The Meaning of Recognition (26 page)

In the Millbank mind, where media control was invented, the media out of control is the demon that never sleeps. Unless you had signed on the dotted line for a seat on one of the two press
buses, you weren’t supposed to go. I linked up with ace freelance photographer Brian Harris, who was covering the day for the
Indy
along with me. His handsome features weathered from
years of room service, Harris is the breed of smudger who gets the shot if has to wade through a swamp, surface through pack ice, dance with the seventh wife of the mad revolutionary general. But
he wasn’t too keen to get on a press bus that charges £540 for a day trip, and neither was I. Why not just hire a car and follow the buses? After all, it was a free country.

Patiently awaiting its precious cargo, the Blair bus was surrounded by demonstrators with signs saying
KEEP CLAUSE
28. The kind of enthusiast who can surround you all on
his own had a sign saying
SEEK THE LORD WHILE HE MAY BE FOUND
. Here was an argument for the prudence of keeping Blair’s various destinations a close secret: otherwise
he would face torrents of this stuff when he got there, and perhaps worse. If Millbank overdid the caution vis-à-vis the press, Special Branch was merely being wise when it came to the
loving public. In large letters, the back of the Blair bus was marked
LEADERS TOUR
. It was heading for the land where the possessive case has been abolished, and apostrophes
are never used except incorrectly, to mark the plural. If I knew where Blair was going every day, I would be waiting there myself, holding my sign that says
SO MUCH FOR YOUR
EMPHASIS ON EDUCATION
,
DIMWIT
.

To the drooping disappointment of the sign-holders, the Blair bus pulled away with no Blair in it. Maybe the Blair bus would pick Blair up at Downing Street. We piled into the car and headed off
in that direction, but at Downing Street there was no Blair bus. Back at Millbank there were no press buses either: they had left without us, we knew not whither. Luckily, Harris had a contact on
the second press bus who owed him one after a hairy moment in Beirut. Ducking beneath the surveillance of the on-board Millbank commissar, the contact whispered into his mobile that the bus convoy
was proceeding through Notting Hill Gate, perhaps on the way to the West Midlands via Shepherd’s Bush roundabout.

We caught up with the second press bus on the M40 and sat behind it while Harris communed again with his contact. Newport had been mentioned as one of the day’s locations. It
couldn’t be Newport Pagnell, and probably wasn’t Newport, Rhode Island: but there might be a Newport in or near Staffordshire. Harris signed off on the moby and studied the map, on
which Staffordshire occupied about a thousand square miles. So there was no point trying to run up there ahead of them and lie in wait. Meanwhile I was calculating the total revenue per bus from
forty or fifty media personnel all coughing up the full whack: somewhere north of 25,000 quid. ‘Almost enough to pay for the petrol,’ said Harris. It would have been a good line for
Hague, who had run out of good lines the previous night while being trampled by Paxman.

The great Australian philosopher Rod Laver once said, ‘When you’ve got your man down, rub him out.’ Strategically, the idea makes sense, but not when extended to the
spectators. By now Millbank had dealt with Hague: he had been rubbed out with such thoroughness that the only way you could tell where he had lain was by a man-shaped area cleaner than the
surrounding pavement. But Millbank still had many enemies, and two of them turned out to be me and Harris. Whispered word came through from the bus that we had been spotted.

Somewhere in the command centre of the bus, Millbank operatives were processing the information that a mystery car had been observed trailing close behind the tinted back window. The face in the
car’s front passenger seat checked out against the hostile media list. James, Clive, 61, Australian origin. Used to be on television, now active on the Internet. Thinks he’s funny.
Back-seat passenger could be Harris, Brian, freelance photographer. Paying for divorce, ready for anything. Once got a shot of Blair in pyjamas with Mandelson picking his nose: not his own nose,
Blair’s nose. High possibility of upcoming satirical attack at arrival point.

The easy course of action for Millbank would have been to buzz Special Branch and suggest that we be removed from the bus’s tail. It would have worked, too: Harris has so many points on
his driver’s licence that he isn’t even allowed to be a passenger. But someone higher up the chain of command must have been given pause by two further considerations. The first
consideration was that people are still legally free to travel on the open road, unlike on the railways, where they can travel only under tight restrictions. The second consideration was that the
Bremner Battlebus Ban (instigated when it was assumed, perhaps correctly, that to give Rory Bremner a ride on the bus might result in his imitating everyone on board including the driver) had
gained negative publicity. The current potential satirical attack was headed up by comparatively minor players but there could be a nasty media backlash if Special Branch took them out. Better use
the charm weapon and suck them in.

Although we were getting our information from on board the bus, we had to deduce that last part. Until the bus arrived in Stafford we were still expecting to be stopped any time by a fast car
full of heavy bluebottles saying ‘Breathe into this bag.’ But suddenly, strangely, the both of us were
persona grata
as the two press buses disgorged their cargo at a complex
called
THE STAFFORDSHIRE AMBULANCE SERVICE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE TRUST HEADQUARTERS
. The Blair bus, which Blair had joined
en route
after a quick flight, was
circling the district in a holding pattern while the media took up position to cover the forthcoming spontaneity. The smudgers toted their trademark aluminium stepladders for seeing over the heads
of the public, although these locations are so secret that it usually means seeing over the heads of nobody except reporters. I grabbed a spot on the ropes where I could clock the scene.

It looked like a military base. I counted at least thirty ambulance personnel in green overalls, most of them marked
PARAMEDIC
on the right breast, while the left breast
bore the name:
ALAN
,
PETER
,
GEORGE
. (In the empire of New Labour, the valley of the lost apostrophe leads to the plateau of
the missing surname.) The ambulances were all inside the hangar, where the main action would take place. A bomb-squad copper was towed past by his sniffer dog. The dog had that particularly
hang-dog look that dogs get when their biggest thrill of the week is snorting a practice wodge of Semtex, but every other life-form on the concourse was polished and alert.

Abruptly I found myself being loomed over by an upright man in green overalls called Roger. He turned out to be the guy in charge of the whole outfit: Roger Thayne OBE, an ex-lieutenant colonel
whose background in medical service includes the Falklands and Lockerbie. We had a point in common. Roger’s son-in-law commands the 4th Royal Australian Rifles, currently active in East
Timor, where they had been in a skirmish only yesterday. After telling him how I approved of the Australian government’s action with regard to East Timor, I discovered that Roger didn’t
necessarily approve of the British government’s action with regard to the Health Service. ‘What you’ve got in the Department of Health are people who have never seen a patient,
and they are advising people who do see a patient.’ I asked him if more money would fix things and the answer was: not without a re-think. ‘It’s a question of morale. Doctors,
nurses, want to look after patients, not paperwork.’

I was busily writing that down when the Blair bus pulled in and gave forth the power couple – Blair and Cherie, both in full smile mode, a grand total of sixty-four scintillating teeth
exposed to scrutiny from a satellite. Blair had his jacket off already: ever since Peter Mandelson noted with horror that one of the smudgers had nabbed an under-arm sweat shot, Blair has been
pre-cooled for all occasions. Bad news for jacket manufacturers, but it makes media sense. So do Cherie’s long-top pants suits with the long-toed shoes. During many a chat-stop on the way to
the hangar, she proved her grace. She has a way of standing with one foot in front of the other, like a figure on an Egyptian frieze, although she does so with her legs crossed, as if Nefertiti
were dancing the tango.

Soon they were inside being shown how the ambulance unit could electronically monitor patients at home, with the aim of cutting down the number of death-defying sprints to the hospital. A
handsome South African doctor name-tagged
ANTON VAN DELLEN
(doctors still have surnames) proudly informed me that this was a cutting-edge set-up, but I wondered if, inside,
anyone was telling Blair (a) that the secret of its success lay in the determination of its commander to fight his own war with no bullshit from upstairs, and (b) that the doctor was an import.

Dr Van Dellen strode handsomely away on his mission of mercy, to be replaced in my view by the celebrated Blairite apparatchik Anji Hunter. Access-starved journos tell me that Anji is a hard
case, but she didn’t seem that way today. At my age I am immune to sexual desire, but there is a lingering aesthetic sense that appreciates a tall, slim female form draped in a black linen
pants suit underpinned with strappy high-heeled sandals for the shapely feet, the toenails painted with the blood of slain lovers. This was one chic apparatchik. Getting as tough as I ever can when
drowning in a woman’s eyes, I asked her why the Labour poster campaign was still screaming at the punters to get out there and vote in case Hague got in. She said, ‘Why don’t you
have a word with Alastair?’ She meant Alastair Campbell, so she might as well have recommended having a word with Napoleon Bonaparte: nice idea, but it would depend on the availability.

Anji drifted elegantly back into the Blair bus and Alastair Campbell came hulking out of it. He was very nice. You could fill the Millennium Dome with media people eager to testify that he is
not nice at all, but he was nice today. I don’t think he was turning it on, although clearly it can be murder when he turns it off. He wasn’t guarded in the least. When I suggested that
New Labour no longer had any challenge from the left, he guilelessly let slip that Charles Kennedy might fill the bill. I noted that one down: the whole potential realignment of British politics
compressed into a moment. His answer to the question I had asked Anji was simple: a foregone conclusion meant that the voters might stay home. When I said that the Tories might vanish altogether,
he said ‘Good.’ He said it with a smile, but he meant it. ‘What about democracy?’ I wailed. This time his smile said he didn’t mean it. ‘Ah, come on. Don’t
give me
that
stuff.’ I could have quoted him cold and launched a thousand cartoons, but it wouldn’t have been fair. His laughter said that what he was saying was preposterous.
There is nothing preposterous, however, about the possibility.

Even with some of the polls adjusting the Labour lead downwards because of new rules for asking questions, we are looking at a one-party state for at least one parliament into the future. As
Campbell went back into the bus to plug himself back into his information system that deals with millions of people all at once instead of one sweating hack at a time, I was pondering the
implications. Tony and Cherie emerged from the hangar and proceeded down the concourse. Craning sideways, I could see Cherie dropping to a crouch, either to kiss babies or else to converse with
children and very small adults. We were informed that at the next stop Blair would reassure Shropshire and the waiting world about New Labour’s commitment to a Strong Society. Medical staff
would be safe from attack by schoolteachers driven crazy by late trains.

But I could catch the speech on the fringe channels late at night. Harris had got his stuff. The great thing about photographers is that they bring the same expertise to baby-kissing as they do
to a Palestinian kid bouncing rocks off an Israeli tank: they do what they must, and when it’s done it’s done. But for a scribbler, the story rarely fits the frame unless he lies.
Integrity means you can’t stop taking things in, and on the road back to London I took in the thing that mattered. It was buried on page 17 of a stapled clump of bumf handed to me by the
indefatigable Roger. At the request of the NHS board, his ambulance unit was being studied by Sheffield University ‘to identify the transferability of the Staffordshire performance throughout
the National Health Service’.

Eureka! If Roger’s irascible voice was going to be heard at government level, the implications were enormous. It meant that Labour would not just be bringing the private sector into the
Health Service, it would be dumping its cherished top-down, target-setting management system. This was the very thing that Portillo was saying the Tories would do. The Tories wouldn’t be
doing anything for the next hundred years, but if Labour moves in that direction it will be clear confession that from the health angle the whole of the last parliament was a waste. Tony’s
campaign slogans for the public services boil down to ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish.’ If he really means ‘I got it wrong last time but this time I’ll get it
right’ he is open to an objection that uses the words ‘piss-up’ and ‘brewery’ in the same sentence. But New Labour certainly can organize a bus-trip.

5. Lunging for the Tape

On Monday afternoon William Hague was in the Wirral, where he said, ‘It’s a campaign that’s going very well.’ No doubt King Harold said the same thing at
Hastings, while his troops kindly pretended not to notice the arrow sticking out of his eye. Scholars have yet to agree about which of the two Roman consuls, Aemillius Paullus or Terentius Varro,
said the same thing at the battle of Cannae. To escape being massacred by 7,000 of Hannibal’s Libyan heavy troops, the depleted legions turned around just in time to be charged by 10,000 of
Hasdrubal’s cavalry. At this point either Aemillius or Terentius said, ‘It’s a campaign that’s going very well.’ It probably sounded better in Latin.