There's far more to journalism than just propaganda

Broadly speaking there are two ways of understanding politics. There is the view, shared by 19th century liberals and 20th century conservatives, that politicians do more harm than good and individuals are best left as much as possible to their own devices.

Then there is the Utopian leftist tradition that human nature is perfectible and that the job of politics is to change the world and create a better society. This belief has animated both the most noble and the most evil thinkers and politicians - Lenin, Stalin and Ceaucescu, as well as Keir Hardie, Sidney Webb and Orwell.

Both traditions are open to criticism - conservatism that it lacks compassion, and leftism that it can annihilate the freedom and privacy of the individual. The great and noble historical claim of Tony Blair and New Labour is that it can unite both traditions to create a society where freedom and compassion can co-exist. It has embraced some traditional conservative and liberal insights while shedding many of the most egregious dreams of state control entertained by the old left. It has done this with some success, most particularly in the economic field, and has been in many respects one of the most successful governments of recent times.

But it has yet to get the balance entirely right. This is understandable enough. New Labour retains, for complex reasons, the old Utopian leftist belief that all human life at the end of the day is political. It is this deeply embedded attitude that explains so many of its most distinctive features and, above all, New Labour's sub-Marxist dogma that institutions are ideologically loaded. That is why the Government constantly infringes the independence and neutrality of the British civil service. The Mittal, Ecclestone and Hiinduja passport affairs all derive from New Labour's reckless willingness to plunder or adapt the machinery of state for party political advantage.

It also explains New Labour's problem with the Royal Family. It fundamentally cannot recognise or accept that there is a giant space in British public life which is above politics and which symbolises the nation as a whole, regardless of party. It was this failure to understand the role of the monarchy that caused Downing Street to make a hash of the Queen Mother's lying in state.

It has a similar kind of problem with the press. Labour has convinced itself over the past few months that it is the victim of a sinister plot by a small group of right- wing newspapers which are determined to bring down Tony Blair. This belief is mistaken. Last night, watching Channel Four News, I listened to one of Labour's special advisers claim that the "right-wing press" are involved in a "campaign" to "pick off" victims like Stephen Byers and Alastair Campbell before moving on, or so he seemed to infer, at some stage to Tony Blair. Perhaps I shouldn't be harsh on this particular speaker, because pretty well all of his former Government colleagues are parroting the same sort of thing. The belief has taken hold in the Cabinet. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid were both expounding different versions of this conspiracy theory yesterday, while readers of the Evening Standard were given a preview of this line of attack in last Friday's entertaining article by Roy Greenslade of the Guardian.

It is an account of events which owes everything to an assumption that the papers which reported Downing Street ' s claim to an enhanced role in the Queen Mother's lying-in-state were driven by the same motives that drove Alastair Campbell when he was Political Editor of the Mirror. Campbell never made the faintest secret that he was a propagandist whose job was simply to further the interest of Labour and damage the governing Tory Party.

For most of the rest of us journalism is simply is not like that. For five years I worked as Political Correspondent of the Evening Standard. Under the sage generalship of Political Editor Charles Reiss, I broke a series of stories which caused deep annoyance to the Tories. One of them - that John Wakeham was leaving the Cabinet to work for a City bank heavily involved in privatisation work - caused such a storm that John Major was seen to bury his head in his hands in despair at the Cabinet table. More recently, in the pages of The Spectator, I revealed that Michael Ashcroft was funding the Tory Party. This too led to an almighty row and in due course a spectacular legal suit between Ashcroft and Times newspapers. Simon Walters, the Political Editor of the Mail on Sunday which has done such a brilliant job in reporting the Black Rod affair, produced a devastating book nine months ago about the splits and rifts in William Hague's Tory Party. Ironically enough, it was Walters who caused profound Tory embarrassment by revealing William Hague's attempt to meddle in the funeral of Princess Diana.

The idea that we are "Tory lickspittles" - as one Labour paper called me yesterday - is, to use a recent phrase from the lips of the Prime Minister, "as offensive as it is completely and totally untrue".

One of the curiosities of the Blair Government has been its sense, right from the very beginning, that it was the victim of some kind of vendetta. About a year after the 1997 election victory, Anji Hunter, a trusted Blair aide, was heard to remark: "They all hate us out there, don't they.? At the time the Prime Minister had a 30-point lead in the polls. This persecution mania was and remains without foundation, and yet it is capable of doing the Government great damage. No 10's belief that all criticism is politically motivated led it to respond to our accurate story about the Queen Mother's lying-instate with a catastrophic mixture of cover-up, bullying and deceit. Unless it is careful, this fear of persecution will become self-fulfilling.