Tomorrow, Prime Minister Tony Blair will stand up in The Sage Gateshead and deliver a speech he hopes will be the launchpad for a third successful election campaign. Doubtless there will be some end-of-jumble-sale-style pleasantries about the North-East, of the kind that usually only surface in his annual conference speech at Northern Night. "I will never forget the people of the North-East and what they have done for me," says Mr Blair each year, before going off to spend another 12 months fretting about Middle England. And likewise, while tomorrow's speech might ostensibly be aimed at the people in the conference hall, his real audience will, as ever, be the wider watching world. In view of New Labour's decidedly mixed record in the region, the Prime Minister would in any case be wise not to dwell on this particular aspect of his eight years in power. For instance, while the Government's record on unemployment appears at first sight to be something of a success-story, there remains a significant North-South gap in levels of joblessness. Similar regional inequalities have persisted in health, with life expectancy actually decreasing in some parts of the region despite the vast sums that have been poured into the NHS. And while school class sizes have been cut as Labour promised in 1997, the threat of closure is still hanging over many rural schools in Northumberland. Then there is the state of the region's rural economy, devastated by the Blair Government's mishandling of the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic that overshadowed the last election. And as for the whole, wretched fiasco of regional devolution
well, even this Prime Minister would be hard pressed to put a positive spin on that one. But whatever inspirational messages pour forth from Mr Blair's lips tomorrow, it is already clear that this will be the dirtiest election in British political history. With the official election announcement still likely to be weeks away, the campaign has already become characterized by those well-used tools of the political trade, spin and smear. In one sense, of course, we shouldn't be surprised by this, given that no-one ever went broke underestimating the depths to which politicians will sink in search of votes. But in another sense, it represents how far New Labour has fallen from the lofty ideals espoused by Mr Blair prior to his election as Prime Minister in 1997. He promised back then that he would not indulge in negative campaigning against the Tories and would concentrate instead on spreading a positive message of national renewal. In fact he did both - the 1997 landslide was at least partly attributable to Labour's relentless characterizing of John Major's Tories as economically incompetent and sleazy. Mr Blair also promised us that his Government would be "whiter than white" and later, once he was safely inside Number 10, that he was "a pretty straight kind of guy." And for a while, the public, desperate for someone in whom they could put their trust after the drift and drabness of the Major years, believed him. Meanwhile, the smear tactics which had once been aimed at the Tories were turned instead on anyone who got in the way of the Government's message - including its own ministers. David Clark, Mo Mowlam, the Paddington train crash survivors, even a 94-year-old hospital patient who complained about being left on a trolley - all were on the wrong end of Mr Blair's ruthless spin machine. The main driver of the machine was, of course, Alastair Campbell, the former No 10 press secretary who became, for a while, the second most powerful man in the country. In the end, the machine over-reached itself by spinning the country into war with Iraq on the basis that Saddam Hussein could fire weapons of mass destruction at 45 minutes' notice. In fact Saddam had no WMD, let alone any that could be fired within 45 minutes, and Mr Campbell was eventually obliged to leave Downing Street. For a while, the Government pretended it had drawn a line under the era of spin - but it was simply a case of "no spin is the new spin," and behind the scenes, nothing really changed. And now, Mr Campbell is back at the Prime Minister's side, helping to mastermind what he hopes will be a third successive Labour landslide. Could it possibly be mere coincidence that his return has seen the negative campaigning against the Tories and their leader Michael Howard reach a new pitch? Even poor old Mr Major found himself back in the firing line, victim of a ludicrous allegation that he tried to cover up documents relating to the Black Wednesday debacle in 1992. It is a measure of the extent to which most political journalism has been debased that this wholly manufactured "story" was reported on the front page of a national newspaper as fact. Alastair Campbell may have been brought back to bolster Labour's campaign - but his presence at the heart of Mr Blair's re-election effort ought in fact to horrify the British electorate. Just how grotesque is it that he has got his job back when Dr David Kelly, the man who tried to tell the truth about the Iraq war, cannot have his life back? Mr Campbell is a walking reminder of what went wrong with a Government that once epitomized the politics of hope but ended up enslaved by spin and smear. In short he is a reminder of why Britain, too, is now urgently in need of regime change. | 
