Lady’s favourite fixer, David Hart, who, with the help of MI5, fixed the miners good and proper in 1984-5.

The leading left-of-centre bloggers were, if anything, even more obviously on the inside track. Recess Monkey’s Alex Hilton was a Labour candidate, Tom Watson an actual Labour MP, and Kerron Cross a long-serving MP’s researcher, allegedly the model for the central character in TV political soap “Party Animals.”

And of course, probably a lot fewer people would have read my own blog had I not been in a position to furnish it with some of the insights gained from my time in the Lobby, a period during which I was able to observe the internal politics of New Labour at fairly close quarters.

In this respect, the blogosphere mimics the world of journalism itself, where who you know is often more important than what you know and where the ability to construct networks is probably a more important skill than the ability to construct the perfect intro.

Just occasionally, an original writing talent will emerge as if from nowhere – in blogging terms Chicken Yoghurt’s Justin McKeating springs to mind – but among the ranks of the leading bloggers, such meteors are very much the exception rather than the rule.

Undoubtedly the single most talented writer thrown up by the entire blogging medium to date has been Rachel North, who began blogging as personal catharsis following the terrible events of 7/7 in which she found herself caught up - but her story was indeed truly exceptional.

In truth, the political blogosphere is not nearly so diverse as its own hype would suggest. It has the potential to be, yes, but thus far, that potential has not been realised.

So, for me, the blogging v journalism dichotomy was always something of a false opposition. Yes, they are different disciplines, and as Trevor Kavanagh proved, success in one does not necessarily engender success in the other, but essentially they are both part and parcel of that huge and amorphous beast, the modern media.

Sure, it sometimes suits both sides to paint them as diametric opposites, as personified by the infamous clash between Paul Staines and the veteran former Guardian political editor Michael White on Newsnight, which “Sir Michael” is widely held to have shaded.

But the relationship was always more complex than that. In actual fact the blogosphere has fed off the mainstream media from the earliest days of “weblogs” consisting of little more than long lists of links to interesting material that could be found online.

In those days, relatively few blog posts did not, in some way, lead back to the MSM, but recently the trend has reversed, with newspaper diary columnists in particular regularly plundering the blogosphere for material – not all of it necessarily accurate.

Journalism, like music, does not stand still. The political journalism of today bears absolutely no resemblance to the straight, low-key factual reporting of 40 years ago, an era in which the parliamentary correspondent reigned supreme while the lobby correspondent was regarded as a form of journalistic pond-life.

A line was crossed, in my view, with the reporting of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s comments after returning from an international summit in Guadeloupe at the height of the Winter of Discontent in 1979, when he was asked what he thought of the “mounting chaos” at home.

His complacent reply - “I don’t think other people would necessarily take the view that there is mounting chaos” – was famously transposed the following day on the front page of The Sun as “Crisis? What Crisis?”

That, of course, was an interpretation rather than a quote – but the episode exemplified that it had become fair game to report such interpretation as fact. Much of the political journalism of today – and I have been as guilty of it as anyone – is built on that pretext.

Why the history lesson? Well, it’s simply to demonstrate that journalism is a constantly evolving trade, and will evolve again as a result of the need to embrace new technologies and meet new commercial challenges.

At the same time blogging, too, will have to change and adapt. It is particularly vital, if the blogosphere is not to degenerate into a right-wing mutual admiration society, that the left gets its collective act together, and produces a blog that can rival Dale and Guido for influence.

But just as the best political bloggers, like Dale, will increasingly become seen as important journalistic figures, the best political journalists, like Brogan, will increasingly embrace blogging. Indeed it would not surprise me if, in five years’ time, much of Ben Brogan’s output as political editor of the Daily Mail was online.

Thus, as in music, and as in art, do new departures eventually become assimilated by the mainstream, while simultaneously ensuring that the mainstream itself is also changed beyond recognition.

Ten years of my Journal column

Column published in today's Newcastle Journal, marking 10 years since the start of the column.

***

This May, unless of course he is forced out of office before then, Tony Blair will chalk up ten consecutive years as Prime Minister, only the second politician to achieve the milestone since 1827.

There will doubtless be much more to say about that if and when the time comes - but first, another rather less significant but, for me, very happy tenth anniversary.

It was ten years ago this week – on Saturday, January 18, 1997 in fact – that this column appeared in The Journal for the first time.

I remain grateful to the then editor Mark Dickinson for starting it off, to the current editor Brian Aitken for keeping it on after I stood down as political editor in 2004, and to Geoff Laws whose brilliant cartoons have illuminated it from the start.

It seems hard to remember sometimes that, when the column first began, the Tories were still in power, and the New Labour project was seen as something fresh, exciting, and even inspiring.

Mr Blair was still derided in some quarters as “Bambi,” a rather effete young leader as opposed to the tough-as-old-boots political survivor who would go on to dominate his era.

In this region, politicians talked about regional government as if it was just around the corner, and speculated about which of them might one day lead the North’s “mini Parliament.”

Well, a decade is a long time in politics, and although few things turned out as expected, it has been my privilege to help chart the twists and turns of the past one for this great newspaper.

That’s enough of me. But sticking with the subject of anniversaries, this week marked 300 years since one of the seminal political events in our history – the Act of Union between England and Scotland.

It comes at a time of much such-searching about the future of the Union, due in part to the devolution reforms Labour has enacted over the past 10 years.

For sure, devolution represented a belated and much-needed recognition of the Scots’ desire for a great measure of self-determination, and to that extent it has succeeded.

But the failure to address the wider implications for the UK as a whole - or level the funding playing field between its constituent parts – has bred a resentment that now threatens the Union’s long-term viability.

Regional government, of course, was meant to deal with that. It was hoped that by devolving power to a network of regional assemblies, we would eventually arrive at a broadly symmetrical framework.
The North-East referendum in 2004 put paid to that, and those like me who believe some form of English devolution is needed to rebalance the constitution switched our attentions to the idea of an English Parliament.

Two years ago, this was at best a fringe cause with about the same degree of support as the Flat Earth Society or the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Since then, though, it has moved dramatically into the mainstream, with a poll this week showing that 61pc of people in England now support the idea.

Yet in more than one respect this week, we saw a Government whose leading members are in denial about the situation they have helped create.

For Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, it’s still quite simple. Regional government remains the only sensible solution, and some bright day, the people will come to realise this.

“I'm sad that regional government was rejected in the North East, but I believe that England will eventually move to elected regional government - just as Scotland and Wales originally rejected devolution and then voted for it,” he said on Wednesday.

Some might call it contempt for the electorate. Others might call it losing touch with reality. Both would be fair accusations.

But for me, in an era in which most politicians will say anything to get elected, I can’t help but admire Prezza for the way he sticks to his guns in support of an unpopular cause.

Mr Blair’s position, though, is even more bone-headed. Having allowed this state of affairs to develop in the first place, he now proposes to do precisely nothing about it.

Questioned about this week’s poll at his monthly press conference on Tuesday, he said that setting up a separate English parliament would be "unworkable" and "unnecessary".

That is all of a piece with his eve-of-election pledge to this newspaper in 2001 when he said he would not reform the funding rules by which English taxpayers continue to subsidise the Scots.

“No taxation without representation” goes the old slogan. For the English, read “More taxation means less representation.”

Finally, there is Gordon Brown. Unlike Mr Blair, who soon won’t have to worry about it any more, the uncertainty over the future of the Union presents him with an acute political problem.

As he made clear in an interview this week, he is desperate to keep the Union together, and I don’t doubt for a moment that he genuinely believes in it.

But more pertinent to the Chancellor’s current predicament is the fear that, as the present situation unravels, the English will become less and less likely to consent to be ruled by a Scot.

It is almost bound to become an election issue in 2009/10, and the Chancellor just has to live in hope that it doesn’t become too big a one.

So is the Union falling apart? Well, you certainly wouldn’t bet on it lasting another 300 years at the moment.

But then again, adaptability to changing political circumstances has been the watchword of our unwritten constitution for centuries, and there is no reason why it cannot adapt to this new challenge.

A nationalist victory in May’s Scottish Parliament elections may well force the Government to take a wider look at the issue, and in my view, that would be a positive development.

I won’t be here in another 50 years’ time. But I would rather like to think that the United Kingdom will be.

Podcast: A follower, not a leader

Script of Week in Politics podcast, Episode 52.

***

On the face of it, there would appear to be little connection between this week’s row over the Prime Minister’s “carbon footprint” and the ongoing controversy over the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Both are moral issues, for sure, but while one merely concerns the fate of a reviled dictator, the other concerns the future viability of the entire planet.

In one vital sense, though, Tony Blair’s failure to take a lead either in curbing greenhouse gas emissions or in condemning the manner of Saddam’s execution are one and same story, in what they show us about his character.

For both highlight what I have always regarded as his primary deficiency as a politician and a Prime Minister – that he is, essentially, a follower rather than a leader.

Take first, then, the case of Saddam. This issue has been causing discomfiture for Mr Blair ever since the Butcher of Baghdad was initially condemned to death in November.

He doesn’t, of course, agree with the death penalty, but he sure as hell wanted it applied to Saddam lest the former dictator emerge as a rallying-point for the Iraqi insurgents.

Mr Blair sought to extricate himself from this tricky little moral dilemma by saying nothing and hiding behind the coat-tails of his Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, whose views about capital punishment are no different to his own.

It was too much for one television interviewer, who told Mr Blair contemptuously: “You’ve been Prime Minister for ten years, she’s been Foreign Secretary for five minutes.”

So when Saddam was finally executed on December 30, it was scarcely surprising that it was poor old Mrs Beckett who was once more wheeled out to give the Government’s response.

Choosing her words with her customary care, Mrs Beckett said the deposed tyrant had been “held to account.”

Then mobile phone images started circulating around the internet demonstrating that the execution, far from being a dignified, behind-closed-doors affair, had been a shameful public humiliation.

To his very great credit, John Prescott for once showed himself to be the moral conscience of the Government by condemning the scenes as “deplorable.”

Still, though, Mr Blair said nothing, his official spokesman briefing the Lobby that the Deputy Prime Minister had been “expressing his own view.”

And doubtless that is where he would have left it, had it not been for Gordon Brown deciding to weigh in on Mr Prescott’s side in his interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr last Sunday.

The following day, the official spokesman changed his line, revealing that Mr Blair now thought the manner of the execution had been “completely wrong” and that it “shouldn’t have happened in this way.”

Was that really the action of a leader, to be forced to concede the moral high ground not only to his hated rival at No 11, but also to his discredited deputy?

But if that episode shamed Mr Blair, even more contemptible was his performance over the issue of air travel and the growing damage which aviation is doing to the environment.

Once again, it was a less senior figure, environment minister Ian Pearson who took the lead, singling out no-frills airline Ryanair as “not just the unacceptable face of capitalism, but the irresponsible face of capitalism."

The degree of political courage required for a junior minister to make a comment such as this should not be underestimated.

Ever since Peter Mandelson told the CBI that the Government was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,” this kind of criticism has been off-limits for New Labour.

But what did Mr Blair do? Not only did he fail to back up Mr Pearson’s brave stance, he attempted to reverse the growing political consensus on the aircraft emissions issue.

Asked whether people should make sacrifices by taking holidays closer to home, the Prime Minister said it would be wrong to impose "unrealistic targets" on travellers.

"You know, I'm still waiting for the first politician who's actually running for office who's going to come out and say it - and they're not," Mr Blair says. "It's like telling people you shouldn't drive anywhere."

He had clearly already forgotten that Mr Pearson, who unlike him actually is running for office at the next election, had actually said something very similar just a few days’ before.

But these are merely two small topical examples of a depressing theme has run throughout the lifetime of the New Labour project.

The aim of that project should have been to bring about an irreversible shift in wealth, power and opportunity in favour of the many, not the few, and indeed, in its early years, it was billed as such.

But it has been clear for some years now that its true purpose was not to shift the country to the left, but simply to shift the Labour Party to the right.

As a result, Mr Blair’s eventual successor now risks being portrayed as “Old Labour” by the resurgent Tories if he so much as attempts to shift one millimetre from the Blairite path.

And there, in a nutshell, you have Mr Blair’s precious “legacy.” Not Iraq, nor even the fact that he has presided over widening inequality, though both of those things are part of it.

No, Mr Blair’s legacy is that despite three election wins and a Tory Party which was incapable of being elected to run a whelk stall, he failed to build that progressive consensus.

It is a failure borne of the same tendency to seek to follow public opinion rather than lead it that we have seen manifested in the events of the past seven days.

And when all the dust has settled, it is a failure that may well go down as the greatest missed opportunity in the history of progressive politics.

Podcast: Who will be Labour's No 2?

Script for my Week in Politics podcast, Episode 51, which went live today.

***

Last week, in my podcast previewing the political year 2007, I focused on what everyone expects to be the big story of the next 12 months – the election of a new Labour leader and Prime Minister.

It goes without saying that it is an event of huge political significance. But the problem with it from a pundit’s point of view is that is the outcome is widely seen as cut and dried.

Over the past few days, Home Secretary John Reid has done his best to suggest that
Gordon Brown may not, after all, have a coronation, with a speech warning him not to veer from the true path of New Labour.

From Labour’s perspective, I happen to think it was spectacularly unhelpful, but if there is to be a contest, then Dr Reid remains overwhelmingly the most likely challenger.

But so much for the main attraction – what of the main support act, namely the contest to become Labour’s deputy leader?

With the leadership battle seen as increasingly sewn-up, much New Year media speculation has centred on the question not of who will succeed Tony Blair, but who will replace John Prescott.

There are six declared candidates - International Development Secretary Hilary Benn, Party Chairman Hazel Blears, backbencher Jon Cruddas, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, Solicitor-General Harriet Harman, and Education Secretary Alan Johnson.

Two of them are currently a little way ahead of the rest of the field – but it’s a wide open race and any of the other four could yet come out on top.

The two early frontrunners are Mr Benn, who has emerged as the leading candidate from inside the current Cabinet, and Mr Cruddas, who is fighting a classic “outsider’s” campaign from the backbenches.

Mr Benn’s attraction is that, as a member of the Blair Cabinet but with slightly left-of-centre views in Labour terms, he is seen as a unifier with broad cross-party appeal.

Some of this is doubtless sentimental, in that Hilary is the son of the left’s great hero Tony Benn, who so narrowly failed to wrest the deputy leadership of the party from Denis Healey in 1981.

But Mr Cruddas is also winning significant support, not just from the left from but from Labour activists who like his emphasis on making the party more accountable to its members.

So can any of the others catch-up? Well, there is little doubt that the candidate whose vote is being squeezed hardest by the Benn-Cruddas ascendancy is Mr Hain.
He is himself a man of the left, having initially gained prominence as an anti-apartheid campaigner, and imagined he would get much of the support that has instead gone to Mr Cruddas.

Mr Hain’s problem is that he is seen to have made too many compromises. He was, for a time, very close to the late Robin Cook, but failed to resign with him over the Iraq War in 2003.

Had he done so, it is at least arguable that he would now be in with a good shout of becoming not merely deputy leader, but Prime Minister.

Of the two female candidates, Ms Blears has recently run into trouble on two counts. Firstly, as Party Chair, she is in charge of party organisation and thus technically responsible for staging the contest, a fairly obvious conflict of interest.

Secondly, her protest against health cuts in her constituency, while brave, has brought accusations of hypocrisy and claims she should resign her Cabinet post.

Ms Harman is likely to have broader support in the party, but the problem with her leadership pitch is that it appears solely to be based on the fact that she is a woman.

She is also handicapped by her poor performance in Cabinet as Social Security Secretary between 1997 and 1998 before Mr Blair had to sack her on the grounds of general uselessness.

That, at least, is not an accusation that could be levelled at Mr Johnson, who has proved himself one of the more energetic and articulate spokesmen for the New Labour cause since joining the Cabinet two years ago.

But his political star appears to be on the wane, after his failure to emerge as a convincing challenger to Mr Brown for the top job last autumn.

Rightly or wrongly, Mr Johnson is still viewed by many as more of a would-be leader than a natural deputy.

As Lord Hattersley pointed out yesterday, his election would lead to moreorless constant media speculation that he was out to undermine Mr Brown in the hope of succeeding to the top job.

Other names could yet enter the fray. The backbencher Jeremy Corbyn, for instance, is rumoured to be launching a bid from the far left.

But Commons leader Jack Straw has probably left it too late. As I wrote last week, he is really the fallback unity candidate for leader should anything amiss happen to Gordon.

I sense the feeling in the party is that the deputy leadership needs to go to a fresh face, to balance out the fact that the leadership is likely to go to a very well-known one.

That need not exclude the likes of Mr Johnson or Mr Benn, but it does rule out figures like Mr Straw and Margaret Becket who have been pivotal Cabinet figures throughout the Blair years.

If I had to put my money on anyone at the moment, it would be Mr Cruddas, on the grounds that the unions and party members will see it as a chance for them to have a bigger say in the way the party is run.

But the really intriguing thing about that is that the anti-establishment Mr Cruddas
could actually be the candidate Mr Brown secretly wants as his deputy.

It was reported last year that the Chancellor intends to do away with the somewhat discredited post of Deputy Prime Minister, and Mr Cruddas is standing on precisely this platform.

Looked at in those terms, a Brown-Cruddas leadership is beginning to seem like it could be Labour’s new dream ticket.

Podcast - Blair's day of shame

Script of my Week in Politics Podcast, Episode 48, which went live today.

***

Several weeks ago, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens let it be known that he intended to publish his report into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on December 14.

Political journalists who for weeks had been waiting to be told when the police would be interviewing Tony Blair over the cash-for-honours affairs immediately smelt a rat.

As one senior lobby hack wrote yesterday: “We all guessed weeks ago that this would be the perfect day for Mr Blair to invite the police in – the day the world would be transfixed by the [Diana] report.”

But it was more in the nature of bar-room gossip rather than informed speculation.
Somehow I doubt that, in their hearts, they really believed even Downing Street would be that brazened.

Well, to paraphrase a famous old saying, it seems no one ever went broke over-estimating the sheer bare-faced cheek of our present Prime Minister.

The police interview with was just the half of it. Thursday also saw the Government announce the closure of 2,500 post offices and call off a long-running Serious Fraud Office inquiry into arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

It also gave the go-ahead to a new round of airport expansion which though it will be welcomed by business leaders has dismayed environmentalists concerned at the impact on global warming.

“It looks like it’s take out the trash day today,” one Labour insider was quoted as saying.

Of course, it could all have been a coincidence. The Christmas Parliamentary recess began yesterday and, in my experience, there is always a godalmighty rush to get out announcements before MPs head off on their hols.

But Scotland Yard has moreorless confirmed that the timing of the cash-for-honours interview was determined not by them, but by Number 10.

This leads one to the inevitable conclusion that Downing Street did indeed request that the interview should take place on this particular day, with the Diana report in mind.

Should we be surprised? Given this Government’s well-deserved and hard-earned reputation for burying bad news, probably not.

Equally unsurprising was the role of the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman in denying that the interview had taken place at the very time Mr Plod was sitting down for his two-hour chat with Mr Blair.

When asked at Thursday’s 11am lobby briefing whether the PM would be interviewed by police today, Tom Kelly replied that “there has been no change in the position.”

This was later explained away by Kelly saying he had asked Mr Blair not to tell him he was being interviewed until it was all over so that he could not be accused of misleading people.

To which one can only say: how very, very convenient.

But Thursday’s rubbish disposal exercise was by no means the only breathtaking manoeuvre carried out by the Prime Minister in relation to the cash-for-honours affair this week.

A few days earlier, a plan came to light for Mr Blair to actually turn this most damaging of political scandals to his own advantage, by using it as an excuse to scrap Labour’s links with the unions.

Ten years ago in 1996, a young, up-and-coming MP by the name of Stephen Byers held a dinner with some sympathetic journalists on the eve of that year’s Labour Party Conference.

His revelation that the party was considering severing the union link was not actually a serious proposal, the aim being simply to position Mr Blair in the public’s mind as Not Jim Callaghan.

But a decade on, the idea has taken on a different context. It is now being seen as a way for Mr Blair to salvage some sort of “legacy” from the whole cash-for-honours fiasco.

Sir Hayden Philips, a retired civil servant who was asked to look at the party funding issue in the wake of the honours probe, has proposed a £50,000 cap on all party donations.

This will, of course, effectively end the big donations to Labour by trade unions which collect the “political levy” on behalf of their hundreds of thousands of individual members.

But such is the sheer scale of the opposition this has already aroused within the party that even some of the Prime Minister’s most loyal supporters have been moved to speak out against the idea.

Former Labour National Executive Committee chairman Sir Jeremy Beecham has always been one of Mr Blair’s most assiduous defenders.

But Sir Jeremy’s loyalty was finally provoked beyond endurance this week, as he publicly denounced the union funding proposals as “outrageous.”

In a similar vein, Durham MP Kevan Jones implied Mr Blair had finally taken leave of his senses saying: “The lights are on in Downing Street but no-one’s at home.”

To see these two old North-East rivals uniting against the Philips proposals ought to be sufficient warning to Mr Blair that the idea should be pursued thus far and no further.

Back in their days on Newcastle City Council days, the Beecham-Jones feud was so poisonous it permeated the entire city Labour Group and beyond, but that is not really the point.

The point is rather that, in party terms, Jones and Beecham are right-wingers, people who, far from being classed as “usual suspects,” would normally be viewed as Mr Blair’s natural supporters.

As it is, there are increasingly fewer of those to be found, as the man who promised to clean up politics continues to sully it beyond anything achieved by John Major’s administration.

And until the day he finally goes, his capacity to damage both the Labour Party and the reputation of British politics in general will remain unhindered.