Clear Out the Kitchen Cabinet

Try this for a pub quiz teaser. What have George Reedy, Mike McCurry, Joe Lockhart and Jim Hagerty got in common? Or, if you need a hint, Ron Zeigler, Marlin Fitzwater, Pierre Salinger and Jody Powell? Yip, they were all White House press secretaries, all the superpower Alastair Campbells of their day. Why, then, is it so difficult to remember them?

These, for the most part, are not names to conjure with. They come and they go. Reedy stayed two terms with Ike: but then, Ike packed less news into a year than George W manages most weeks. Ari Fleischer has just packed up as the voice of Bush after two-and-a-half years, handing over to Scott McLellan, and nobody in Washington bats an eyelid. Nobody pontificates about turning points of administration history. Talking to the press, like directing communications, is simply not that important. It matters, of course; but it is only part of the game.

By contrast, the man his opponents like to call President Blair seems to enjoy no such contextualisation. Campbell, in the hasty obituaries, is occasionally called deputy prime minister. (Perhaps that should be vice-president?) The loss of other aides - like Anji Hunter, and maybe one day soon, Jonathan Powell - is treated as gathering crisis. So farewell Alastair and Fiona: the old kitchen cabinet has almost gone. Our leader is somehow left alone, deserted, traduced, reviled: a T-shirt Lear railing on a Barbadan beach about the unfairness of the world and too many Cliff Richard CDs on the stereo system.

In fact, a real presidential system treats flux as a friend, a refreshment, an opportunity. Change rescued the second Reagan term. Change rode constant shotgun for Clinton. Change is normality (certainly in the restlessly shuffled portfolios of Labour ministry). Why, then, the supposed Downing Street problem?

Too many enemies, grateful for years of power but unpersuaded by the project. Too little help from his neighbour next door. Too much global travelling, too little nose to domestic grindstones. But - listing - there is also the oddness of the perpetually barking dog.

Who says that Alastair Campbell is such a giant figure, such a brooding genius of orchestration? Why, the press says it. And who talks to press about such matters? Why, Alastair Campbell. It's his job. Thus the picture of Ally as heap big cheese flows naturally from too many hot nights in the cheese factory. The medium, precisely, is the message.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Campbell has spent almost a decade burnishing his own reputation (though he's not always backward at coming forward). It is much more a question of siting Number 10's press office on the front line of every scrap. Nothing much happening on the Labour/Tory front? No, that's still a moribund yarn consigned to page 79. So the reporters themselves have to play gladiators. The arena they're in is the only one they see.

The departure of Campbell, when it comes, is perspective's fresh chance. Not the "death of spin", whatever that means. ("Spin", at root, is mostly a reportorial confection designed to make the battle seem tougher and the dark forces ranged against truth more sinister.) Just a chance to get boring again. Remember Gus O'Donnell and Chris Meyer? They were John Major's civil service mouthpieces (now bestriding the Treasury and the Press Complaints Commission respectively). They didn't have an easy ride - but that was because the Major government was imploding with hatred, not because they courted controversy.

If Tony Blair's government, similarly, is in hate implosion mode, then there's nothing to be done beyond damage limitation. But if it has energy in reserve - and fresh talent on tap - then clearing away the old, broken kitchen cabinet promises nothing but good. Nobody sentient, in this particular world, would want to go on any longer. It is high time to change the scenery - and the mood.

That, in the British way of things, is easily done, because the British system provides a continuing cadre of professional public servants. Over six years on, house-trained to New Labour, they can be given much more scope. So can the Cabinet itself, and their departments of state. The fate of Britain doesn't rest on three men and a poodle. The centre isn't the only place to hold.

Of course, when Peter Hain surfaces, offering a deal where the government drops the spin and the press drops its "obsession" with personality-mongering, he isn't offering a real deal. How can he, when Tessa Jowell is still fingering the BBC's collar and Gavyn Davies is taking up the enforced role of public defender in a row destined to run on for two years of charter renewal virulence? The legacy of Alastair Campbell won't disappear overnight if the causes and attitudes that formed it are allowed to run on. When Campbell went ballistic, he effectively deemed "not much change" to the charter, because changing it would look like spite.

No. The way to let the heat out of this kitchen heads in quite a different direction. It means bringing bright elected politicians back near the stove: more sightings of Douglas Alexander, a Downing Street return for David Miliband. It means letting effective ministers, from Alastair Darling to Charles Clarke, do much more of their own thing. It means less of the boss, emoting, and more of the team, promoted. And much less of media village introversions. As my American friend says: if you thought Ari Fleischer was boring and uncommunicative, you should see Scott McLellan now.