When the heat is on, sofa rule will return

Alastair Campbell's diaries have been a gift to Gordon Brown. Their publication last week might have been expected to be an embarrassment to the new Prime Minister. The Conservatives certainly tried to make them so, publishing a list of disobliging things that Tony Blair's former press secretary says about Brown. But it hasn't worked.

The reason is that the myth of Alastair Campbell is too powerful. This is the belief that he is a liar and a spinner and a very bad man who poisoned the relationship between the government and the media. Thus the book, set in the safe no-man's land of the recent past, ending in 2003, serves only to emphasise Brown's separation from the "Blair Years" of Campbell's title.

So powerful is the myth that Campbell's own account, which of course gives a rather different view of his role, only reinforces it. His is a modern Catch-22. He is a spinner; therefore his book portraying himself as a straight man who tried to do good is spin.

In fact, the diaries contain a more ominous message for Brown. Which is that managing the aggressive and distorting British media is no picnic. They may all be lauding the arrival of "no spin" government now, praising Brown to the skies for returning government from the sofa to the Cabinet table and doing everything by the book, but it will not last.

The idea that Brown does not do "spin" is as ridiculous as the idea that journalists do not do "spin". After the week in which the BBC was caught out for pub-licising footage that gave a misleading impression of the Queen, what might be called the Campbell thesis can hardly be denied. And after two and a half weeks of Brown government, it should be obvious that all successful politicians try to present themselves in the best possible light.

Thus we had spin-free Brown telling us he had revoked the Order in Council that allowed Campbell and Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, to issue instructions to civil servants. It was an order that no longer applied, so it was just a symbolic gesture. But it was hailed as a refreshing change by the same people who will soon be complaining about Brown's politi-cisation of the Civil Service.

The idea that Brown's entourage consists mainly of non-political civil servants whose only loyalty is to the Queen-in-Parliament is unsustainable. Among his aides, the distinction between political advisers and civil servants is not obvious to the naked eye. As Chancellor, he politicised the Treasury Civil Service, and I am all for it, but it runs against the grain of the conventional view that he has assiduously courted.

As Prime Minister, Brown said last week that he would not be running "what people call 'sofa government". But the idea of government-by-furniture is nonsense. The phrase owes its origin to Danny Finkelstein, the Times columnist who worked for John Major and William Hague. During the Hutton inquiry hearings, he commented: "A picture of Blair's Downing Street emerged in which people plonked themselves on sofas in other people's offices, shooting the breeze about the crisis, with no one in charge and no one keeping a record. Not very reassuring."

It was not an accurate picture, but the image stuck, with the phrase glued to it. As soon as Brown takes a decision with which people disagree, however, the metaphorical sofa will be back. Where, for example, was the decision to ditch super-casinos taken? It doesn't matter now, because it was a clever and right decision - reversing one into which Blair allowed his ministers to blunder without realising that they had been captured by the US gaming industry. But there will be other decisions that will not be so welcome, and then critics will find fault with the way in which they were made.

Then, last week, we had sleaze-free Brown presiding over a Labour Party fundraising bash at Wembley stadium attended by Owen Oyston, a man who has paid his debt to society but not to the less forgiving media. No-showbiz Brown had defiantly launched his lonely leadership campaign in May by declaring: "I do not believe politics is about celebrity." Guests at Wembley included Sir Alex Ferguson, Mick Hucknall, Sean Bean, John Mot-son and Nancy Dell'Olio - and by the self-titled "former celebrity" Tony Blair. (Remarkably, Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP, was quoted in yesterday's Daily Mail describing the event not as a pretty seedy beginning to Brown's Labour, but as "a pretty seedy end to Blair's Labour".)

This is the background against which we should assess the general opinion last week that, while the Campbell diaries provide lots of texture, they do not reveal much that is new. What this means is that they do not substantiate the myth that the poisoning of media- political relations was all the fault of one malevolent spin- doctor.

What is important to the future, to the Brown-Cameron battle that will dominate the next few years, is the true story - rather than the myth - of the way in which journalists and politicians interact. Far from Alastair Campbell, the confrontational alpha male, being the problem, his personal drama was the symptom of a pre-existing state of affairs. He had a difficult relationship with the press from early on. When, for example, do you think another spin-doctor diarist recorded the observation that "AC was in full bash-the- media mode (especially the BBC) over its Iraq coverage"? That was Lance Price, Campbell's deputy, writing in December 1998 about the Desert Fox bombing campaign.