Into the Second Term

R.W. Johnson

• Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley
  Hamish Hamilton, 434 pp, £17.99, September 2000, ISBN 0 241 14029 3
• Mandelson and the Making of New Labour by Donald Macintyre
  HarperCollins, 638 pp, £6.99, September 2000, ISBN 0 00 653062 1
• Mo Mowlam: The Biography by Julia Langdon
  Little, Brown, 324 pp, £16.99, September 2000, ISBN 0 316 85304 6
• Ann Widdecombe: Right from the Beginning by Nicholas Kochan
  Politico’s, 302 pp, September 2000, ISBN 1 902301 55 2
• The Paymaster: Geoffrey Robinson, Maxwell and New Labour by Tom Bower
  Simon and Schuster, 272 pp, £17.99, March 2001, ISBN 0 7432 0689 4
• The Future of Politics by Charles Kennedy
  HarperCollins, 235 pp, £17.99, September 2000, ISBN 0 00 710131 7

Throughout the time that he was Prime Minister Clement Attlee read only the Times. He was, he said, too busy to bother with other newspapers. The fact that the Times was firmly Tory and, after a few years of Labour Government, almost hysterically anti-socialist, didn’t worry him at all. ‘That’s what one expects,’ he said. ‘It’s quite reliable in that, which is, in its way, rather restful. And the cricket reports are good.’ Under New Labour, by contrast, every day in Downing Street starts with a careful sifting of the press; there are strong responses to any stories which might have been ‘inspired’ or leaked. Enormous care is taken to try to manage the news not just in the obvious sense of trying to put a positive spin on whatever the Government is doing but, more fundamentally, in blocking off whole policy areas because they might result in a damaging headline in the Sun or the Mail.