Daily Mail, 8 February 2010

Yesterday, jaws up and down the land dropped to the floor as Alastair Campbell appeared to lose his composure under questioning by Andrew Marr on his BBC TV show.

The arch media manipulator, whose hitherto impregnable armour had withstood serial public inquiries and innumerable interrogations, appeared for a few seconds almost to lose it altogether when he was pressed over Tony Blair’s evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.

Marr asked insistently whether, if the inquiry concluded that the pre-invasion intelligence had not established ‘beyond doubt’ that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction as Tony Blair had claimed, it would follow that Blair had misled Parliament.

Campbell got out the words ‘As I said’, then stopped dead and heavily blew out his cheeks, remaining silent with his eyes lowered for some time before finally answering the question and claiming to have been ‘upset’ by it.

Some will see this as establishing beyond doubt a shameless new low in spin, trying to get out of trouble when faced with a killer question by playing the sympathy card.

I’m not so sure about that. He said he was upset - but there was no sign of that theatrical prop, the wobbling lip. It looked instead to me as if Campbell — who, after all, has a history of emotional instability — was struck by a panic attack and was having difficulty with his breathing.

If true, that in turn could be taken either way. Those who believe that both Campbell and Blair have consistently lied through their teeth about the war in Iraq will think that if this was a genuine loss of composure, it was surely proof that he thought his guilt was finally about to be exposed.

Those, however, who don’t think that we were lied to over Iraq — and who perhaps also know a bit about panic attacks — may find it all too plausible that the terrifying impossibility of prising open closed minds on this subject produced a momentary meltdown.

Whatever the truth of this curious episode, the fact is that Campbell sought to finesse it by saying he was upset because ‘I’ve been through a lot on this’.

Cynical as this may sound, there is no doubt that appealing to public sympathy is now a way to score political points or a ‘get out of jail free’ card in public debate.

We see this when politicians use personal adversity to tug at the heart-strings. And what all but silences any cynicism is that such politicians’ personal anguish is all too real.

We saw it over David Cameron’s disabled young son, Ivan, who, before he died a year ago, featured in many moving interviews with Cameron and accounts of his family life.

Some found this tasteless and exploitative; Cameron himself simply said that Ivan was a part of his life he was not prepared to conceal.

What was undeniable was the wave of public sympathy this engendered for Cameron, and the way this humanised the hitherto callous and uncaring image of a Tory politician.

Now we learn that in a forthcoming TV interview, Gordon Brown is overcome by emotion when talking about his daughter who died in 2002, ten days after being born prematurely.

Hitherto, the intensely private Brown has conspicuously refrained from doing anything that might be construed as making political capital out of this tragedy. Yet now, he apparently weeps on camera when asked about his daughter - questions to which he must have agreed in advance of the interview.

It is surely no coincidence that he is now being advised generally on presentation by none other than Alastair Campbell - who said yesterday that the only way to avoid the perception of spin was to be ‘genuinely authentic’.

Of course, the danger is that people may well conclude that such ‘genuinely authentic’ emotion is just an even more shameless act of spin. But Campbell is reflecting the fact that it is only by emoting in public that so many people today believe you have any heart at all.

We saw this most spectacularly over the death of Princess Diana, when an ugly public mood threatened the Queen and the Royal Family because of the perception that they were cold and heartless from the absence of public displays of their grief.

It was only when the Queen let people glimpse signs of royal sorrow that this danger was defused.

This general attitude has its roots in the therapy culture, which tells us that it is bad for the individual to repress emotion. That doctrine has now developed into the belief that anyone who fails to display emotion is a bad individual.

It has produced a culture in which genuine emotion, which is almost always private, is deemed not to exist, while inappropriate or vicarious emotion, or sentimentality, is mistaken for the real thing.

This has the pernicious effect not only of devaluing real feelings such as grief, but elevating histrionics such as self-pity and narcissism. Hence the obsession in our society with ’self-esteem’.

One result of exchanging the stiff upper lip for the trembling lower one is that people become less able to cope with the vicissitudes of life.

That is what the octogenarian Duchess of Devonshire was getting at when she recently branded Britain as ’sloppy and sentimental’. Her generation ‘made little of sorrow. . . it wasn’t the thing to bellyache’.

As she said, grief was just part of life — people mourned and then got on with their lives. They didn’t go on about it and need counselling; nor did they wear their grief like a badge of honour, or as their entry ticket to the human race.

To that generation, not just grief but other emotions such as fear were both private and restrained. To be otherwise would have demoralised others and courted defeat or disaster.

But that is precisely what we have now done to ourselves. Our culture of emotional incontinence has made us, for example, less able to cope with war and thus defend this country.

We saw this in 2007, when 15 British marines and sailors were taken hostage by Iran.

After falsely ‘confessing’ to having trespassed into Iranian waters, and arriving home clutching propaganda ‘gifts’ from their captors, some of them subsequently justified their damaging and unprofessional behaviour by saying how terrifying the whole thing had been and how they had only wanted to go home.

Emotional incontinence has also had the effect of turning masculinity inside out. Male characteristics that were once lauded, such as stoicism, emotional restraint and even physical courage, are now regarded as evidence of ‘emotional illiteracy’.

Instead, the ‘new man’ has to be caring and sharing and not afraid to burst into tears.

So when Britain’s tennis wunderkind Andy Murray cried on court after being defeated by Roger Federer — who himself had wept after being beaten by Rafael Nadal — he was praised for showing himself to be human after all.

Once upon a time, stoicism, emotional restraint and a sense of privacy were English virtues that were considered essential to a civilised culture based upon reason.

Which is why it is so unnerving to see British politicians, sportsmen or members of the armed forces display such loss of control.

The trouble is that in our sentimentalised culture, touchy-feely politics do indeed work. Which is why emotionalism is the new spin — even when it really is the real thing.