By ADAM BOULTON The explosive Election row on live television between Adam Boulton, Sky News political editor, and Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell is dramatically reignited in a new book. Campbell made wild allegations about Boulton in a secret email sent to Sky bosses days after the row, according to Boulton’s book on the Election, Hung Together. Boulton says the email, published by The Mail on Sunday today, was part of an ‘insidious’ plot by Campbell to undermine him. In the email, Campbell claims Boulton branded him and Peter Mandelson ‘compulsive liars’ and ‘unpatriotic’ and threatens to sue Sky unless it says sorry for Boulton’s ‘unacceptable’ conduct. Live on air spat: Sky political editor Adam Boulton (left) waves his arm at Alastair Campbell as their debate on Sky News turns into a row Boulton justifies publishing the confidential email - which he says he has done without permission from Sky bosses - to expose what he claims is the way Campbell spent years ‘bullying, baiting and impugning’ anyone who criticised New Labour. The two clashed amid the chaotic aftermath of the Election as Gordon Brown made a last-ditch attempt to keep David Cameron out of power - with support from Campbell, who was advising the Labour leader in No 10. The dust-up was the culmination of a decade-long feud between Boulton and Campbell, who was forced to resign as Tony Blair’s Press supremo after the death of Iraq weapons expert Dr David Kelly. The dispute is mirrored - and fuelled - by an equally bitter feud between their partners. Boulton is married to Blair’s former No 10 ‘gatekeeper’ Anji Hunter, who clashed frequently with Campbell’s partner Fiona Millar when Millar was an adviser to Cherie Blair. The mutual loathing between the two men boiled over at 5pm on May 10 in a spectacular showdown at the Election media village on Abingdon Green, opposite the Houses of Parliament, after Mr Brown announced he was willing to stand down to kick-start talks between Labour and the Lib Dems. Campbell and Boulton slugged it out on live TV, hurling insults at each other. Host Jeremy Thompson only narrowly succeeded in preventing the two heavyweights coming to blows. In his book, co-authored with fellow Sky News political reporter Joey Jones, Boulton gives his account of the infamous spat in full for the first time. Boulton, who said at the time he ‘regretted’ the incident, describes how Sky ignored Campbell’s threats when he ‘pestered’ them with further emails. Here he explains his decision to publish Campbell’s email because ‘it reveals a lot about the man and his motives’. The best that can be said of the on-air row between Alastair Campbell and me is that it added greatly to the gaiety of the nation. Many viewers have told me it was the highlight of their General Election. A snowballing YouTube hit, it ‘trended’ on Twitter that night, a new expression to me, meaning it was one of the dominant topics of online-chatter in the English-speaking world. But it was not one of my proudest moments as a broadcaster. I regret losing my temper, although I stand by the comments I made. It was a Harry Hill ‘fight, fight’ moment in which two unelected observers of the political scene squared up to each other - but there were no blows, or other physical contact between us, to the disappointment of many of those watching. Campbell had come straight from No 10. Tony Blair’s former director of communications had no official position in the current party team but Alastair was Alastair, famous for his intimate friendships at the top of New Labour. My instinct was to leave the interview to Jeremy Thompson, at that hour the Sky News channel’s main presenter from Westminster, and I withdrew out of camera-shot. But just before going live, Campbell challenged me to take part with words to the effect of: ‘Come on, let’s have a dust-up.’ Against my better judgment I agreed to join the discussion. Here is an abridged version of our argument: Campbell: Because I don’t think that would be the right thing to do. Boulton: The nation needs four more months of Gordon Brown limping on? Campbell: You’ve been spending the last few years saying Gordon Brown is dead meat. Boulton: I’ve not been saying that, show me where I said that once. Campbell: You’re upset that David Cameron’s not Prime Minister. Boulton: I’m not. Don’t keep casting aspersions on what I think . . . Campbell: Calm down. Thompson: Alastair, Alastair . . . Campbell: Dignity, dignity. Boulton: Don’t keep telling me what I think. Campbell: I don’t care what you think. [laughing] Oh my God, unbelievable. Adam, calm down. Thompson: Gentlemen, gentlemen. Boulton: I actually care about this country. Campbell: You’re as pompous as it gets. He had not expected to be challenged on his tendentious assertions but once he was, he resorted to bullying, baiting, impugning his inconvenient challenger. It may possibly have worked for him during the Kelly affair and the Iraq War, but it didn’t, as history repeated itself as farce, with the attempted ‘Coalition of the Losers’. Experience told me to walk away and get on with the job of reporting the major political story. I decided not to blog, let alone Twitter, on the matter. The ‘Boulton v Campbell’ encounter quickly gathered a cult following. Every day since, I have had strangers coming up to me to express their support. In Haymarket a bus driver jammed on the brakes to give me a double thumbs-up; I’ve had congratulations from policemen to Labour peers and Alastair Campbell has naturally claimed that he has made me famous. At the time, I declined to comment, except to a woman journalist whom I talked to in Whitehall, as a passing crowd of demonstrators chanted my name. She reported that I regretted the incident. I repeated this view a few weeks later on Radio 4’s Today programme. But even though Campbell instantly claimed to have won the encounter, he and his cronies set about trying to dominate the post-match analysis and to do me as much damage as they possibly could. That night Campbell contacted the most senior people at Sky News he could find in his BlackBerry to demand action against me. John Prescott, who seems never to have forgiven me or Sky for breaking the story that he had punched a member of the public in 2001, pointed his 22,000 Twitter followers in the right direction. He tweeted: ‘Inundated by people wanting link to report Adam Boulton, happy to help.’ Then he gave the address of Ofcom. Campbell also continued to try to settle scores on Twitter: ‘When JP punched someone, pompous Boulton said he must go! Wonder if same rules for TV hacks losing it live. Thought the headbutt imminent . . . Really worried about Adam Boulton . . .Wonder if he might need some of my pills. Anji ought to come home from her foreign trip.’ He variously referred to my ‘on-air meltdown’, how I ‘lost it live’, and my ‘live toys-out-of-the-pram tantrum’. But he couldn’t quite work out who was threatening whom during the publicity interviews for the latest volume of his diaries. He told The Guardian: ‘There’s one point where I start to move back a little bit. I was thinking, “What do you do if someone headbutts you live on TV?” ’ But, according to PR Week, he also boasted at an awards ceremony: ‘If I hadn’t thought about my mum watching at home, I’d have head-butted him.’ However, along with the banter, Campbell made a more private and insidious attempt to throw his weight around. The man who had impugned both my and the channel’s professional integrity sent a letter by email that same week to John Ryley, head of Sky News, threatening to sue unless disciplinary action was taken against me. A copy of Campbell’s email was supplied to me for my information. I reproduce quotations from it here without the permission of John Ryley or indeed Sky News. But I take this step in the firm belief that reading it reveals a lot about the man and his modus operandi. Following the initial pleasantries, Campbell writes that he has spoken that morning to lawyers: ‘Their advice is that I have every right to complain to Ofcom, and have set out the grounds on which such a complaint ought to be accepted. However, I see from the media that many others have done this already. So, other than giving publicity to an interview that needs no more, I see little point in doing this. Ofcom will doubtless look at it and make up their own minds.’ Campbell also states he had been advised that what I had said during the interview and afterwards was defamatory: ‘Lawyers draw attention in particular to his questioning of my motivations in seeking to discharge the duty I had been asked by the Prime Minister to fulfil, namely advising him in conjunction with the official government machine on how to navigate a complex constitutional position. Further, he questioned my integrity at various points including via allegations that Peter Mandelson and I were involved in an unconstitutional “stitch-up”, that we were compulsive liars and that we were unpatriotic.’ He claims that he has ‘been libelled and defamed many times, but in part because I believe in freedom of speech, and because I happen to think our libel laws are hopeless, I have rarely used them. Whenever I have, I have won. ‘I let most things go because there are more important things in life than wasting time on this kind of thing. Indeed, Boulton has defamed me in the past and, because the impact has been minimal, I have let it go. However, the attention given to this has been enormous, and worldwide. ‘Yesterday as I went about my business, as many people raised this with me as raised the rather more important question about who our Prime Minister might be at the end of the day. 'It has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people since the first broadcast, produced tens of thousands of comments online, and though the vast majority are in my favour, that does not negate the defamatory nature of what he said, and has been saying to others since. ‘Even the Mail today, which libels me on close to a daily basis, seems to accept most professional journalists saw his outbursts as a disgraceful and unprofessional contribution to an important debate in which I was trying to engage in a respons-ible, restrained, if robust manner.’ While Campbell writes that his lawyers are advising he consider whether to take legal action, he stresses that he would be ‘less minded to do so if Sky News were to take some steps, privately and publicly, to mark an acceptance that his behaviour was unacceptable and that I am owed an apology. For this not to happen would mean that Sky felt there was nothing wrong with his behaviour, when I know from senior executives at News that they think no such thing. ‘I think it is best at this stage if you, rather than I, make proposals as to what the private and public expression of this should be, but be assured I am determined there should be such an expression and I look forward to hearing from you.’ Pestered by several more emails - ‘Have you got anything for me?’ - Ryley eventually replied by letter that I had expressed regret about the incident and that should be sufficient. Nothing further has been heard from Campbell. Attempts by Campbell, Prescott and other interested online parties to involve Ofcom were no more successful. The regulator reported that it had ‘received 1,116 complaints about this content, with complainants considering that Adam Boulton was biased towards the Conservative Party and against the Labour Party, and was confrontational, bullying and aggressive towards Alastair Campbell. Some complainants considered that it was inappropriate for a presenter to lose his temper on television’. Ofcom took the view that both sides had the chance to air their opinions, concluding: ‘While the conduct and manner of the discussion was certainly unusual, in terms of impartiality we consider that relevant views and issues were aired.’ The regulator also said that ‘. . . to find that these heated exchanges could not be transmitted would be an unnecessary interference with the broadcaster’s and the viewer’s right of freedom of expression’. The Ofcom ruling was a great relief to me and effectively closed an incident which had always had its ludicrous side. I have made mistakes during live broadcasts, and I admit them. What concerned me about this incident was that a political operative appeared perhaps by instinct to resort shamelessly to ‘playing the man’. As ever, family members can be relied upon to put things in their proper perspective. Over the summer, Campbell and I ran into each other at parties given by mutual friends (some openly hoping our row would add a frisson to proceedings). Emotions were highest at a joint 60th and 21st birthday party for Blair’s pollster Philip Gould and his daughter Grace. Campbell spoke movingly and at length about his friends and Philip’s battle with cancer. He concluded with a jokey programme for the evening, to be rounded off with ‘a naked mud-wrestling match’ between teams led by him and me. His only rule was that it should be ‘a fight to the death’. Afterwards Campbell’s own teenage daughter, also called Grace, confessed to me that she was on my side ‘because nobody has ever argued with Dad like that’. I replied that my wife Anji, a former Downing Street colleague of his, ‘backed Alastair’. Hot temper: Gordon Brown kicked a paper bin and shouted at his wife Sarah during a row over expenses according to Boulton's book Raging Gordon Brown bawled abuse at his wife Sarah and kicked a paper bin across the floor of his study in a row over his expenses, according to Boulton’s book. The incident happened after Mr Brown got caught up in the MPs’ expenses scandal last year, when it emerged he claimed £6,500 to pay his brother Andrew to hire a cleaner for his second home. The former Prime Minister was furious at reports suggesting he had fiddled his parliamentary allowances. According to the book, he took out his anger on Sarah. ‘To the dismay of many of those closest to him, Brown was paralysed by rage when it was suggested that his cleaning expenses, shared with his brother, had been too great,’ it states. ‘It was one of those occasions when he really did kick a wastepaper bin across the floor and shout at his wife. ‘More significantly, he lost crucial days worrying about the stain on his own integrity, so allowing his political rivals to take the lead on dealing with the matter.’ According to a source, Mr Brown shouted at his wife: ‘It’s your bloody fault, you were supposed to be looking after that.’ She reportedly replied in equally forthright terms, insisting she was not to blame. The cleaner was employed to clean Mr Brown’s flat in Westminster, a nearby flat owned by his brother and a third London home that belonged to his wife. Mr Brown was renowned for his outbursts as Prime Minister. He is said to have once manhandled an adviser, and there were claims he hurled phones across the room and reduced aides to tears. He lost his temper again over his cleaning claim when challenged on Radio 1’s Newsbeat during the Election campaign. An official inquiry into the matter cleared him of any wrongdoing.His bullying and baiting might have worked over Kelly...
but he wasn't doing it to me:
Adam Boulton on explosive election row with Alastair Campbell
Last updated at 2:43 AM on 7th November 2010
An extract from Hung Together, by Adam Boulton and Joey Jones
Boulton: Why not just go quietly, accept that you lost this election?
Readers must draw their own conclusions about both of us. My view was that the tide finally going out on Campbell’s influence-peddling exposed him for what he had always been.
Alastair Campbell told one magazine about the spat with Boulton: ‘If I hadn’t thought about my mum watching at home, I’d have head-butted him.’
'Over the summer, Campbell and I ran into each other at parties given by mutual friends - some openly hoping our row would add a frisson to proceedings...'
BROWN YELLED AT WIFE SARAH OVER EXPENSES
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1327347/His-bullying-baiting-impugning-worked-Kelly--wasn-t-doing-me.html#ixzz14a5gjLer
Sunday, 7 November 2010
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