It also sheds light on his determination to limit his exposure to scrutiny as far as possible: bypassing Parliament (which huge Labour majorities turned into a passive instrument of the executive) while subverting collective Cabinet government. This ensured, as former Blairite insider David Clark explained in 2002, "that all power and authority in Whitehall flows personally from Blair. The few remaining checks and balances in the British constitution have been swept aside. The result is government by whim. With the exception of Gordon Brown, Cabinet ministers have virtually no autonomous policy-making function. Their role is to carry out the will of the Prime Minister."

Earlier, in a 17 November 2001 BBC documentary, the late Mo Mowlam, a Blair minister for four years, had said it herself. "Tony's acting more like a President than a Prime Minister and in that situation the Cabinet itself is dead. He makes decisions with a small coterie of advisers, just like the President of the United States." On the same programme, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott unwittingly confirmed that even the momentous decision to make the Bank of England independent, just after Labour's 1997 election victory, was taken without Cabinet consultation.

Former Cabinet Secretary Lord Butler, who worked closely with Mr Blair when Labour first swept to power, also said Cabinet government "virtually disappeared" under Mr Blair's leadership. Condemning Blair's "sofa" syle of informal government during a discussion at the Hay literary festival on 29 May 2007, he claimed that just one decision was taken by the Cabinet as a whole during the first eight months of Blair's tenure. In keeping with New Labour's modus operandi, where image and gloss trump reality and substance, Butler stated that Cabinet meetings were "not discussions or decisions about policy" but, rather, "What are the issues of the week and what is our message about them?" He lamented that Mr Blair would make crucial decisions with a handful of aides in his Downing Street "den". Instead of consulting Cabinet colleagues, the Prime Minister relied on a small circle including his Chief of Staff, Director of Political and Government Relations, Foreign Policy Adviser and his notorious Director of Communications, Alastair Campbell.

Having also observed this development at first-hand, David Clark reflected that "Those around Blair have no grasp of the fact that in diminishing the Cabinet they have diminished the Government itself."

Birds of a feather

It was mendacious spin-maestro Alastair Campbell, of course, who directed this strategic turning of Downing Street into a presidential bunker. Since you can tell a lot about a man by the close company he keeps, Mr Campbell adds much to our understanding of the real Tony Blair.

A thuggish, foul-mouthed former pornographer, ex-"red top" journalist, reformed alcoholic and, doubtless, future star as "Comic's" sidekick in The O'Blairs, Campbell became Mr Blair's right-hand man in 1994. In the eyes of many he was 'the real Deputy Prime Minister', famous for keeping the PM and his Ministers, all Labour MPs, a largely compliant media, Whitehall and anyone else he could bully - "on message".

As the late Daily Mail columnist Lynda Lee Potter recalled: "Tony Blair dispensed the charm and Alastair issued the threats. He was prepared to ruin the livelihoods and reputations of dissident journalists. His vindictive, haranguing telephone calls were legendary. Reporters who stood up to him were punished and isolated. Access to the Prime Minister and Cabinet members was denied, information withheld and smear campaigns orchestrated. [...] Alastair Campbell's ability to control the Prime Minister is unprecedented in political history."

In his 2002 article, David Clark recounted "a briefing for special advisers given by Alastair Campbell which he used to chide Ministers for failing to use certain approved slogans in their interviews and speeches." This was routine. According to one regular attendee at Campbell's daily 8.30am meeting in Downing Street, it was Campbell who decided what the ministers would say, including the Prime Minister.

Mr Blair feebly accepted such barking of orders by his ferocious guard dog because Campbell had orchestrated both the politicisation of the Whitehall press corps, replacing neutral civil servants with New Labour apparatchiks, and the near total stitch-up of the British media, Left and Right, which got him elected and ensured that he stayed in power.

Treachery and treason

Campbell's 'expertise' was vital because although he could count on the Left wing press and the liberal-Left bias of the BBC [CO, Feb. 2008], Blair desperately needed the support of the erstwhile Tory-supporting Murdoch press, which constitutes about 35 per cent of the newspaper circulation in Britain. He was prepared to sell his soul, his country and his very dignity to gain that endorsement. Campbell provided the contacts and direction.

In October 1995, when Mr Blair is making his first tentative approaches to Mr Murdoch, former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan confides in his published diary: "Blair is clearly terrified of [him]".(1) In that vein, Tony Blair became Rupert Murdoch's obliging creature from Day One of his premiership, flying half way around the world to speak at a Murdoch conference shortly after he became PM. Thereafter, the symbiotic relationship never flagged and Blair would plumb ever new depths in order to curry favour with Rupert's massive, voyeuristic Page Three readership. On the eve of the 2005 election, for instance, during an interview with The Sun, he and his wife boasted about their sexual prowess. Introduced with a lewd front page headline and carrying a photograph of a bare-chested Prime Minister inside, Blair was quoted as saying, in response to a question about his fitness, that he was "ready for it…five times a night" (emblematic of the vulgarity, impropriety and patent self-deception which marked their Downing Street years).

For his part, Murdoch gained in return an easy ride apropos predatory pricing of his newspapers and the monopoly enjoyed by his Sky satellite channel in televising British Premier League soccer matches. But his leverage was far more substantial.

Despite Alastair Campbell's sorry efforts to convince anyone who'll listen that the billionaire boss of News International in no way influenced his boss, Lance Price, his Downing Street deputy for three years and still a staunch New Labour supporter, preferred to tell the truth. In The Spin Doctor's Diary [Hodder & Stoughton, 2005] he called Mr Murdoch "the 24th member of the Cabinet": He went on: "His presence was always felt. No big decision could ever be made inside No.10 without taking account of the likely reaction of three men, Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch. On all the really big decisions, anybody else could safely be ignored."

The "big decisions" were just that, including those on Europe, about which Price wrote: "We've promised News International we won't make any changes to our Europe policy without consulting them."(2)

In July 2007, after four years of blocking disclosure of the contacts between Mr Blair and Mr Murdoch, the Cabinet Office finally released details under the Freedom of Information Act which lend weight to Price's account. It transpires that there were six telephone discussions between Mr Blair and Mr Murdoch in 20 months, all at crucial moments of his premiership. Among three conversations between them in the nine days leading up to the Iraq war was a call made by Blair to Murdoch on 19 March 2003, the day before Britain and the United States invaded Iraq. The war was strongly supported by Murdoch-owned newspapers around the world.

Another conversation took place on 25 April 2004, just after Mr Blair bowed to pressure led by The Sun for him to promise a referendum on the proposed EU constitution. Mr Murdoch is virulently anti-euro.

Thus, Blair's 'government by sofa' was all of a piece with his deceitful 'government by media' as micro-managed by Campbell. One newspaper pundit righteously thundered: "Our contempt should be reserved for Mr Blair. It's clear from the diaries of Lance Price that the PM has betrayed both his party and his country. Influence is one thing but giving a media proprietor such control over policy is spinelessness so outrageous that it cries out for punishment."

Pornographic politics

Certainly, this wicked strategy of retaining power through media patronage went far beyond the Tories' relationship with the Murdoch press, or the toadying of yesteryear when politicians like Winston Churchill and Michael Foot cuddled up with Express proprietor Lord Beaverbrook (3). And, yes, it was spineless and treacherous. Yet Blair's army of spin doctors did more lasting damage. By manipulating language to an unprecedented degree, draining words of their original meaning or giving them opposite meanings, his huge public relations machine corroded the political process: successfully blurring the line between words and actions.

In its 2008 Lexicon, a dictionary compiled to help decipher buzz words and phrases, the Centre of Policy Studies think-tank says: "New Labour has taken this disguise [of appearing to be active] to new heights in its desire to be seen to be solving every problem. Talking about a problem has come to mean the same as doing something about it."

In 2003, the spin backfired explosively when Mr Blair's "sexed up" dossier on Iraq intensified public distrust of government. Deeply concerned, former Prime Minister John Major lambasted the spin doctors, labelling spin "the pornography of politics". A fitting analogy given Alastair Campbell's first journalistic endeavour: writing accounts of sexual exploits for top-shelf magazine Forum, under his pen-name "Riviera Gigolo". (Storylines for The O'Blairs write themselves; even Matt Groening couldn't make them up!)

Subsequently, Major produced a booklet entitled The Erosion of Parliamentary Government, in which he insists that spin "perverts. It is deceit licensed by the Government. Statistics massaged. Expenditure announced and reannounced. The record reassessed. Blame attributed. Innocence proclaimed. Black declared white: All in a day's work."

Some of Blair's comrades concurred. Respected former Labour MP Frank Field was moved to comment: "Even if the Government's press releases were now approved by St. Peter, people would still wonder whether there was some trick on the way." And he added: "Although it's easy to blame Alastair Campbell, it's the Prime Minister who approves it, because if the Prime Minister wanted to stop it, he would stop it." Precisely.

In September 2002, Channel 4 ran Control Freaks: The New Labour Machine, a documentary by former top civil servant Martin Sixsmith which laid bare all the lying, cynicism and smear utilised by Blair for short-term political advantage. It was a frightening insider view of the gross abuse of political power in a moral vacuum. A place where pragmatism rules through the overriding dictum: "What works is what counts, and what counts is what works." The sort of environment which encouraged spin doctor Jo Moore not only to suggest that September 11, 2001, was "a good day to bury bad news," but to blithely ignore the furore she caused and repeat the dose five months later by suggesting that some railway news be released on the day of Princess Margaret's funeral.

An example of routine spin was the regular re-announcement of Government spending, made on the basis that people would think more cash was being provided each time. Or a difficult policy, especially involving welfare reform, was assuaged by offering a friendly journalist an "exclusive preview" but actually providing a carefully doctored version, suggesting the announcement was going to be much tougher than the Government ever intended. This created an outcry in the media (e.g. that widows' benefits were to be axed), so when the real policy was released (merely tightening the payment rules) it was accepted with a sigh of relief as a reasonable measure. "It was a technique used to great effect over and over again," said Sixsmith, who found the Civil Service being pressured to abandon its traditional and crucial impartiality to join the manipulation and falsehood. He considers this willingness to undermine the safeguards of trust and integrity of the Civil Service for personal and Party gain one of the most corrupting tendencies of the Blair government: "I found widespread alarm among public servants that Britain's democratic guarantees are being poisoned and abandoned."

Vicious and deadly

In addition to this institutional damage, Campbell's spin-and-smear tactics sanctioned by Blair were personally destructive. Martin Sixsmith himself was targeted and nearly destroyed for merely seeking to prevent Jo Moore's deceitful spin.

When Rose Addie, an old lady who had been left on a trolley in a hospital corridor without care or attention spoke out about her treatment, the bad publicity prompted the spin doctors to label her a racist to deflect attention from the failings of the NHS. "We can say she's a racist and refused to be tended by black nurses," was the cynical outcome of the daily 8.30am Downing Street discussion, said Sixsmith.

Survivors of the Paddington rail crash who simply wanted to prevent the same thing happening again were similarly treated. Pam Warren, who was badly injured in the crash and campaigned for new safety measures, told the Daily Mail that the spin doctors were looking for information about her private life that they could use to impugn her integrity. Subsequently, they branded the group as Conservatives with a Tory agenda, to show them up as political crusaders with an anti-Labour agenda.

The mendacity and deceit reached its zenith/nadir with the suicide or murder of Iraqi weapons expert Dr David Kelly.

After straying "off message" this unassuming academic was ruthlessly exposed as the BBC source for a story calling into question Mr Blair's WMD rationale for going to war. Displaying what his former supporter, novelist Robert Harris, writing in The Guardian recently called "the selfishness and indifference to others that have always been the least attractive marks of his personal and political style," Blair let the Downing Street attack dogs smear and dismiss Kelly as a "Walter Mitty" fantasist, ruining his career and reputation while thrusting him into the eye of a political storm.

Either the strain was too much and he took his own life (official verdict), or he was killed by sinister forces desperate to invade Iraq and topple Saddam for one reason or another. Either way, his body was found in woodland near his home.

The brother of Dr Kelly's widow is in no doubt where the blame lies. After years of dignified silence, he spoke up for the family last month in response to Cherie Blair dredging up the affair to promote her memoirs and absolve her husband. "It's somehow so typical of the Blairs to make use of Dai's death to show the world what a wonderful man Tony Blair is," he said. "So far as I'm concerned, my brother-in-law's death was caused by what went on at Number 10 and what they said about him. Where else was the furore created but in her husband's office, with all that wicked nonsense being fed to the media that Dai [the family's name for Dr Kelly] was a 'Walter Mitty' character and so on."

Socio-political fallout

In defying the Cabinet Secretary's attempt to prevent publication of his aforementioned memoirs, Campbell's former deputy Lance Price verified all of this: confirming our worst fears about Mr Blair, how he ran the country and the way the Party he formed in his own image is prepared to lie and cheat to get its message across (in which Price candidly admits he was involved, if not always willingly). He paints a damning and chaotic picture of a Government making major policies on the hoof, sometimes minutes before Blair went on TV. This rings true, given so many of his hare-brained initiatives, clearly launched on a whim and never followed through. Who could forget his cunning plan to march thugs to a cashpoint for on-the-spot-fines, or his brainwave about free CDs and clothes for hooligans as an "incentive for responsible behaviour"!

Such thoughtless gestures reflect the intellectual incoherence marking all his schemes. The half-cock remodelling of the House of Lords; the back-of-a-bus-ticket scheme for a Supreme Court; the shambolic devolvement of Scotland and Wales; the Millennium Dome fiasco; the unworkable fox-hunting legislation....

Among his most catastrophic acts, however, was the target-setting culture he imposed on civil administration. This utilitarian plank of political correctness is a major reason why people fear the implementation of all Blairite legislation, since government "targets" have turned 6 million state employees (up 900,000 under Blair with nearly 1.25 million in central administration) into form-filling, box-ticking Stalinist robots. In the process, justice and commonsense have been obliterated. Some examples:

• Police are heavily pressured (or 'bribed' by annual bonuses) to meet "performance targets" involving arrests which meet "sanction detection" quotas set by the Home Office. Consequently, every minor incident is now blown out of proportion to meet targets and police are alienating the public by classifying as crimes incidents that would once have been dealt with informally or ignored. "Targets" measure crime committed rather than crime prevented, so personal discretion is taken away and crime priorities are turned on their head. A child chalking on the pavement, as happened recently, gets a "sanction detection" but the effort to track down a missing child does not. A child stealing a Mars bar earns an officer the same as working on a murder investigation. Since careers and pensions are at stake and forces are at the mercy of politicians and judged by the number of "detections", there is a reluctance to get involved in anything that does not contribute to their targets. "Your reputation stands or falls on figures, not how well you're doing with the community," a senior officer informed investigative journalist Harriet Sergeant. An inspector told her his community wanted anti-social behaviour dealt with, "But we don't get measured on that."[Daily Mail, 11,12,13 Feb. 2008]
• In order to meet targets set by Mr Blair in 2000 to increase adoptions by 50 per cent, English councils are driven by huge financial incentives ('36million in 'reward grants'). This has led to the unspeakable crime of "1,000 children wrongly being seized from their birth parents each year even though they have not been harmed in any way," according to evidence secured by Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming. "We are seeing a massive increase in the forced removal of newborns," he said. "Babies are being taken before they can even be breastfed. Social workers are seizing very young children on the flimsiest of excuses and giving them to other families. This smacks of social engineering on a grand scale. The offer of monetary rewards for meeting the targets has created a frenzy among social workers. There are council targets for recycling rubbish and now targets for recycling children." Accounts of the resultant parental anguish are difficult to read.
• Teachers and health professionals must also deal with a target-driven culture which hampers or perverts their principal duties. Nurses now typically spend twenty per cent of their time on administration. Of 2,000 nurses polled by the Royal College of Nursing, 81 per cent said they had felt distressed by the degrading treatment they are "forced" to offer due to time eaten up by paperwork. Meanwhile, "more than 34,000 people a year die unnecessarily in our hospitals and another 25,000 are unnecessarily permanently disabled," according to economist David Craig.