Tony Blair was in trouble. Grey-faced, uncharacteristically faltering, he could only reiterate under siege in the press, on television and in parliament that the Weapons of Mass Destruction which had convinced him to take Britain to war really did exist and would be found.
Perhaps to divert the heat, his colleague and chief spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, suddenly savaged what he characterised as the BBC’s biased coverage of the war with Iraq and the WMD dispute. He took special aim at the BBC’s defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, who notoriously reported that the September dossier on Iraqi WMD had been ‘sexed up’ at the behest of Downing Street.
‘We must not allow ourselves to be diverted by Downing Street, and in particular by Alastair Campbell,’ riposted the Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor on 28 June, ‘from extremely serious issues which go to the very heart of how we are being ruled.’ The following day, under the heading ‘Don’t Be Conned by the Campbell Sideshow’, the Independent joined in the charge, insisting that ‘Britain appears to have been led into an unjustified war, in which thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed, on a false pretext ... Unless the weapons are discovered and shown to be as lethal as Blair said, voters will not be distracted by marginal issues.’
Meanwhile, in the same newspapers and on the same days, another Blair was being argued about, though with somewhat less of a splash. This was Eric Arthur Blair who, on 25 June, while his namesake’s desperate defences were unravelling, would have been 100 had he lived. This Blair is of course much better known as George Orwell. Next to Richard Norton-Taylor’s article, headlined incidentally, ‘The BBC row has been got up to obscure the ugly truth’, was one called ‘Orwell: saint or stooge?’ in which Scott Lucas and D.J. Taylor, both biographers of Orwell, ‘argue over the inheritance of the literary icon’s fickle idealism’. And in the Independent, one page before the editorial on the ‘Campbell sideshow’, was ‘A hero for the wine bar warriors’ by Joan Smith—a flip, shallow column in which she remarked correctly that ‘George Orwell is everywhere’. The Independent and the Guardian were not alone in fulsomely if combatively recognising the centenary. Eric Blair, in his Orwell manifestation, was as ubiquitous during that week, even if in a lower key, as the other Blair—attracting praise and excoriation from admirers and the apostate Left respectively.
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