The arch spinner: We spun too much

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's closest adviser and communications supremo, admits today that the Government has resorted to spin far too much in its attempt to win public approval.

In a rare interview, Mr Campbell acknowledges that Labour became far too reliant on the dark arts of hype and spin, particularly in the first few years of power, and that ministers were keen to re-announce policies to get more publicity.

But he attempted to justify his efforts to manage the media, saying it arose from fears that the Prime Minister would find himself a victim of the newspapers in the way that the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock was destroyed by a hostile press in the Eighties.

" If I were honest about the whole thing, we hung on to some of the techniques and ways of opposition for too long," Mr Campbell said today. "I don't know if things could have been done differently to prevent the spin thing becoming so huge."

But the PM's director of communications and strategy blamed much of the hype of the Government's attempt on the 24-hour demand for news from TV stations and increasingly competitive newspapers.

" I don't know whether it could have been done differently to prevent the whole spin thing becoming so huge," he told The Times. He also reserves much criticism for the media, accusing journalists of being far more interested in trivial issues. "Everything has to be a 'massive scandal' - it's never a minor scandal - or it has to be the 'worst crisis yet'."

He said that journalists wanted to "report everything as if it's 100mph in the fast lane, but most people are living in the middle lane and don't want to go that fast."

However, there is an acknowledgement that that ministers spent too long worrying over whether anyone would write about their policies "unless there is some news wheeze or angle attached". But he said they can be more confident now, "because policies we have gone through have made an impact".

The relationship now between the Government and the media does sometimes "feel like a dialogue of the deaf," he said. "The press on one side, saying we just spin you a line the whole time, then us on the other side, saying that you are obsessed by trivia and process. The victims are the public, who don't think it has anything to do with them whatsoever."

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