Good Days To Bury Bad News

"A good day to bury bad news" was how a young New Labour advisor on transport policy described the events of 9.11.2001 in an email. Her subsequent departure from office was remarkably swift, compared to the perpetrators of later media-related blunders. However, this kind of comment very much sets the tone for political/media values during the Blair and Brown Governments. In fact, it is precisely the lack of values in the relationship between politics and the media which has been one of the most disturbing features of New Labour in office.

I was reminded of this deficit the other day when former spin doctor supremo Alistair Campbell was given air time on BBC Radio 4's cultural programme "Front Row" to promote his new novel, "All in the Mind", and describe his various nervous breakdowns and depressions. The interview co-incided with the row about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand : a pair of overpaid mediocre twats in my opinion incidentally, but hardly worth all the fuss. Mark Lawson, the interviewer, suggested to Campbell that this row was the biggest to have hit the BBC since the media furore about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the related death of United Nations weapons inspector Dr David Kelly in 2003. Excuse me, but am I living on the same planet ! To compare the Ross/Brand nonsense with the WMD/Kelly story was rather more obscene, I would suggest, than Russell Brand's answerphone message. I can only imagine that there must be something about Alistair Campbell which causes derangement in other people.

As it happens, many other important and newsworthy items occurred whilst the politicians and the Media were gorging themselves on the on the Ross/Brand business, particularly on the economic front. But, thanks to the co-operation of busily-complaining Jo Public, whipped up by the popular press, here were more good days to bury bad news; and not least the information that the British Government knew about the problems of the Icelandic banks long before it invoked anti-terror laws - instead prudent financial regulation - against them.