Blair... beware

With a general election expected next year, the British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair, and his aides will be desperately seeking to stem the tide of bad news, says THOMAS ABRAHAM.

FEW POLITICIANS could have had a worse week. On Wednesday, the British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair, received a drubbing in Parliament from the Conservative Leader of the Opposition, Mr. William Hague. Mr. Hague hauled the Prime Minister over the coals for a proposal Mr. Blair had made to cut down on public drunkenness and disorderly behaviour by giving the police powers to impose on-the-spot fines. Senior police officers had dismissed the scheme as impractical, deeply embarassing the Prime Minister. Mr. Hague rubbed salt in the wound by taunting Mr. Blair in Parliament over his differences of opinion with the police.

As the Prime Minister went home that day to lick his wounds, there was worse news to come. The police had found his 16-year- old son, Euan, late at night at Leicester Square, a popular centre of entertainment in London, sitting by the side of the road in a drunken state after having celebrated the end of his school leaving GCSE exams a little to spiritedly. While there was likelihood of the Opposition making political capital of an incident that could have happened to any parent of teenagers, the media reported the incident widely, and few could escape the irony of the Prime Minister's son being found drunk the day after his father had proposed tough fines to discourage drunkenness in public. As Mr. Blair put it later, ``Being a Prime Minister can be a tough job, being a parent is sometimes tougher, and you don't always succeed.''

Though being a Prime Minister is undoubtedly tough at the best of times, over the past month, Mr. Blair has been finding it tougher than usual. Nothing seems to be going well for him, and the media has been carrying little political news other than the series of embarrassments that have dogged Mr. Blair. One of his close supporters, the millionaire novelist, Mr. Ken Follet, launched a scathing public attack on Mr. Blair's style of governance, which he said was characterised by gossiping and backstabbing. A few weeks earlier, the Women's Institute, a normally mild group of middle-aged women, had heckled him during a speech. To compound his problems, reports of divisions within his Government dominated news headlines, confirming the impression in the public mind of a Prime Minister who was losing his grip.

To an extent, it is inevitable that any Government, even one as popular as this Labour Ministry was when it was elected three years ago, will suffer reverses. But Mr. Blair's fall from grace appears to be starker because it also clearly marks the end of his long honeymoon with the British media. The rash of adverse headlines and news stories marked the failure of a strategy that Mr. Blair had successfully followed since his days in the Opposition - using the media to project himself and his party/Government in a positive light.

Both as Leader of the Opposition and as Prime Minister, Mr. Blair has been acutely aware how important it is to have a constant stream of positive headlines and news stories to help consolidate his party's and Government's position. Until a few months ago, Mr. Blair appeared to be succeeding supremely. It was rare to see stories unfavourable to the Government on the front pages of the British press. Except for the staunchly Conservative Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, Mr. Blair and his advisers had succeeded in winning over most of the other major British newspapers. A key aide who has implemented Mr. Blair's media strategy, has been his press secretary, Mr. Alistair Campbell. A former tabloid journalist, Mr. Campbell has combined a shrewd understanding of how to mould the news agenda with a combative personal style which has allowed him to ensure a flow of positive stories about the Government. But Mr. Campbell, after facing increasing criticism for his ``spin doctoring'' of the media, has retreated to the background, and is clearly playing a less active role in day-to-day press management. This has clearly had an impact on the Government.

The lack of an active press management strategy has led to a string of disastrous headlines, and the impression is growing of a Government which is increasingly ineffectual and at odds with itself. Earlier, the occasional bit of bad news would be drowned out by some skillfully planted news about some new Government initiative or the other. This no longer seems to happen, and the result has been a series of disasters for Mr. Blair.

Normally, the lack of a media strategy is not a fatal flaw in a Government. But Mr. Blair's ``new Labour'' project has based the success of its political strategy on its media strategy more than most other political parties. Britain is a naturally Conservative country, and the Blairite strategy has been to use the media to win over a public which is instinctively anti-Labour. The media was also to be used to win enough time for the Government to push through deep political and economic reforms, which over the long term would make Labour the natural party of Government in Britain.

The seeming breakdown of the Government's media strategy, if unchecked, could be a serious setback for Mr. Blair's ambitions for a second term in Government. With a general election expected next year, the Prime Minister and his aides will be desperately seeking to stem the tide of bad news.

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