Campbell left office over media breakdown

Alastair Campbell, former spinmeister to Tony Blair and the crooked newspaper proprietor Lord Maxwell, has admitted he left Downing Street in 2003 partly because he felt he had become a factor in the deteriorating relations with the media and that if he left, things might improve. But he claimed in a lecture at the London College of Communication last night that his departure had in fact made no difference to the breakdown in trust between government and journalists.

In the annual Hugh Cudlipp lecture, named after the legendary Daily Mirror editor-in-chief of the 1950s, Campbell echoed a speech made by Blair in June 2007, just before he left office, in which he claimed that politics was increasingly reported in black and white, rather than grey, terms.

"The coverage surrounding his successor has rather proved his [Blair's] point," said Campbell. "For the first few weeks, the breathless pavement-standers told how Gordon Brown could do no wrong. Then the mood shifted, the prism changed and he went straight from hero to zero."

Campbell said he had had little input into the former PM's 2007 speech in which Blair berated the "feral beast" of the modern media and picked out the Independent for censure. "I certainly wouldn't have singled out the Independent when the Mail is the most poisonous UK newspaper, and I know that is his view too."

Campbell did not expound on the well-known friendship between the Daily Mail's editor Paul Dacre and Gordon Brown, in sharp contrast to the miserable relationship between the 'Middle England' newspaper and Blair during the later years of his premiership. ·